The little tales brought together in this volume are drawn from the
literature of the Middle Ages, and in many cases were written in France
of the thirteenth century. I hope that they may be found interesting in
themselves, but to appreciate them fully they should be considered in
their relations to a definite historical background. Their conceptions
of society, of religion, of politics, of humour--that precious gift
which always dies so young--are not common to all of us to-day. They
are of the thirteenth century, and we of the twentieth. We may not be
better than our forefathers, but a great chasm of seven hundred years
yawns between us and them. To enjoy their work without reserve it is
necessary for a time to breathe the same air that was breathed--roughly
speaking--by the subjects of St. Louis of France.
It is possible to love the period known as the Middle Ages, or it is
possible to detest it. But you cannot ignore it, nor find it
flavourless on the palate, because that period possesses character,
"character, that personal quality, that idiosyncrasy which, no doubt,
you are the richer for possessing, be it morally bad or good--for it is
surely better to have a bad character than none, and if you are a
church, better to be like the Badia than the City Temple." Indeed, it
is evident that the personal equation must largely determine what any
writer's conception of the Middle Ages is. A great modern poet, for
instance, loved the Middle Ages because economic conditions pressed
less hardly on the poor; because London was small and white and clean;
because chivalry afforded opportunity for that decorative treatment of
knightly episodes which makes his poetry so attractive. Yet across the
Channel, much at the same time, an equally distinguished poet treated
of the same period in a book of poems which it is instructive to
consider side by side with the work of William Morris, and the
Frenchman's verse is lurid with fire and bigotry, and the tale of
man's inhumanity to man. And the strange point is that both writers
could give chapter and verse for the very different type of story they
selected. Again, the religious temperament is apt to look back fondly
to the Middle Ages as the "Age of Faith." To such minds mediaevalism is
a period of easy acquiescence in spiritual authority, a state of health
before the world grew sick with our modern disease of doubt. Certainly
these centuries produced saints whose arresting examples and haunting
words must always be the glory of Christianity, and it is equally
certain that the offices and doctrines of the Church entered far more
intimately into the lives of the common folk than they do to-day. But
side by side with faith there was a "spirit of rebellion and revolt
against the moral and religious ideas of the time." It may be found in
many strangely different shapes: in the life of Abelard; in the
extraordinary spread of witchcraft; and--in its supreme literary
expression, perhaps--in a famous passage of "Aucassin and Nicolette."
And, to take a third illustration of the same difficulty, were the
Middle Ages years of sheer lyric beauty, or rather years of
inexpressible ugliness and filth? "If you love the very words 'Middle
Age'; if they conjure up to your mind glowing old folios of black
letter with gilt and florid initials; crimson and green and blue pages
in which slim ladies with spiked head-dresses walk amid sparse flowers
and trees like bouquets, or where men-at-arms attack walled cities no
bigger than themselves, or long-legged youths with tight waists and
frizzed hair kiss girls under apple-trees; or a king is on a dais with
gold lilies for his background, minstrels on their knees before him,
lovers in the gallery"--well, if you accept all this dainty
circumstance, you get sheer lyric beauty, and nothing else. Only there
is another side, a side not very pleasant to dwell upon, and it may
perhaps be hinted at by saying that such a necessary of the toilet as a
pocket-handkerchief was not generally known in this Age of Beauty.
Perhaps it would be truer to hold that the Middle Ages comprised all
these things--the knight-errant and the tormentor; the altar and the
witch's Sabbath; a dream of loveliness having its roots in slime and
squalor. These centuries were both "enormous and delicate." They were
great enough to include opposites, and to square the circle. You may
love them, or you may hate them; but they cannot be given the go-by.
The philosophy of the Middle Ages--that is to say, the idea which
governed their political and theological conceptions--was both simple
and profound. The Emperor or King was considered to be the guardian of
the temporal order of things, just as the Pope was held to be the
supreme authority in matters of eternal and spiritual concern. It was
an idea fascinating in its simplicity, but life is a tangled and
complex matter, and in practice, planets, which in theory moved
strictly in their own orbits, were continually striking across each
other's path. Even St. Louis, the King, who carried saintliness to the
extreme limit permitted to man, was involved in frequent political
quarrels with the supreme head of his Church, and by one of the little
ironies of fate came within measurable distance of excommunication. The
King--again in theory--was the owner of all his realm. This was
necessary to abolish Heptarchies. But for the support of the Crown he
parcelled out his realm amongst great lords, and thus established
Heptarchies again. The great barons, in their turn, divided their
estates amongst knights, bound to assist them in their quarrels, and to
furnish a certain number of soldiers to their service. Amongst these
knights sprang up one of the supreme institutions of the Middle
Ages--the institution of chivalry. "It took its birth in the interior
of the feudal mansions, without any set purpose beyond that of
declaring, first, the admission of the young man to the rank and
occupation of the warrior; secondly, the tie which bound him to his
feudal superior--his lord, who conferred upon him the arms of
knighthood. But when once the feudal society had acquired some degree
of stability and confidence, the usages, the feelings, the
circumstances of every kind which attended the young man's admission
among the vassal warriors, came under two influences, which soon gave
them a fresh direction, and impressed them with a novel character.
