was more of a Christian nevertheless than many of his fellows. This
is illustrated by another trait highly illustrative of the principles
which influenced those brave and pious warriors. De Joinville remarks
that on the eve of Shrove-tide, 1249, he saw a thing which he “_must_
relate.” On the vigil of that day, he tells us, there died a very
valiant and prudent knight, Sir Hugh de Landricourt, a follower of
De Joinville’s own banner. The burial service was celebrated; but
half-a-dozen of De Joinville’s knights, who were present as mourners,
talked so irreverently loud that the priest was disturbed as he was
saying mass. Our good chronicler went over to them, reproved them, and
informed them that “it was unbecoming gentlemen thus to talk while
the mass was celebrating.” The ungodly half-dozen, thereupon, burst
into a roar of laughter, and informed De Joinville, in their turn,
that they were discussing as to which of the six should marry the
widow of the defunct Sir Hugh, then lying before them on his bier! De
Joinville, with decency and common sense “rebuked them sharply, and
said such conversation was indecent and improper, for that they had too
soon forgotten their companion.” From this circumstance De Joinville
tries to draw a logical inference, if not conclusion. He makes a sad
confusion of causes and effects, rewards and punishments, practice and
principle, human accidents and especial interferences on the part of
Heaven. For instance, after narrating the mirth of the knights at the
funeral of Sir Hugh, and their disputing as to which of them should
woo the widow, he adds: “Now it happened on the morrow, when the first
grand battle took place, although we may laugh at their follies, that
of all the six not one escaped death, and they remained unburied. The
wives of the whole six re-married! _This_ makes it credible that God
leaves no such conduct unpunished. With regard to myself _I fared
little better_, for I was grievously wounded in the battle of Shrove
Tuesday. I had besides the disorder in my legs and mouth before spoken
of, and such a rheum in my head it ran through my mouth and nostrils.
In addition I had a double fever called a quartan, from which God
defend us! And with these illnesses was I confined to my bed for half
of Lent.” And thus, if the married knights were retributively slain for
talking about the wooing of a comrade’s widow, so De Joinville himself
was somewhat heavily afflicted for having undertaken to reprove them!
I must add one more incident, however, to show how in the battle-field
the human and Christian principle was not altogether lost.
The poor priest, whom the wicked and wedded knights had interrupted
in the service of the mass by follies, at which De Joinville himself
seems to think that men _may_, perhaps, be inclined to laugh, became as
grievously ill as De Joinville himself. “And one day,” says the latter,
“when he was singing mass before me as I lay in my bed, at the moment
of the elevation of the host I saw him so exceedingly weak that he was
near fainting; but when I perceived he was on the point of falling to
the ground, I flung myself out of bed, sick as I was, and taking my
coat, embraced him, and bade him be at his ease, and take courage from
Him whom he held in his hand. He recovered some little; but I never
quitted him till he had finished the mass, which he completed, and this
was the last, for he never celebrated another, but died; God receive
his soul!” This is a pleasanter picture of Christian chivalry than any
other that is given by this picturesque chronicler.
Chivalry, generally, has been more satirized and sneered at by the
philosophers than by any other class of men. The sages stigmatize the
knights as mere boasters of bravery, and in some such terms as those
used by Dussaute, they assert that the boasters of their valor are as
little to be trusted as those who boast of their probity. “Defiez vous
de quiconque parle toujours de sa probité comme de quiconque parle
toujours de bravoure.”
It will not, however, do for the philosophers to sneer at their
martial brethren. Now that Professor Jacobi has turned from grave
studies for the benefit of mankind, to the making of infernal machines
for the destruction of brave and helpless men, at a distance, that
very unsuccessful but would-be homicide has, as far as he himself is
concerned, reduced science to a lower level than that occupied by men
whose trade is arms. But this is not the first time that philosophers
have mingled in martial matters. The very war which has been begun by
the bad ambition of Russia, may be traced to the evil officiousness of
no less a philosopher than Leibnitz. It was this celebrated man who
first instigated a European monarch to seize upon a certain portion of
the Turkish dominion, whereby to secure an all but universal supremacy.
