Thus have been seen Messire Conon and his familiars in their pleasures,
feasts, and wars. The gentle folk seem to monopolize all the life of
the barony. Yet at best they number scarce one in a hundred of all the
Christians who dwell therein. Assuredly the poor and humble seem much
less interesting and command less attention. They have no splendors, no
picturesque fêtes or feuds. A life of monotonous poverty seldom detains
the chronicler; nevertheless, it is time to visit the village of huts
so often seen spreading beyond the bridge to the west of the castle.
The St. Aliquis peasants are told that they have naught whereof to
complain. They have a kindly seigneur who "renders justice." Since the
Foretvert feud, no war has ravaged them. The saints of late have sent
neither short crops nor pestilence. To repine against their lot is
ingratitude toward God.
There is abundant class consciousness in the Feudal Ages. Clerks,
knights, peasants--every man knows to which of the three great
categories of humanity he belongs, and acts accordingly.
A monkish preacher[76] pictures the world as a vast body whereof the
clerics are the eyes, for they show to all men the way to safety; the
noble knights the hands and arms, for God orders them to protect the
Church and the weak and to promote peace and justice; finally the
common people (_minores_) form the lower parts of the body--it is their
business to nourish the eyes and limbs. More bluntly still, as long ago
as about A.D. 1000, Bishop Adelberon of Laon had divided mankind into
two great divisions--first, the clergy who prayed and the seigneurs who
fought; second, the toilers; adding that "to furnish all with gold,
food, and raiment--such is the obligation of the servile class."
Since these classes are clearly ordained of Heaven, to rebel against
one's status is manifestly questioning the justice of Providence--a
damnable impiety.
Few of the St. Aliquis peasants ever dream of being anything but
villeins. They regard gentlefolk somewhat as good Christians regard
angels--as beings of another sphere. All they hope for is kindly
treatment and modest prosperity within the limits providentially
assigned them. Therefore, they are not too unhappy.
If we go up and down France we shall find the rural population
decidedly dense.[77] One little village usually follows another closely
and every collection of huts swarms with human bipeds. There are,
indeed, vast forests and marshes which might with better management
be put under the plow, but the extent of arable land is great. Heaven
surely loves the peasants, it has made so many of them. Seemingly their
number is limited merely by the question of food supply.
[Sidenote: Danger of Great Famines]
If the condition of the peasantry often seems bad, it is comforting to
know that for the last two centuries it has been improving. Not for
many years have matters in the St. Aliquis region been as they were in
some parts of France during the terrible famine of 1030-32. At that
time we are told that the poor devoured grass, roots and even white
clay. Their faces were pale, their bodies lean, their stomachs bloated,
"their voices thin and piping like the voice of birds." Wolves came out
of forests and fed on children. Strangers and travelers were liable
to be waylaid in solitary spots and killed simply that they might be
eaten. Near Macon a "hermit" at last was seized who had lured wayfarers
to share the hospitality of his cell. The skulls of forty-eight victims
were there discovered, after which they burned the wretch alive.
[Illustration: GROUP OF PEASANTS AND OF SHEPHERDS
(Twelfth century), from a window in the cathedral of Chartres.]
You can go on multiplying stories about famines--how human flesh at
times was sold in markets; how starving children were lured by the
offers of a bit of food to places where ghouls could kill and feast on
them; how a measure of corn rose to sixty sous in gold; and how even
the very rich "lost their color." These days, thanks be to the saints,
seem disappearing; yet the danger of pinching hard times is still a
real one, even in fortunate St. Aliquis.[78]
The peasants of Messire Conon are free. The serfs of the barony had
been manumitted about a hundred years earlier, by a baron who (after
an extremely iniquitous life) was admonished on his deathbed by his
confessor that he must do something extraordinary for the salvation of
his soul.[79] As a result the St. Aliquis peasants were no longer bound
to the soil and could quit the seigneury--as serfs assuredly could not
do. They could also marry any women they wished without asking their
lord's consent or paying him a fee. They could bequeath their goods
without having him sequester an outrageous part. All this, of course,
improved their status, yet they were still subject to numerous imposts
in money and kind, and to various forms of forced labor. Although they
had now the legal right to quit the barony, only with the greatest
difficulty could they sell their little farms and chattels thereon, so
they could take a decent share of their possessions elsewhere; and if
they wandered to distant parts, the local authorities were likely to
call them "masterless men" and assume that if they had forsaken their
old lord they must somehow be criminals.