Religion and imagination, poetry and the Church, laid hold on chivalry,
and used it as a powerful means of attaining the objects they had in
view, of meeting the moral wants which it was their business to provide
for." Throughout a long apprenticeship, in a castle which contained
practically but one woman, the wife of his lord and she removed how
infinitely from him in distance and in station, the young squire was
trained to feel towards all women something of the dreamy devotion with
which art and religion taught him to regard Our Lady herself. And the
apprenticeship culminated in the ceremony of knighthood, with all the
mystical significance of the symbolism preserved for us in the little
story of Sir Hugh of Tabarie and the Sultan Saladin, carefully
calculated to impress the recipient in the highest degree. Devotion to
God, to his king, and to his lady--these were the ideals of knighthood,
not always, unfortunately, its realities. But ideals are difficult of
realization in so faulty a world as ours. The Black Prince was the very
pattern of chivalry in his youth, yet Froissart remarks in his account
of the battle of Poitiers that "the Prince of Wales, who was as
courageous and cruel as a lion, took great pleasure this day in
fighting and chasing his enemies." The conduct of that perfect gentle
knight, Sir Graelent, towards the lady he discovered bathing in the
fountain, was far from chivalrous, according to modern notions, and yet
I can assure the reader that I have walked delicately as Agag, and gone
to the verge of weakness, in recounting the incident. Finally, here is
a passage from a letter written by a knight of the fourteenth century
to the Tyrant of Mantua, relating to a French girl, Jeannette, which is
sufficiently explicit. "Let her be detained at my suit, for if you
should have a thousand golden florins spent for her, I will pay them
without delay, for if I should have to follow her to Avignon I will
obtain this woman. Now, my lord, should I be asking a trifle contrary
to law, yet ought you not to cross me in this, for some day I shall do
more for you than a thousand united women could effect; and if there be
need of me in a matter of greater import, you shall have for the asking
a thousand spears at my back." Ah, well, ideals that are realized cease
to be ideals.
Just as this worship of woman was the great social note of the Middle
Ages, so the devotion to the Blessed Virgin was the distinguishing
religious feature of those times. In honour of Our Lady were erected
the magnificent Gothic cathedrals--those masterpieces of moral
elevation--which stud the fair land of France like painted capitals
upon a written page. In these buildings the genius of the Middle Ages
found its supreme expression. Above the crowded market-place and narrow
mediaeval street rose those incomparable churches, "like Gothic queens
at prayer, alone, silent and adorned." In her honour, too, they were
made beautiful with glass and statuary, so that never before nor since
were churches filled with such an entrancing congregation, never had
buildings such wonderful eyes. And at a time when masons built to her
honour and theologians defined her position, the story-tellers were not
slack in her praise. The three legends relating to the Virgin, which I
have included in this book of translations, are but specimens of an
immense literature devoted to her service. "Our Lady's Tumbler" is, to
the modern taste, one of the most appealing of all these legends, but
there are others nearly, if not quite, so beautiful. Once upon a time
there was a monk who was so ignorant that he was exposed to the rebuke
of his brethren. But in his devotion to Our Lady he took for his
meditation five psalms, each commencing with a letter of her name. And
when it pleased God that his end should come, there happened a very
beauteous miracle, for from his mouth came forth five fresh roses,
sweet, crimson and leafy, in honour of the five letters of the name of
Maria. Again, how exquisite is the story of the nun who by frailty of
heart fled from her cloister to give herself over to sin. After many
long years she returned to the nunnery, having lost her innocence, but
not her faith, for during all her wanderings she had never omitted her
habit of prayer to Our Lady. But, to her surprise, always she was
addressed by her sisters as if she had never gone from amongst them.
For the Blessed Virgin, having clothed herself with the vesture and
seeming of the truant who loved her, even in sin, took also upon her
the duties of a sacristan from which she had fled, so that no single
person had noticed the absence from her cloister of the faithless nun.
Yet, after all, the Middle Ages delighted to honour Our Lady as the
tender Mother rather than as the Queen of Heaven. In numberless
miniatures, and on the portals of the cathedrals raised to her glory,
she stands presenting her Child to the adoration of men. It is as the
instrument of the Incarnation that her ultimate dignity consists.