The monarch was Louis XIV., to whom Leibnitz addressed himself, in a
memorial, as to the wisest of sovereigns, most worthy to have imparted
to him a project at once the most holy, the most just, and the most
easy of accomplishment. Success, adds the philosopher, would secure
to France the empire of the seas and of commerce, and make the French
king the supreme arbiter of Christendom. Leibnitz at once names Egypt
as the place to be seized upon; and after hinting what was necessary,
by calling his majesty a “miracle of secresy,” he alludes to further
achievements by stating of the one in question, that it would cover his
name with an immortal glory, for having cleared, whether for himself or
his descendants, “the route for exploits similar to those of Alexander.”
There is no country in the memorialist’s opinion the conquest of which
deserves so much to be attempted. As to any provocation on the part
of the Turkish sovereign of Egypt, he does not pause to advise the
king even to feign having received cause of offence. The philosopher
goes through a _resumé_ of the history of Egypt, and the successive
conquests that had been made of, as well as attempts against it, to
prove that its possession was accounted of importance in all times; and
he adds that its Turkish master was just then in such debility that
France could not desire a more propitious opportunity for invasion.
This argument shows that when the Czar Nicholas touched upon this
nefarious subject, he not only was ready to rob this same “sick
man,” the Turk, but he stole his arguments whereby to illustrate his
opinions, and to prove that his sentiments were well-founded.
“By a single fortunate blow,” says Leibnitz, “empires may be in an
instant overthrown and founded. In such wars are found the elements of
high power and of an exalted glory.” It is unnecessary to repeat all
the seductive terms which Leibnitz employs to induce Louis XIV. to set
his chivalry in motion against the Turkish power. Egypt he calls “the
eye of countries, the mother of grain, the seat of commerce.” He hints
that Muscovy was even then ready to take advantage of any circumstance
that might facilitate her way to the conquest of Turkey. The conquest
of Egypt then was of double importance to France. Possessing _that_,
France would be mistress of the Mediterranean, of a great part of
Africa and Asia, and “the king of France could then, by incontestable
right, and with the consent of the Pope, assume the title of Emperor
of the East.” A further bait held out is, that in such a position he
could “hold the pontiffs much more in his power than if they resided
at Avignon.” He sums up by saying that there would be on the part of
the human race, “an everlasting reverence for the memory of the great
king to whom so many miracles were due!” “With the exception of the
philosopher’s stone,” finally remarks the philosopher, “I know nothing
that can be imagined of more importance than the conquest of Egypt.”
Leibnitz enters largely into the means to be employed, in order to
insure success; among them is a good share of mendacity; and it must
be acknowledged that the spirit of the memorial and its objects,
touching not Egypt alone, but the Turkish empire generally, had been
well pondered over by the Czar before he made that felonious attempt in
which he failed to find a confederate.
The original of the memorial, which is supposed to have been presented
to Louis XIV. just previous to his invasion of Holland--and, as some
say, more with the intention of diverting the king from his attack on
that country, than with any more definite object--was preserved in the
archives of Versailles till the period of the great revolution. A copy
in the handwriting of Leibnitz was, however, preserved in the Library
at Hanover. Its contents were without doubt known to Napoleon when he
was meditating that Egyptian conquest which Leibnitz pronounced to be
so easy of accomplishment; a copy, made at the instance of Marshal
Mortier for the Royal Library in Paris, is now in that collection.
The suggestion of Leibnitz, that the seat, if not of universal
monarchy, at least of the mastership of Christendom, was in the Turkish
dominions, has never been forgotten by Russia; and it is very possible
that some of its seductive argument may have influenced the Czar before
he impelled his troops into that war, which showed that Russia, with
all its boasted power, could neither take Silistria nor keep Sebastopol.
But in this fragmentary prologue, which began with Lingard and ends
with Leibnitz, we have rambled over wide ground. Let us become more
orderly, and look at those who were to be made knights.
THE TRAINING OF PAGES.
“What callest thou Page? What is its humor?
Sir; he is _Nobilis ephebus_, and
_Puer regius_, student of Knighthood,
Breaking hearts and hoping to break lances.”--_Old Play._
I have in another chapter noticed the circumstance of knighthood
conferred on an Irish prince, at so early an age as seven years.
This was the age at which, in less precocious England, noble youths
entered wealthy knights’ families as pages, to learn obedience,
to be instructed in the use of weapons, and to acquire a graceful
habit of tending on ladies. The poor nobility, especially, found
their account in this system, which gave a gratuitous education
to their sons, in return for services which were not considered
humiliating or dishonorable. These boys served seven years as pages,
or varlets--sometimes very impudent varlets--and at fourteen might be
regular esquires, and tend their masters where hard blows were dealt
and taken--for which encounters they “riveted with a sigh the armor
they were forbidden to wear.”