[Sidenote: Exploitation of Villeins]
Nevertheless, it is much better to be a free peasant than a serf. The
majority of the French lower classes are now becoming free, although
in other Christian lands, notably Germany, serfage will prevail for a
weary day hereafter.
But even though one becomes free, he is a villein still. The taint
of ignoble blood clings like a shirt of pitch, even after achieving
prosperity and wealth. Knightly opinion is expressed by that great
troubadour, Bertran de Born: "I love to see the rich churl in distress
if he dares to strive with nobles. I love to see him beg his bread in
nakedness."
Even a well-disposed lord looks on a peasant largely as a source of
income. In time of peace the taxes and forced labor squeezed out of
him yield that which presently turns into destrers, silvered hauberks,
furs, hawks, fair dames' luxuries, dowries, adubbements, tourneys.
In time of war he exists to be pillaged and massacred, in order to
impoverish his master by ruining the latter's revenues. The burghers of
the towns are a little more respected. Their industrial products are
needful. They can better protect themselves. But the richest syndic of
a commune cannot really hold up his head socially with the unknighted
bachelor who drags out life in a tumble-down manor house.
At every turn the peasant finds himself exploited. He must pay a direct
tax supposedly proportioned to the size and yield of his farm. That is
only the beginning. When his wife has bread to bake, it must be taken
to the lord's oven. One loaf in so many goes as the fee. The flour
must be ground up in the lord's mill--again for a fee. The grapes
must be pressed out in the lord's winepress. The sheep must be driven
into the lord's sheepfold every night, that he may get the manure.
Every dispute must be arbitrated before the lord's provost or the great
man himself--more fees. In short, the whole régime aims to compel the
peasant to go to his seigneur for everything he needs, so that he will
have extremely little business to transact away from the seigneury.
Doubtless it is a convenience often to find things commonly needful
always at hand. There is a certain return for many of the exactions.
But the seigneur does not act out of benevolence. If the peasants wish,
for example, to set up their own ovens, they must pay the seigneur the
equivalent of the baker's fees of which he is deprived. If they then
wish to bake their own bread, he is now quite indifferent.
Besides the imposts and numerous fees (_banalités_) the peasants owe
the _corvées_, payments by labor. A large part of every seigneury
is "domain land"--for the lord's own personal use. The peasants are
obliged to give a certain number of days to keep this plowed and
tilled, mow the meadows, bring in the hay, dress the vines. They
must also see that the castle has its firewood and fodder; clean
out the moat; help keep the fortifications in repair; and assist on
many extraordinary occasions.[80] For this they get no pay, although
they may be given their rations during the days of labor. In time of
war they do almost everything from helping to defend the castle to
marching on offensive campaigns as part of the ban--serving, as we have
seen, as grooms, baggage attendants, diggers, and engineers, and also
as the despised, but sometimes useful, infantry pikemen.
[Sidenote: Oppressive Seigneurial Officers]
Such are the burdens of the St. Aliquis peasants. They burn holy
candles of thankfulness, however, that Baron Conon does not multiply
their troubles by intrusting the collection of his imposts and the
administration of his forced labor to outrageous officers. Sire
Macaire, the provost, is harsh toward real offenders and strict
in exacting the last _sol_ or sheaf in just debts, but he is no
blackmailer, as is Foretvert's general factotum. In old Baron Garnier's
day, of course, there had been a provost who not merely levied
abominable imposts, diverting a share thereof toward his own pocket,
but who would accuse poor men falsely of theft and then take bribes for
condoning their alleged offenses, all the time that he was dividing the
profits of real bandits whom he protected.