Indeed, the religion of the Middle Ages can only be appreciated by
regarding it in the light of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Christ is
God. The Mass--the popular service instituted by Himself--is an
extension of His Incarnation. The Blessed Virgin is to be held in
peculiar veneration as the Mother of God. The two threads can easily be
seen twined together in that story of how Our Lady tourneyed whilst the
knight was at Mass. But belief in the Incarnation is the keystone of
mediaeval theology, and the only explanation of the lives of those
saints who poured out their years like water in the service of God and
man.
The authors of the stories brought together in this book from various
sources are, in some cases, identified, but in others are unknown. They
may, perhaps, be regarded as representative of the three classes who
are responsible for this kind of fiction--the monk, the trouvere and
the professional minstrel. The monk, for his part, wrote in French
seldom enough. He was a scholar, and when he had something to say,
preferred to deliver himself in Latin, the language common to all
educated men. But, for once, in the thirteenth century, a monk of
Soissons, named Gautier de Coinci, translated into French verse a great
collection of the miracles of Our Lady. From this garner I have
selected the legend "Of a Jew who took as Surety the Image of Our
Lady." Gautier de Coinci may not have been a supreme poet--that saving
grace comes seldom enough--but his industry was certainly abnormal. His
labour of love must have been the occupation of a lifetime, and it is
pleasant to recall the old monk, in silent scriptorium and shady
cloister, turning the Latin legends into fluent and pious verse.
The trouvere was drawn from the same class as the troubadour, and the
circumstances of their lives were in essentials much the same. He lived
very probably in some nobleman's castle, where he composed his stories
as a sort of amateur, and recited the verses to an audience more or
less select. His pride forbade him to appear personally before the
populace, but it permitted him to provide wandering minstrels with
copies of these poems, and so entertain the common folk by deputy. In
the lord's castle it was, of course, another matter. On summer
afternoons he would recite before the baron's household, where they
were seated on the steps of the garden terrace, each in his order and
degree. You can feel the hush and heat of the Provencal evening, whilst
the sombre cypresses spire into the sky, and the olives whisper, and,
far below, the broad stretches of the Rhone are suffused with the
lovely light and colour of southern France. Or, in winter, after
supper, when the tables were cleared, the trouvere would recite in
hall. At the feet of the ladies sat their knights on silken cushions,
fettered with silver chains, each to his friend. It was an audience
rich and idle, familiar with the fantastic lives of the troubadours,
and with the wanton judgments of the Courts of Love. For such a company
no flower of sentiment could be too highly scented, and no tale come
amiss, save only that it spoke of love.
If the trouveres were "the aristocracy of this literature," the
minstrel was its "democracy." Sometimes he rose almost to the status of
the trouvere, composing his own stories, and reciting them even in
kings' houses. Generally, however, the minstrel was but a strolling
player, speaking other men's thoughts, and wandering over the length
and breadth of the land. Occasionally he went alone with his viol. At
other times he was accompanied by bears, or a little troupe of singing
boys or dancing girls. The minstrel might have the good fortune to give
his entertainment before some knight or count. At any rate, the common
folk heard him gladly, before the church or on the village green. If he
was lucky, the homeless minstrel got free lodgings for the night at
some hospitable monastery, but occasionally he was turned from the
door, with hard words, because of St. Bernard's saying that "the tricks
of the jongleurs can never please God." Once upon a time such a
minstrel as this knocked at a monastery door, and asked for
hospitality. He was received without indecent joy, and the
guest-master, forgetting that a grace conferred unwillingly is no
favour at all, provided the guest with black bread, salted vegetables,
cold water, and a hard and dirty pallet. The abbot obviously felt no
passion for strolling vagabonds, and had appointed a guest-master after
his own heart. On the morrow, when the minstrel was leaving the
monastery, he met the abbot returning from a short journey. To revenge
himself, at any rate, on one of the two, the minstrel accosted him
effusively. "My lord," said he, "I thank you and all the community from
the bottom of my heart, for Brother such-an-one has welcomed me like
Christ Himself last night. He lighted a fire in my chamber, and served
me with choice wines, excellent fish, and more dishes than I am able to
recall. And this morning when he bade me farewell he gave me shoes,
and these leathern laces, and a knife." When the abbot heard this he
was filled with anger, and, parting shortly from the minstrel, he
hastened to the monastery, and promptly relieved the guest-master of
his office, before the latter could offer a word of explanation. Thus
was the minstrel revenged on this grudging heart.