Neither pages, varlets, nor household, could be said to have been
always as roystering as modern romancers have depicted them. There was
at least exceptions to the rule--if there was a rule of roystering.
Occasionally, the lads were not indifferently taught before they left
their own homes. That is, not indifferently taught for the peculiar
life they were about to lead. Even the Borgias, infamous as the name
has become through inexorable historians and popular operas, were at
one time eminently respectable and exemplarily religious. Thus in the
household of the Duke of Gandia, young Francis Borgia, his son, passed
his time “among the domestics in wonderful innocence and piety.” It
was the only season of his life, however, so passed. Marchangy asserts
that the pages of the middle ages were often little saints; but this
could hardly have been the case since “espiègle comme un page,” “hardi
comme un page,” and other illustrative sayings have survived even the
era of pagedom. Indeed, if we may believe the minstrels, and they were
often as truth-telling as the annalist, the pages were now and then
even more knowing and audacious than their masters. When the Count Ory
was in love with the young Abbess of Farmoutier, he had recourse to his
page for counsel.
“Hola! mon page, venez me conseiller,
L’amour me berce, je ne puis sommeiller;
Comment me prendre pour dans ce couvent entrer?”
How ready was the ecstatic young scamp with his reply:--
“Sire il faut prendre quatorze chevaliers,
Et tous en nonnes il vous les faut habiller,
Puis, à nuit close, à la porte il faut heurter.”
What came of this advice, the song tells in very joyous terms, for
which the reader may be referred to that grand collection the “Chants
et Chansons de la France.”
On the other hand, Mr. Kenelm Digby, who is, be it said in passing, a
painter of pages, looking at his object through pink-colored glasses,
thus writes of these young gentlemen, in his “Mores Catholici.”
“Truly beautiful does the fidelity of chivalrous youth appear in the
page of history or romance. Every master of a family in the middle
ages had some young man in his service who would have rejoiced to
shed the last drop of his blood to save him, and who, like Jonathan’s
armor-bearer, would have replied to his summons: ‘Fac omnia quæ placent
animo tuo; perge quo cupis; et ero tecum ubicumque volueris.’ When
Gyron le Courtois resolved to proceed on the adventure of the _Passage
perilleux_, we read that the valet, on hearing the frankness and
courtesy with which his lord spoke to him, began to weep abundantly,
and said, all in tears, ‘Sire, know that my heart tells me that
sooth, if you proceed further, you will never return; that you will
either perish there, or you will remain in prison; but, nevertheless,
nothing shall prevent me going with you. Better die with you, if it be
God’s will, than leave you in such guise to save my own life;’ and so
saying, he stepped forward and said, ‘Sire, since you will not return
according to my advice, I will not leave you this time, come to me what
may.’ Authority in the houses of the middle ages,” adds Mr. Digby,
“was always venerable. The very term _seneschal_ is supposed to have
implied ‘old knight,’ so that, as with the Greeks, the word signifying
‘to honor,’ and to ‘pay respect,’ was derived immediately from that
which denoted old age, _πρεσβευω_ being thus used in the first line
of the Eumenides. Even to those who were merely attached by the bonds
of friendship or hospitality, the same lessons and admonitions were
considered due. John Francis Picus of Mirandola mentions his uncle’s
custom of frequently admonishing his friends, and exhorting them to a
holy life. ‘I knew a man,’ he says, ‘who once spoke with him on the
subject of manners, and who was so much moved by only two words from
him, which alluded to the death of Christ, as the motive for avoiding
sin, that from that hour, he renounced the ways of vice, and reformed
his whole life and manner.’”
We smile to find Mr. Digby mentioning the carving of angels in stone
over the castle-gates, as at Vincennes, as a proof that the pages
who loitered about there were little saints. But we read with more
interest, that “the Sieur de Ligny led Bayard home with him, and in the
evening preached to him as if he had been his own son, recommending him
to have heaven always before his eyes.” This is good, and that it had
its effect on Bayard, we all know; nevertheless that chevalier himself
was far from perfect.