Even more obnoxious can be the forester who controls the hunting
preserves and grazing grounds. He decides how the peasants' pigs may be
turned out in the oak forests, how and when firewood may be cut, and he
battles incessantly with the multitudinous poachers. A few years ago
even Conon was deceived by a fellow in his employ, one Maître Crispin.
He was "a very handsome man with fine carriage and well armed with bow
and sword." No one could _congé_ more gracefully to Madame Adela, or
do more to help messire to discover a great boar, but all the while he
was filling his own chest. For example, he seized lame Georges' oxen on
the pretext that he had cut three oaks and a birch in the seigneur's
forest--yet he would forget the crime if Georges could find him one
hundred sous! Fortunately Sire Macaire discovered the evil ways of his
lieutenant, and Conon, exceedingly incensed, had the smooth Crispin
turned over to Maître Denis and his halter after abrupt formalities.
The present forester, taught by example, is more honest, although of
course, all the real poachers curse him.
[Illustration: PEASANTS AT WORK
From a manuscript of the thirteenth century (Bibliothèque nationale).]
A great part of the peasant's time is spent neither in working nor in
resting, but in walking. Few are so lucky as to have all their land
in a single compact plot. Even a rather poor peasant has his farm
scattered in several tiny holdings, possibly at the four quarters of
the neighborhood. When a peasant dies, his children all divide the
paternal estate, and if a separate piece of ground cannot be provided
for each heir, some lots must be subdivided smaller still. The St.
Aliquis lands thus present a curious sight--innumerable little parcels
scattered everywhere, each carefully fenced off and each growing its
own separate crops. Meantime their owners begin in the morning toiling
with their heavy mattocks, on one of their holdings, then on to the
next, and so on until sundown. Thus they trudge several miles, and yet
are seldom far from their village, whither they must all return at
dusk.
[Sidenote: Primitive Agricultural Methods]
Men of more fortunate days will be astonished when they survey the
agricultural methods of even the least stupid peasants. Everything is
according to traditions--"so it was with our fathers." In the abbey
library there are some Latin books about agriculture. They deal with
conditions in ancient Italy, however, not feudal France. The most
benevolent monk hardly dreamed of examining his Cato or Columella to
learn how to better the lot of the peasantry, though in fairness it
should be said that the abbey farms enjoy on the whole a much superior
cultivation. Not all peasants can own plows; they borrow or hire from
their neighbors, or break the ground with the clumsy mattocks. What
plows exist have only wooden plowshares. The wheat in St. Aliquis is
beaten out by flails, although a little farther south it is trodden out
by cattle. The soil is often impoverished, and it is usual to leave
one-third fallow all the time to recuperate. Such a thing as "rotation
of crops" is still a matter of vague talk save on some of the monastery
lands.
Under these circumstances, even in the best of years, there is not much
surplus of food. A short crop means misery. Men pessimistically expect
a famine on the average of one in every four years. If there has not
been one of late in St. Aliquis, it is because the saints are rich
in mercy. "In 1197 a countless throng died of hunger," significantly
wrote a chronicler in Rheims. Naturally, the villeins seldom get enough
ahead to be able to learn the practices of thrift. If the year has
been good, with an extra supply of corn in the barns, and plenty of
pigs and chickens fattening, the winter will be spent in gorging and
idleness. By spring the old crop is exhausted almost to the seed corn;
then perhaps the new crop will be a failure. The next winter these same
peasants may be glad to make a pottage of dead leaves.