If, however, any reader would like to see closer the actual life of a
minstrel of the thirteenth century, I would suggest that he obtain the
excellent little book on Rutebeuf, one of the most famous of them all,
published in the Grands Ecrivains Francais series. There he may read of
the poet's bare cupboard, and the unfurnished lodging, where he lived
with his ugly and dowerless old wife, who brought him but fifty years
with her soup. He coughs with cold and gapes with hunger. He has no
mattress, but only straw, and a bed of straw is not a bed. He fears to
face his wife without money for food and rent. If he cannot dig,
emphatically, to beg he is not ashamed. All his goods are in pawn, and
his time is wasted in the tavern, playing dice, which are his curse and
his downfall. Well, Rutebeuf is not the first nor the last to be ruined
by dice. How the Devil must smile! Do you remember the legend of the
making of these little figures? A merchant who sold himself to the
Devil was bidden by him to make a six-sided piece of bone, and to mark
each side with a number. One point was to insult the only true God. Two
points were to insult God and the Blessed Virgin. Three points to
insult the Holy Trinity. Four points to insult the four Evangelists.
Five points to insult the Sacred Wounds; and six points to insult the
Days of Creation. From that hour the little figures spread rapidly
through the world, to man's confusion. Such is the picture Rutebeuf
paints of his life--a life curiously anticipative of that of many a
Bohemian poet since. It is not a very attractive picture, and though
for artistic and other reasons the shadows may be unduly darkened, yet
in the main it is doubtless substantially correct.
The stories written by such men as these are racy of their soil, and
give the very form and pressure of their times. I have tried to make my
little selection representative, and have included in this book not
only romances of love and chivalry, but legends of devotion and
moralities. Greatly daring, I have translated a specimen of their
humour even--not too characteristic, I hope, of the robust merriment
of the feudal period. These stories will be found illustrative of some
of the ideas with which the mind of the Middle Ages was concerned. The
devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and to Our Lady; the languid and
overwrought sentiment of love; the mystical ceremonies of knighthood;
all these things are illuminated by the tales which follow this
Introduction. Bound up with them are customs and ideas which to the
modern mind are, perhaps, less happy. It seems odd, for instance, that
the feudal knight should see nothing repugnant in accepting money and
clothing from the lady who had given him already the supreme favour of
her love. It is possible to entertain a high ideal of friendship
without being prepared to cut the throats of your children for the sake
of your friend. Yet this is what Amile did for Amis in the great epic
of friendship of the Middle Ages. In its stark adherence to a
superhuman standard, it puts one in mind of the animal-like patience of
Griselda--which story (not included here) may perhaps be regarded as
the modest ideal of the mediaeval husband. It is strange, too, to find
in stories so concerned with the knightly exercises of the tourney and
the joust, no hint of the singular disfavour in which these games (or,
perhaps, pursuits) were held by the Church. Popes prohibited them; St.
Louis forbade them. Those slain therein were refused burial in
consecrated ground. The Church testified, "Of those who fell in
tournament there is no question but that they go down to hell, unless
they are aided by the great benefit of absolution." At Cologne sixty
knights and squires were killed, and the cries were heard all about of
demons carrying off their souls to perdition. Apparently all this
tremendous machinery failed utterly in its purpose. The most pious
knights strove in tournaments equally with the most reckless,
and--according to Miss Knox, to whose admirable _Court of a Saint_ I am
indebted--a son of St. Louis himself was thrown at a tourney, and was
afterwards weak in intellect as a consequence.
Nor is it only with the lives of the rich that the mediaeval minstrel
was concerned. He dealt, too, with the lives and aspirations of that
yet more numerous class, the poor. Such a story as "The Three Thieves"
is indeed a picture of the home of the hind. We see the mean mud and
timber hovel, into which the thieves broke so easily, with its
cauldron upon the fire of fagots, its big bedstead, and the little
lean-to byre. The peasant's tools stood around the wall, whilst outside
was the garden, in which a wise ordinance of St. Louis required that
pot-herbs should be planted. And if the tale of "The Three Thieves"
shows us the home of the peasant, his soul is stripped for us to the
quick, in--of all places in the world of literature--"Aucassin and
Nicolette." Amongst the full-blown flowers of sentiment in that
incomparable love-story is placed an episode which, in its violence and
harsh realism, has been likened to a spot of blood and mud on a silver
ground. Possibly it was inserted merely to show the hero's good heart,
or is simply an instance of that artistic use of contrast so noticeable
throughout the book. Any way, there are few things in feudal literature
more striking than the meeting of the "dansellon" with the tattered,
hideous ploughman, the one weeping in delicate grief, the other
telling, dry-eyed, the sordid story of the abject poor. It is very far
from being the happiest incident in the romance, but it is certainly
one of the most memorable. One wonders how it was taken by an audience
that concerned itself so little with the interests of the serf, and
whose literature never mentioned that class, except in scorn. Was the
author possibly of the ploughman's kindred, like Chaucer's parish
priest in _The Canterbury Tales_? Had the stinging whips of captivity
taught him sympathy with unpoetical sorrows; or is this an early hint
of the coming storm! "They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their
furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine
and spices and fair bread; and we, oat-cake and straw, and water to
drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the
rain and the wind in the fields." We cannot tell; but comparing this
dainty make-belief with that tragic misery, we feel the significance of
the peasant's cry, "Woe to those who shall sorrow at the tears of such
as these."