With regard to the derivation of _Seneschal_ as noticed above, we may
observe that it implies “old man of skill.” Another word connected
with arms is “Marshal,” which is derived from _Mar_, “a horse,” and
_Schalk_, “skilful,” one knowing in horses; hence “Maréchal ferrant,”
as assumed by French farriers. _Schalk_, however, I have seen
interpreted as meaning “servant.” Earl Marshal was, originally, the
knight who looked after the royal horses and stables, and all thereto
belonging.
But to return to the subject of education. If all the sons of noblemen,
in former days, were as well off for gentle teachers as old historians
and authors describe them to have been, they undoubtedly had a great
advantage over some of their descendants of the present day. In
illustration of this fact it is only necessary to point to the sermons
recently delivered by a reverend pedagogue to the boys who have the
affliction of possessing him as headmaster. It is impossible to read
some of these whipping sermons, without a feeling of intense disgust.
Flagellation is there hinted at, mentioned, menaced, caressed as it
were, as if in the very idea there was a sort of delight. The worst
passage of all is where the amiable master tells his youthful hearers
that they are noble by birth, that the greatest humiliation to a noble
person is the infliction of a blow, and that nevertheless, he, the
absolute master, may have to flog many of them. How the young people
over whom he rules, must love such an instructor! The circumstance
reminds me of the late Mr. Ducrow, who was once teaching a boy to
go through a difficult act of horsemanship, in the character of a
page. The boy was timid, and his great master applied the whip to him
unmercifully. Mr. Joseph Grimaldi was standing by, and looked very
serious, considering his vocation. “You see,” remarked Ducrow to Joey,
“that it is quite necessary to _make an impression_ on these young
fellows.”--“Very likely,” answered Grimaldi, dryly, “but it can hardly
be necessary to make _the whacks_ so hard!”
The discipline to which pages were subjected in the houses of knights
and noblemen, does not appear to have been at all of a severe
character. Beyond listening to precept from the chaplain, heeding the
behests of their master, and performing pleasant duties about their
mistress, they seem to have been left pretty much to themselves, and
to have had, altogether, a pleasant time of it. The poor scholars had
by far a harder life than your “Sir page.” And this stern discipline
held over the pale student continued down to a very recent, that is, a
comparatively recent period. In Neville’s play of “The Poor Scholar,”
written in 1662, but never acted, the character of student-life at
college is well illustrated. The scene lies at the university, where
Eugenes, jun., albeit he is called “the poor scholar,” is nephew of
Eugenes, sen., who is president of a college. Nephew and uncle are
at feud, and the man in authority imprisons his young kinsman, who
contrives to escape from durance vile, and to marry a maiden called
Morphe. The fun of the marriage is, that the young couple disguise
themselves as country lad and lass, and the reverend Eugenes, sen.,
unconsciously couples a pair whom he would fain have kept apart. There
are two other university marriages as waggishly contrived; and when
the ceremonies are concluded, one of the newly-married students, bold
as any page, impudently remarks to the duped president, “Our names
are out of the butteries, and our persons out of your dominions.” The
phrase shows that, in the olden time, an “ingenuus puer” at Oxford,
if he were desirous of escaping censure, had only to take his name
off the books. But there were worse penalties than mere censure. The
author of “The Poor Scholar” makes frequent allusion to the whipping
of undergraduates, stretched on a barrel, in the buttery. There was
long an accredited tradition that Milton had been thus degraded. In
Neville’s play, one of the young Benedicks, prematurely married,
remarks, “Had I been once in the butteries, they’d have their rods
about me.” To this remark Eugenes, jun., adds another in reference to
his uncle the president, “He would have made thee ride on a barrel, and
made you show your fat cheeks.” But it is clear that even this terrible
penalty could be avoided by young gentlemen, if they had their wits
about them; for the fearless Aphobos makes boast, “My name is cut out
of the college butteries, and I have now no title to the mounting a
barrel.”
Young scions of noble houses, in the present time, have to endure more
harsh discipline than is commonly imagined. They are treated rather
like the buttery undergraduates of former days, than the pages who, in
ancient castles, learned the use of arms, served the Chatellaine, and
invariably fell in love with the daughters. They who doubt this fact
have only to read those Whipping Sermons to which I have referred. Such
discourses, in days of old, to a body of young pages, would probably
have cost the preacher more than he cared to lose. In these days, such
sermons can hardly have won affection for their author. The latter, no
doubt, honestly thought he was in possession of a vigorously salubrious
principle; but there is something ignoble both in the discipline
boasted of, and especially in the laying down the irresistible fact
to young gentlemen that a blow was the worst offence that could be
inflicted on persons of their class, but that _he_ could and would
commit such assault upon them, and that gentle and noble as they were,
they dared not resent it!