Lame Georges, who had his oxen sequestered, is, despite his
misfortunes, one of the most prosperous peasants in the village. He
limps because in his youth a retainer of Baron Garnier's twisted one
of his feet while trying to extort money. Georges is really only
forty-five years old, but to see his gray head, gnarled face, and bent
back you would think him sixty. His wife Jeanne is four years younger
than he, but looks as aged as her husband. "Old Jeanne," the children
call her. The pair have been blessed with at least fifteen children,
but four of these died in childbirth, and five more before they could
grow up. The other six are, all but the youngest, married already and
Jeanne has been a grandmother for several years.
Georges' house stands near the center of the village. To reach it
you pick your way down a lane usually deep in mud. In front of each
fenced-in cottage there is an enormous dungheap, beloved by the hens
and pigs, which roam about freely. Georges' one-story dwelling is an
irregularly built, rambling structure of wood, wattles, and thatch, all
of dirty brown. This "manse" stretches away in four parts. The rearmost
contains the corn cribs, the next mows for hay and straw, then the
cattle sheds; and nearest, and smallest, the house for the family.
[Sidenote: A Peasant's House]
Pushing back the heavy door, after lifting the wooden latch, one enters
a single large room; the timbers and walls thereof are completely
blackened by soot. There is really only one apartment. Here everything
in the household life seems to go on. The floor is of earth pounded
hard. Upon it are playing several very dirty, half-naked children,
come over to visit "grandmother," and just now they are chasing two
squealing little pigs under the great oak table near the center. One
makes no account of a duck leading her goslings in at the door in hopes
of scraps from the dinner. A hen is setting on eggs in a box near the
great fireplace.
Jeanne has just kindled a lively fire of vine branches and dry billets.
She is proud that her house contains many convenient articles not
found with all the neighbors. By the fireplace is an iron pot hanger,
a shovel, large fire tongs, a copper kettle, and a meat hook. Next to
the fireplace is an oven, in case she does not wish to use that at
the castle and yet will pay the baron's fee. On the other side of the
fireplace is an enormous bed, piled with a real mountain of feather
mattresses--we do not discuss their immunity from vermin. In this one
bed a goodly fraction of Georges' entire family, male and female, old
and young, have been able to sleep; of course, with their heads usually
pointing in opposite directions. If a stranger chances to spend the
night, it will be hospitable to ask him to make "one more" in that
selfsame bed!
If the goodman takes us about his establishment we shall find that,
in addition to various stools and benches, he owns a ladder, a mortar
and pestle for braying corn, a mallet, some crudely shaped nails, a
gimlet, a very imperfect saw, fishing lines, hooks, and a basket. He
is fortunate enough also to own a plow, and, in addition, a scythe, an
iron spade, a mattock, a pair of large shears, a handy knife, and a
sharpening stone. He has replaced the stolen oxen with another pair and
owns a two-wheeled wagon with a harness of thongs and ropes. Besides
the oxen, there are three milch cows in his barn, and he has a hennery
and pigpen. The place seems also to abound with long, lean cats, very
wild, who gain a living by hunting the numerous rats and mice which
lurk in the dense thatch of the roofs.
Georges himself wears a blouse of dirt-colored cloth, or sometimes
of sheepskin, fastened by a leathern belt. In cold weather he has a
mantle of thick woolen homespun, now also dirt color, to his knees. He
has a pair of very heavy leathern boots, although not seldom he goes
on short walks barefoot. The lower part of his body is covered by a
pair of loose woolen trousers which once were blue. Very seldom, save
in storms, does he wear any headdress; then he produces a kind of cap
of the same dirty woolen as his coat. As for gloves, he never wears
them except when hedging. Jeanne's costume is much the same, with
a few changes to make it suitable for women. In her chest she has,
however, a green bliaut of Flanders wool made somewhat in imitation
of those she has seen at the castle, and it even is beautified with
red and purple embroidery. This bliaut she wears with pride on great
festival days, and in it, despite the envious hopes of her daughters
and daughters-in-law, she expects at last to be buried.
[Illustration: A LABORER, THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Restored by Viollet-Le-Duc, from the manuscript of Herrade of
Landsberg.]