I hope I have not dwelt unduly on these stories considered as pictures
of the customs and philosophy of their times. Perhaps, after all, these
matters are of interest to the archaeologist and the ecclesiologist
rather than to the general reader. Not being a scholar myself, I have
no pretension to write for scholars. My object is more modest. I have
tried to bring together a little garland for the pleasure of the
amateurs of beautiful tales. To me these mediaeval stories are
beautiful, and I have striven to decant them from one language into
another with as little loss as may be. To this end I have refined a
phrase, or, perhaps, softened an incident here and there. I do not
pretend that they are perfect works of art. "All poets are unequal,
except the bad, and they are uniformly bad." Sometimes a story drags,
or there are wearisome repetitions. The psychology occasionally strikes
a modern reader as remarkably summary. When Amis, for example, became a
leper, we are gravely told that his wife held him in bitter hatred, and
many a time strove to strangle him. Here is an author who, obviously,
is astonished at nothing. But in reading these narratives you will
remember how they have delighted, and been used by, writers in some
cases greater than their own authors. Is it possible, for instance, to
peruse "The Lay of the Little Bird" without recalling Shelley's
"Sensitive Plant"? The tale of "The Divided Horsecloth" is told, in
another version, both by Montaigne and Browning. The principal incident
of "King Florus and the Fair Jehane" is used by Shakespeare in
"Cymbeline." "Our Lady's Tumbler" and "A Jew who took as Surety the
Image of Our Lady" have been re-written by Monsieur Anatole France with
such perfection of art and artistry as to be the admiration and despair
of all who come after him.
It should not be forgotten that the majority of these stories were
intended to be recited, and not read. Repetition, therefore, is the
more easily excused. This also accounts for the dramatic use of
dialogue, so noticeable in "The Palfrey" and in "Aucassin and
Nicolette." But it is evident that this Introduction, already
over-long, will not permit me to go _seriatim_ through these tales,
"Item, a grey eye or so. Item, two lips, indifferent red." Let me
therefore content myself with appreciating the most lovely of them all,
"Aucassin and Nicolette."
A single copy of "Aucassin and Nicolette," transcribed in the
thirteenth century, and preserved as by miracle, has retained for us
not only a charming tale, but also an unique specimen of the minstrel's
craft. Without it we could not have gathered that so elaborate a
blending of prose and verse was possible to a strolling player of
mediaeval France. The cante-fable was designed for recitation, with
illustrative gesture, to the accompaniment of viol and pipes. In this,
and not only in this, it seems to suggest an Eastern origin, and
to-day, in any Moorish coffee-house, the tales of the _Arabian Nights_
are delivered in a manner very similar to that witnessed in Provence
seven hundred years ago. The peculiar quality of pleasure afforded by
"Aucassin and Nicolette" is not to be found in the story itself. That,
indeed, is very simple, and, perhaps, a trifle hackneyed. Aucassin, the
only son of the Count of Beaucaire, is passionately in love with
Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of the
Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The story turns
on the adventures of these fond lovers, until at the end their common
fidelity is rewarded. Portions have faded sadly, like old tapestry, and
the laughter sounds especially hollow, for of all precious things fun
dies soonest. But in "Aucassin" the part is emphatically greater than
the whole, and its charm must rather be sought in its graceful turns of
speech--jewels, five words long--and in the pictorial quality which
makes it more a series of pictures than a narrative. Who can forget the
still night of May on which Nicolette escapes from her prison, and
hurries through the garden, kilting her skirt against the dew; or the
ruined tower in whose kindly shadow she remains hidden, whilst the
watch march along the moonlit street, their swords beneath their
mantles; or that bower of branches, built by her own white hands,
through the trellis-work of which her lover looks upon the stars! In
such felicitous picture-making the dainty little classic is equalled by
no work of its period.
May I express the pious wish that every reader may find it all as
delightful to read as I have found it to transcribe?