The pages of old time occasionally met with dreadful harsh treatment
from their chivalrous master. The most chivalrous of these Christian
knights could often act cowardly and unchristian-like. I may cite, as
an instance, the case of the great and warlike Duke of Burgundy, on
his defeat at Muret. He was hemmed in between ferocious enemies and
the deep lake. As the lesser of two evils, he plunged into the latter,
and his young page leaped upon the crupper as the Duke’s horse took
the water. The stout steed bore his double burden across, a breadth of
two miles, not without difficulty, yet safely. The Duke was, perhaps,
too alarmed himself, at first, to know that the page was hanging
on behind; but when the panting horse reached the opposite shore,
sovereign Burgundy was so wroth at the idea that the boy, by clinging
to his steed, had put the life of the Duke in peril, that he turned
upon him and poignarded the poor lad upon the beach. Lassels, who
tells the story, very aptly concludes it with the scornful yet serious
ejaculation, “Poor Prince! thou mightest have given another offering
of thanksgiving to God for thy escape, than this!” But “Burgundy”
was rarely gracious or humane. “Carolus Pugnax,” says Burton, in his
Anatomy of Melancholy, “made Henry Holland, late Duke of Exeter,
exiled, run after his horse, like a lackey, and would take no notice of
him.” This was the English peer who was reduced to beg his way in the
cities of Flanders.
Of pages generally, we shall have yet to speak incidentally--meanwhile,
let us glance at their masters at home.
KNIGHTS AT HOME.
“Entrez Messìeurs; jouissez-vous de mon coin-de-feu. Me voilà, chez
moi!”--_Arlequin à St. Germains._
Ritter Eric, of Lansfeldt, remarked, that next to a battle he dearly
loved a banquet. We will, therefore, commence the “Knight at Home,” by
showing him at table. Therewith, we may observe, that the Knights of
the Round Table appear generally to have had very solid fare before
them. King Arthur--who is the reputed founder of this society, and who
invented the table in order that when all his knights were seated none
could claim precedency over the others--is traditionally declared to
have been the first man who ever sat down to a whole roasted ox. Mr.
Bickerstaff, in the “Tatler,” says that “this was certainly the best
way to preserve the gravy;” and it is further added, that “he and his
knights set about the ox at his round table, and usually consumed it to
the very bones before they would enter upon any debate of moment.”
They had better fare than the knights-errant, who
“as some think,
Of old, did neither eat nor drink,
Because when thorough deserts vast,
And regions desolate they passed,
Where belly-timber above ground,
Or under, was not to be found,
Unless they grazed, there’s not one word
Of their provision on record:
Which made some confidently write,
They had no stomachs but to fight.”
This, however, is only one poet’s view of the dietary of the errant
gentlemen of old. Pope is much nearer truth when he says, that--
“In days of old our fathers went to war,
Expecting sturdy blows and scanty fare,
Their beef they often in their morion stewed,
And in their basket-hilt their beverage brewed.”
--that basket-hilt of which it is so well said in Hudibras, that--
“it would hold broth,
And serve for fight and dinner both.”
The lords and chivalric gentlemen who fared so well and fought so
stoutly, were not always of the gentlest humor at home. It has been
observed that Piedmontese society long bore traces of the chivalric
age. An exemplification is afforded us in Gallenga’s History of
Piedmont. It will serve to show how absolute a master a powerful
knight and noble was in his own house. Thus, from Gallenga we learn
that Antonio Grimaldi, a nobleman of Chieri, had become convinced of
the faithlessness of his wife. He compelled her to hang up with her
own hand her paramour to the ceiling of her chamber; then he had the
chamber walled up, doors and windows, and only allowed the wretched
woman as much air and light, and administered with his own hand as
much food and drink, as would indefinitely prolong her agony. And so
he watched her, and tended her with all that solicitude which hatred
can suggest as well as love, and left her to grope alone in that blind
solitude, with the mute testimony of her guilt--a ghastly object on
which her aching eyes were riveted, day by day, night after night, till
it had passed through every loathsome stage of decomposition. This man
was surely worse in his vengeance than that Sir Giles de Laval, who has
come down to us under the name of Blue-Beard.