[Sidenote: Very Poor Peasants]
Georges' house is considerably better than many others. Some of his
neighbors live in mere cabins that are barely weather tight. They are
made of crossed laths stuffed with straw or grass, and have no chimney.
The smoke from the hearth escapes through a small hole in the roof
(where the thatch is very liable to take fire) or merely through the
door. None of these houses has glass windows. Georges fastens his few
openings with wooden shutters, but poor Alard near by has to close his
apertures by stuffing them up with straw, if it is too cold to leave
them open. Alard, too, is without a bed. His family sleep on thin
pallets of straw laid on the ground, with a few ragged blankets. There
are plenty of peasants who have not even the straw.
[Illustration: PEASANT SHOES
Twelfth century (abbey church of Vézelay)]
[Illustration: A REAPER
From the doorway of the cathedral of Amiens.]
Alard inevitably has no cows, no oxen or cart, no plow, and only a few
rude tools. He and his are barely able to satisfy the provost's men by
grinding field labor, and have still enough grain laid up to carry them
till the next harvest. If it is a little too dry, a little too wet, if,
in short, any one of a number of untoward things happen, by next spring
he, with his bent and bony wife and his five lean children, will all be
standing at the castle or abbey gate with so many other mendicants to
cry their "Bread! For the love of Christ, a little bread!"
The peasants marry as early as do the nobility. Of the moral condition
of many of them it is best to say little. Good Father Étienne, the
parish priest, spends much of his time first in baptizing infants of
unacknowledged paternity, and then in running down their presumptive
fathers and forcing the latter to provide for their children's upkeep.
But a girl can often indulge in amazing indiscretions and later find
some self-respecting peasant willing to marry her.
Every girl looks forward to her marriage as the climax of life. If she
hopes to find a husband in the coming year, she will dance around a
bonfire, then cast some pins into a bubbling fountain. If these are
thrown to the surface it is a sign the right swain will come along.
When drawing water from a well, if she can throw into it an egg cracked
upon the head of some companion, she can see in the water the image
of her future husband. As for the young men, when one of them decides
he wishes to marry a certain girl, he often comes to her parents,
presenting a leathern bottle of wine. If they drink of the same his
suit is accepted. However, if he is uncertain of his reception by the
maiden herself, he invites himself to dinner at her home. If at the end
she serves him with a dish of walnuts, it is a clear token that he is
rejected. He had better slink away.
[Illustration: A MARRIAGE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
From a manuscript of the Bibliothèque nationale (Bordier et Charton).]
On the wedding day, if the bride has always been sage and modest, the
neighbors present her with a white hen, but her mother gives her a
piece of fine cloth, to make a gala dress which will serve ultimately
for a shroud. At the ceremony itself the great question is, "How will
the wedding ring slip on?" If easily the bride will be docile. If it
goes on tightly she will rule her husband!
[Illustration: A PLOW
Restored by Viollet-Le-Duc, from a manuscript of the thirteenth century
at the Seminary of Soissons.]
[Sidenote: Hard Toil and Ignorance]
The peasants need every kind of public and private holiday. On ordinary
days toil begins at gray dawn and usually continues until dusk.
There are no eight-hour laws; even the "nooning" is short, although
sometimes there is time taken out in hot weather for a siesta during
the afternoon. The women labor in the fields as hard as do the men.
Children begin weeding, digging, and carrying when very little. Their
help is so important that many peasants look on large families as
assets of so much unpaid field labor, rather than as liabilities which
they must clothe and feed until the children reach maturity. Education
is almost unknown. One or two very bright boys from the village somehow
have been caught by the churchmen and trained for the priesthood.
There is even a story of a lad born in a neighboring seigneury who
thus rose to be a bishop! But such cases are very exceptional. In the
whole village by St. Aliquis, Father Étienne is the only person who
understands the mysteries of reading and writing, except two assistants
of the provost, who have to keep accounts for the baron.
