GUENDOLEN'S BOWER.
"Four gray walls, and four square towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers,
The Lady of Shalott."
TENNYSON.
High up in the gray square tower, which constituted the keep of the
castle of Waltheofstow, there was a suite of apartments, the remains
of which are discoverable to this day, known as the Lady's Bower;
which had, it is probable, from the construction of the edifice, been
set apart, not only as the private chambers of the chatelaine and
ladies of the family, her casual guests and their attendants, but as
what we should now call the drawing-rooms, wherein the more social
hours of those rude days were passed, when the sexes intermingled,
whether for the enjoyment of domestic leisure, or for gayety and
pleasure.
The keep of Waltheofstow consisted, as did indeed all the smaller
fortalices of that date, when private dwellings, even of the great and
powerful, were constructed with a view to defense above all beside, of
one large massive building of an oblong square form, with a solid
circular buttress at each angle, which, above the basement floor, was
hollowed into a lozenge-shaped turret, extending above the esplanade
of the highest battlements, and terminating at a giddy height in a
crenellated and machicolated lookout, affording a shelter to the
sentries, and a flanking defense to the _corps de logis_.
For its whole height, from the guard-room, which occupied the whole
ground-floor, to the battlements, one of these turrets contained the
great winding stone staircase of the castle, lighted at the base by
mere shot-holes and loops, but, as it rose higher and higher above the
danger of escalade, by mullioned windows of increasing magnitude,
until, at the very summit, it was surmounted by a beautifully-wrought
lanthorn of Gothic stone-work. The other three, lighted in the same
manner, better and better as they ascended, formed each a series of
small pleasant rooms, opening upon the several stories, and for the
most part were fitted as the sleeping-rooms of the various officers.
The whole floor, first above the guard-room, was divided into the
kitchen, butteries, and household offices; while the next in order,
being the third in elevation above the court-yard, was reserved in one
superb parallelogram of ninety feet by sixty, well lighted by narrow
lanceolated windows, and adorned with armors of plate and mail,
scutcheons rich with heraldic bearings, antlers of deer and elk, horns
of the bull, yet surviving, of the great Caledonian forests, skulls of
the grizzly boars grinning with their ivory tusks, and banners
dependent from the lofty groinings of the arched roof, trophies of
many a glorious day. This was the knight's hall, the grand
banqueting-saloon of the keep; while of its three turrets, one was the
castle chapel, a second a smaller dining-hall, and the last the
private cabinet and armory of the castellan. Above this, again, on the
fourth plat, were bed-chambers of state, the larger armory, and the
dormitories of the warders, esquires, pages, and seneschal, who alone
dwelt within the keep, the rest of the garrison occupying the various
out-buildings and towers upon the flanking walls and ramparts.
The fifth story, at least a hundred feet in air above the inner court,
and nearly thrice that elevation above the base of the scarped mount
on which the castle stood, contained the Lady's bower; and its whole
area of ninety feet by sixty was divided, in the first instance,
laterally by three partitions, into three apartments, each sixty feet
in length by thirty wide. Of these, however, the first and last were
subdivided equally in two squares of thirty feet. The whole of the
bower, thus, contained a handsome ante-chamber, opening from the great
staircase, with a large room for the waiting-women to the right,
communicating with the turret chamber corresponding to the stairway.
Beyond the vestibule, by which access was had to it, lay the grand
ladies' hall, furnished with all the superabundance of splendor and
magnificence, and all the lack of real convenience, which was the
characteristic of the time; divans, and deep settles, and ponderous
arm-chairs covered with gold and velvet; embroideries and emblazoned
foot-cloths on the floor; mirrors of polished steel, emulating
Venetian crystals, on the walls; mighty candelabra of silver gilt;
tables of many kinds, some made for the convenience of long-forgotten
games, some covered with cups and vessels of gold, silver, and
richly-colored glass, and one or two, smaller, and set away in quiet
nooks, with easy seats beside them, showing the feminine character of
the occupants, by a lute, a gittern, and two or three other musical
implements long since fallen into disuse; pages of music written in
the old musical notation of the age; some splendidly-bound and
illuminated missals and romances, in priceless manuscript, each
actually worth its weight in gold; silks and embroideries; a
working-stand, with a gorgeous surcoat of arms half finished, the
needle sticking in the superb material where the fairy fingers had
left it, when last called from their gentle task; and great vases full
of the finest flowers of the season.
Such was the aspect of the room, beheld by the declining rays of the
sun, which had already sunk so low that his stray beams, instead of
falling downward through the gorgeous hues of the tinted-windows,
streamed upward into that lofty place, playing on the richly-carved
and gilded ceilings, catching here on a mirror, there on a vase of
gold or silver, and sending hundreds of burning specks of light
dancing through the motley haze of gold and purple, which formed the
atmosphere of that almost royal bower.