It is very hard for great folk to understand such teachings of the
Church as that "all men are brethren." "Doubtless it is true," Adela
and Alienor have often told each other, that "God created man in His
own image," but how is it possible that God should have the image of
most of the villeins on the seigneury? Are not so many of them like
the peasant described in the epic "Garin"? "He had enormous hands and
massive limbs. His eyes were separated from each other by a hand's
breadth. His shoulders were large, his chest deep, his hair bristling,
and his face black as a coal. He went six months without bathing.
Nothing but rain water had ever touched his face."
The manners of these people are equally repulsive. Countless ballads as
well as monks' sermons and treatises represent your typical villein as
incessantly discontented, scolding about the weather, which is always
too wet or too dry, treating his wife like an animal, hauling her about
by the hair. Lately at the castle a jongleur told this anecdote: "A
certain peasant showered his wife with blows on principle. 'She must
have some occupation,' said he, 'while I work in the field. If she is
idle she will think of evil things. If I beat her she will weep the
whole day through, and so will pass the time. Then when I return in the
evening she will be more tender.'" According to other stories, however,
many peasants are clever, aggressive, and insolent--well able to care
for themselves.
[Sidenote: Filthy Habits of Peasants]
The castle folk and the burghers are none too careful in sanitary
matters, but even to them the peasants are disgustingly filthy. They
relate in Pontdebois this story: "Once a villein, leading some
donkeys, went down the lane of the perfumer's shops. Instantly he
fainted at the unaccustomed odor. They brought him to, however, by
holding a shovel full of manure under his nose." Another story (told
at the monastery) has it that the devil has refused to receive more
villeins into hell because they smell so vilely!
In the village you soon find many typical peasant characters, and
nearly all of them are bad. There is the surly fellow who will not even
tell a traveler the way. There is the malcontent villein who mutters
enviously whenever he sees a knight riding out hawking; there is the
mad fool who reviles God, saints, Church, and nobility; there is the
talkative villein who is always arguing bad causes before the provost's
court and inciting his neighbors to senseless litigation, there is the
honest simpleton who wandered up to Pontdebois and got his pockets
picked while gaping at the sculptures on the portal of the cathedral;
finally, there are the misers, the petty speculators in grain (who pray
for a famine), and all the tribe of poachers. Certainly there are also
a great number of hard-working, honest folk who bow respectfully when
Messire Conon rides by and who pay their taxes without grumbling. Such
give prosperity to the seigneury; but it is the rascals who ever thrust
themselves into prominence.
The St. Aliquis villeins seem doltish and dirty enough, but they
are nothing to those existing in Flanders. Some monks have recently
returned thence after doing business for their order. They tell with
horror that in summertime Flemish peasants are seen around their
villages, taking their ease, with no more clothes on than when they
were born. When the monks remonstrated, the rough answer was: "How is
this your business? You make no laws for us." It is pitiful (say the
monks) that any seigneur should tolerate such things on his fief, for
the peasants are such sodden creatures they cannot of themselves be
expected to know better.
If the knights exploit the peasants, the clergy do so hardly less. It
is notoriously hard for the bishop's tithe collector to secure the
quota of pigs, hens, eggs, wheat, vegetables, etc., which everybody
knows that the villein owes to the Church after or upon the same time
he satisfies the collectors for the baron. Indeed, certain impious
villeins complain, "The tithe is worse than the imposts and the
_corvées_." The monkish preachers have to be constantly threatening
these sinners who pay their tithes slowly. The Church tithe is the
property of God. "It is the tax you owe to God, a sign of his universal
dominion." Those who withhold it not merely imperil their souls, but
God will send them "drought and famine," punishing them alike in this
world and the next.
Villeins too often wickedly insist on working on Sundays and holy days.
The peasants complain there are so many saints' days that it is hard
to keep track of them, but if only they would go to Church on Sundays
when the priest announces the next holy days they could avoid this sin.
Worse still are the peasants who, when they see their fellows going
dutifully to mass, hide under the hedges, then slip away to rob the
unguarded orchards.
[Sidenote: Gross Oppression by Knights]
It seems certain, therefore, that God has no such love for villeins as
he has for gentle knights and their dames. The knights display their
superiority by always reminding their peasants of their condition. With
some barons, to flog their villein for most trifling offenses is about
as common as for them to eat their dinners. Even Conon has plenty of
use for his riding whip. Unless the blows are very brutal the average
peasant takes this as all in the day's work. He merely trades out his
own blows upon his wife and children. Indeed, it is commonly said
that most villeins are so numb mentally they never can comprehend the
simplest orders unless they are driven home with stripes. In time of
war the fate of the peasants is, as we have seen, far worse than this.
Whatever a feud means to the contending parties, to their villeins it
means houses and crops burned, fruit trees girdled, young girls dragged
off to a life of infamy, and probably the massacre of many peasants in
cold blood. One of the reasons the nobles delight so in war is because
it is seldom that they have to endure its real anguish and horror;
but in the churches the non-nobles pray, "_Grant us to peace_" quite
as fervently as they beseech, "Save us from famine"--and with equal
justice.
The monkish preachers who make a business of scolding sometimes
denounce high-born oppressors of the villeins. One monk thus cries out,
"All that the peasant amasses in one year of stubborn toil, the noble
devours in an hour. Not content with his lawful revenues, he despoils
them by illicit exactions. As wolves devour carrion while the crows
croak overhead, awaiting their share of the feast, so when knights
pillage their subjects the provosts (their agents) and others of the
hellish crew rejoice at the prospect of devouring the remainder." Or
again: "Ye nobles are ravening wolves; therefore shall ye howl in
hell," for you "despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat
of the poor." (Jacques of Vitry.) Nevertheless, the selfsame preachers
accuse the peasants of the cardinal sins of avarice and of shunning
labor. Only rarely are the villeins comforted by being told that if
they work faithfully and bring up a proper family they are morally on
equality "with a cleric who chants all day in a church."
On the St. Aliquis fiefs, and, indeed, on many others, these grosser
abuses do not obtain, but nowhere are the villeins exempt from one evil
which they must meet with dumb resignation--the seigneurial hunts.[81]
Conon and his guests never hesitate at going with horses and hawks or
hounds straight across plowed and seeded fields or even over standing
grain. This is the lord's absolute right, and protest is impossible.
The hunters, too, are entitled, if far from home, to stop at the
peasants' huts and demand food and fodder, perhaps for a large party.
If payment is made, it is merely out of charity. Greater evils still
may come from the depredations of the wild game, if the fields are
close to the hunting preserves. Villeins cannot harm any deer nibbling
the young sprouts. They can only scare them away--and the cunning
creatures soon grow daring. A wild boar can root up a dozen little farm
plots before the baron can find leisure to chase him down. Upon some
fiefs the peasants can arrange to pay an extra fee to their lord, in
return for which he keeps only rabbits near their fields; but the hunt
of a single rabbit, if the flying wretch doubles in among the corn, may
ruin a family.
On the other hand, the penalties for poaching, for "killing messire's
game," are terrible. It is probably safer on St. Aliquis'--as on any
other fief--to risk killing a traveler than killing a fawn or even a
hare. The law is pitilessly enforced by the foresters. Maître Denis
will tell you he has hanged more stout fellows for poaching than for
any other two crimes put together.
[Sidenote: Futile Peasant Revolts]
Do the villeins ever revolt? Sometimes, when they are driven to
desperation by extreme misery; when they find a clever leader; when
circumstances are peculiarly favorable. Then may come the sudden
burning of manor houses and small fortalices; the massacre of their
inmates; and other brutish deeds of tardy retaliation. The rebels are
likely to boast, as did some insurgent peasants in Normandy in the
eleventh century: "We have been weak and insane to bend our necks for
so long. For we are strong-handed men, and solider and stouter limbed
than the nobles will ever be. For everyone of them there are a hundred
of us!"