From this rich withdrawing-room, strangely out of place in appearance,
though not so in reality, in the old gray Norman fortress, among the
din of arms and flash of harness, opened two bed-rooms, equal in
costliness of decoration to the saloon without, each having its
massive four-post bedstead in a recess, accessible by three or four
broad steps, as if it were a throne of honor, each with its mirror and
toilet, its appurtenances for the bath, its easy couches, and its
chair of state; its _prie dieu_ and kneeling-hassock, in a niche,
with a perfumed lamp burning before a rudely-painted picture of the
Madonna, each having communication with a pretty turret-chamber,
fitted with couch and reading-desk, and opening on a bartizan or
balcony, which, though they were intended in times of war or danger
for posts of vantage to the defense, whence to shower missiles or pour
seething pitch or oil on the heads of assailants, were filled in the
pleasant days of peace with shrubs and flowers, planted in large tubs
and troughs, waving green and joyous, and filling the air with sweet
smells two hundred feet above their dewy birth-place.
It may be added, that so thick and massive were the walls at this
almost inaccessible height, that galleries had been, as it were,
scooped out of them, offering easy communication from one room to
another, and even private staircases from story to story, with secret
closets large enough for the accommodation of a favorite page or
waiting-damsel, where nothing of the sort would be expected, or could
indeed exist, within a modern dwelling.
Thus, the inconveniences of such an abode, all except the height to
which it was necessary for the female inmates to climb, were more
imaginary than real; and it was perfectly easy, and indeed usual, for
the ladies of such a castle to pass to and fro from the rooms of their
husbands, fathers, or brothers, and even from the knights' hall to
their own bower, without meeting any of the retainers of the place,
except what may be called the peaceful and familiar servants of the
household.
Through the thick-vaulted roofs of stone, which rendered every story
of the keep a separate fortress, no sound of arms, of revelry or riot,
could ascend to the region of the ladies; and if their comforts were
inferior to those of our modern beauties, their magnificence, their
splendor of costume, of equipage, of followings, their power at home,
and their influence abroad, where they shone as "Queens of Love and
Beauty," were held the arbiters of fame and dispensers of honor, where
their smiles were held sufficient guerdon for all wildest feats of
bravery, their tears expiable by blood only, their importance in the
outer world of arms, of romance, of empire, were at the least as far
superior; and it may be doubted, whether some, even the most spoiled
of our modern fair ones, would not sigh to exchange, with the dames
and demoiselles of the twelfth century, their own soft empire of the
ball-room for the right to hold Courts of Love, as absolute
unquestioned sovereigns, to preside at tilt and tournament, and send
the noblest and the most superb of champions into mortal combat, or
yet more desperate adventure, by the mere promise of a sleeve, a
kerchief, or a glove.
She, however, who now occupied alone the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstow
was none of your proud and court-hardened ladies, who could look with
no emotion beyond a blush of gratified vanity on the blood of an
admirer or a lover. Though for her, young as she was, steeds had been
spurred to the shock, and her name shouted among the splintering of
lances and the crash of mortal conflict, she was still but a simple,
amiable, and joyous child, who knew more of the pleasant fields and
waving woodlands of her fair lake-country, than of the tilt-yard, the
court pageant, or the carousal, and who better loved to see the
heather-blossom and the blue-bell dance in the free air of the breezy
fells, than plumes and banners flaunt and flutter to the blare of
trumpets.
The only child of Sir Yvo de Taillebois, a knight and noble of the
unmixed Norman blood, a lineal descendant of one of those hardy barons
who, landing with Duke William on his almost desperate emprise, had
won "the bloody hand" at Hastings, and gained rich lands in the
northern counties during the protracted struggle which ensued, the
Lady Guendolen had early lost her mother, a daughter of the noble
house of Morville, and not a very distant relative of the good knight,
Sir Philip, whose hospitality she was now partaking with her father.
To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she has
reached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, more
especially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties,
martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-up
impossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, the
accomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladies
were few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcated
to our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at a
period later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by an
elegant writer,[3] the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick the
Kingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, no
knowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste.
[3] Sir E. Lytton Bulwer.
Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond the
teaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of the
pen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, and
whose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of their
sword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretend
to read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either be
regarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishment
had degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case,
during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how little
soever they may have affected the moral, political, or agricultural
condition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt a
blow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personal
polish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only to
recover in the reigns of the later Tudors.
But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of her
mother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would the
incapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him of
superintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was--at
that day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture had
received some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet more
accomplished father, Beauclerc--a man of intellectual ability, and not
a little cultivation.
He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, in
diplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, the
court of poetry and minstrelsy, and the _gai science_; had dwelt
in the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seat
of all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and while
acquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, had
both softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements.
Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she was
bursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had been
permitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years,
she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, either
as a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invader
of the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores of
Ireland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less to
devote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was,
beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified.
Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, she
had been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up under
circumstances which had produced no better consequences on her head
than on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on the
formation of her feminine and gentle character.