Such revolts always have a single end. The ignorant peasants submit to
no discipline. They cannot use the knight's weapons if they capture
them. They cannot organize. If they seize a castle, the liquor in the
cellars lays them out helpless through a week of orgy. The seigneurs
instantly rally and with their great horses hunt down the rebels as
creatures worse than wolves. The vengeance then taken on the insurgents
is such that every ear that hears thereof must tingle. Perhaps along
a league of roadway a corpse will be swinging from every tree. Such
measures effectively discourage rebellion save under most exceptional
circumstances. Even with atrocious seigneurs it is usually best to bow
to the will of God and merely to pray for deliverance.
Georges' and Alard's mental horizons can be imagined. They have on rare
occasions been as far as Pontdebois, although some of their neighbors
have passed a lifetime without even that privilege. They have only the
most limited, one might say only the most animal, hopes and fears.
Their ideas of such things as the king's court, Paris, and the various
Christian and Infidel lands are a jumble of absurd notions. "Religion"
means a few prayers, a few saints' stories, as told in the church,
the miracle plays at Christmas, and a fear lest by failing in proper
respect to monks and priests they will be eternally tormented in worse
torture chambers than old Baron Garnier's.
The villeins, of course, have their own rustic holidays, full of rough
sports--wrestling, throwing weights, archery, and also cockfighting
and bull baiting. The best of entertainment is when two blindfolded
men, each carrying a cudgel, try to kill a goose or pig let loose in
an inclosure. The whole village roars to see them belabor each other.
During the wedding festivities, to show their dutiful esteem for
Alienor and Olivier, the peasants had arranged a special ceremony in
their honor. Four blindfolded men were led about the neighborhood,
preceded by two men, one playing an oboe, the other carrying a red
banner whereon a pig was painted. After this noisy merrymaking a real
pig was produced, and before an august company of most of the castle
folk the four champions "attacked the pig." They hit one another so
hard, that one was picked up almost dead. The pig became the property
of the villein who had managed to pound the life out of the creature
just as in mercy Alienor was about to beg that the contest end.
Despite grievances and grumblings, the average peasants are loyal,
somewhat after the manner of dumb dogs, to their seigneurs. Conon and
Adela command the real affection of their villeins because of acts of
charity, but even Baron Garnier had been treated with an astonishing
faithfulness. Many a knight has owed his life or honor to humble
dependents whom he has not treated so well as his horses or hounds.
It is the toiling thousands in the little thatched huts that make
possible the wedding feasts, the adubbements, the tourneys, and the
spectacular battles. Some day the exploitation will cease--but not in
the thirteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[76] This cleric, Jacques of Vitry, may have written a few years later
than the presumable date of this narrative, but it represents entirely
the orthodox viewpoint of A.D. 1220.
[77] It has been estimated that the rural population of France in the
thirteenth century was almost as great as in the twentieth. There was
probably a decided falling off, in the fourteenth century, thanks to
the Black Death (1348) and the ravages of the Hundred Years' War.
[78] By 1220 these wholesale famines were really becoming matters
of tradition, thanks to better transportation and better methods
of agriculture. Very lean years, almost ruinous to the peasantry,
remained, however, as extremely grim possibilities.
[79] In Brittany, and, somewhat less generally in Normandy, most of the
peasants at this time were free. In Champagne and central France there
were still so many serfs that very possibly the peasants of St. Aliquis
were more fortunate than the majority of the villeins on neighboring
baronies. The advantages of the free peasants over the serfs have,
however, been somewhat exaggerated.
[80] The list of curious _corvées_ required of peasants on various
seigneuries is a long one. On one fief they were expected to beat
the water of the castle moat to stop the noise of the frogs whenever
the mistress was sick. Or on certain specified occasions they had to
perform some absurd service: to hop on one leg, to kiss the latch
of the castle gate, go through some drunken horseplay in the lord's
presence, or sing a broad song in the presence of his lady.
[81] See page 67.