HUSBANDS AT THE CHURCH DOOR
"Io ho uno grandissimo dubbio di voi, ch'io mi credo che se ne salvino
tanti pochi di quegli che sono in istato di matrimonio, che de' mille,
novecento novantanove credo che sia matrimonio del diavolo."--ST.
BERNARDINO OF SIENA, Sermon xix
But we have as yet considered only one side of chivalry. While blushing,
like Gibbon, to unite such discordant names, let us yet remember that the
knight was "the champion of God _and the ladies_," and may therefore
fairly claim to be judged in this latter capacity also.
Even here, however, we find him in practice just as far below either his
avowed ideal or the too favourable pictures of later romance. The feudal
system, with which knighthood was in fact bound up, precluded chivalry to
women in its full modern sense. Land was necessarily held by personal
service; therefore the woman, useless in war, must necessarily be given
with her land to some man able to defend it and her. As even Gautier
admits, the woman was too often a mere appendage of the fief; and he
quotes from a _chanson de geste_, in which the emperor says to a favoured
knight--
"Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs;
Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner,
Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez." [femme
Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time went on, the
compulsion was rather less barefaced than this, he is still compelled
sadly to acknowledge of the average medieval match in high life that
"after all, whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of a
truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly Christian one." From
this initial defect two others followed almost as a matter of course: the
extreme haste with which marriages were concluded, and the indecently
early age at which children were bound for life to partners whom they had
very likely never seen. Gautier quotes from another _chanson de geste_,
where a heroine, within a month of her first husband's death, remarries
again on the very day on which her second bridegroom is proposed and
introduced to her for the first time; and the poet adds, "Great was the
joy and laughter that day!" The extreme promptitude with which the Wife of
Bath provided herself with a new husband--or, for the matter of that,
Chaucer's own mother--is characteristically medieval.
[Illustration: BRASS OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK
(From Southacre Church, Norfolk (1384))
(For the lady's cote-hardie and buttons, see p. 27, note 2. Her dress is
here embroidered with her own arms and Sir John's.)]
But child-marriages were the real curse of medieval home-life in high
society. The immaturity of the parents could not fail to tell often upon
the children; and when Berthold of Regensburg pointed out how brief was
the average of life among the 13th-century nobility, and ascribed this to
God's vengeance for their heartlessness towards the poor, he might more
truly have traced the cause much further back. "In days of old," wrote a
_trouvere_ of the 12th century, "nobles married at a mature age; faith and
loyalty then reigned everywhere. But nowadays avarice and luxury are
rampant, and two infants of twelve years old are wedded together: take
heed lest they breed children!"[198] The Church did, indeed, refuse to
recognize the bond of marriage if contracted before both parties had
turned seven; and she further forbade the making of such contracts until
the age of twelve for the girl and fifteen for the boy, though without
daring, in this case, to impugn the validity of the marriage once
contracted. That the weaker should be allowed to marry three years earlier
than the stronger sex is justified by at least one great canon lawyer on
the principle that "ill weeds grow apace"; a decision on which one would
gladly have heard the comments of the Wife of Bath.[199] But "people let
the Church protest, and married at any age they pleased"; for it was
seldom indeed that the ecclesiastical prohibition was enforced against
influence or wealth, and the Church herself, theory apart, was directly
responsible for many of the worst abuses in this matter. Her determination
to keep the whole marriage-law in her own hands, combined with her
readiness to sell dispensations from her own regulations, resulted in a
state of things almost incredible. On the one hand, a marriage was
nullified by cousinship to the fourth degree, and even by the fact of the
contracting parties having ever stood as sponsors to the same child,
unless a papal dispensation had been bought; and this absurd severity not
only nullified in theory half the peasants' marriages (since nearly
everybody is more or less related in a small village), but gave rise to
all sorts of tricks for obtaining fraudulent divorces. To quote again from
Gautier, who tries all through to put the best possible face on the
matter: "After a few years of marriage, a husband who had wearied of his
wife could suddenly discover that they were related ... and here was a
revival, under canonical and pious forms, of the ancient practice of
divorce." It is the greatest mistake to suppose that divorce was a
difficult matter in the Middle Ages; it was simply a question of money, as
honest men frequently complained. The Church courts were ready to "make
and unmake matrimony for money"; and "for a mantle of miniver" a man might
get rid of his lawful wife.[200] An actual instance is worth many
generalities. In the first quarter of the 14th century a Pope allowed the
King and Queen of France to separate because they had _once_ been
godparents to the same child; and at the same time sold a dispensation to
a rich citizen who had _twice_ contracted the same relationship to the
lady whom he now wished to marry. The collocation, in this case, was
piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which was chalked up at
street corners in Paris. John XXII. probably laughed with the rest, and
went on as before.
On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theoretically of the utmost
strictness, though only to the poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of
the most incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve might,
at any time and in any place, not only without leave of parents, but
against all their wishes, contract an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal
promise, without any priestly intervention whatever. In other words, the
whole world in Chaucer's time was a vaster and more commodious Gretna
Green.[201] Moreover, not only the civil power, but apparently even the
Church, sometimes hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions as
existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock case is quoted at
length in the contemporary "Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln" (R.S., pp.
170-177), and fully corroborated by official documents. A wretched child
who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great noble took
her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a
second noble; and on his death, when she was apparently still only eleven,
and certainly not much older, she was bought for 300 marks by a third
knightly bridegroom. The bishop, though he excommunicated the first
husband, and deprived the priest who had openly married him "in the face
of the church," apparently made no attempt to declare the marriage null;
and the third husband was still enjoying her estate twenty years after his
wedding-day. In the face of instances like this (for another, scarcely
less startling, may be found in Luce's "Du Guesclin," p. 139), we need no
longer wonder that our poet's father was carried off in his earliest teens
to be married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or that in
Chaucer's own time, when the middle classes were rapidly gaining more
power in the state, Parliament legislated expressly against the frequent
offences of this kind.
But the real root of the evil remained; so long as two children might, in
a moment and without any religious ceremony whatever, pledge their persons
and their properties for life, no legislation could be permanently
effectual. From the moral side, we find Church councils fulminating
desperately against the celebration of marriages in private houses or
taverns, sometimes even after midnight, and with the natural concomitants
of riot and excess. From the purely civil side, again, apart from runaway
or irregular matches, there was also the scandalous frequency of formal
child-marriages which were often the only security for the transmission of
property; and here even the Church admitted the thin end of the wedge by
permitting espousals "of children in their cradles," by way of exception,
"for the sake of peace."[202] Let me quote here again from Smyth's "Lives
of the Berkeleys." We there find, between 1288 and 1500, five marriages in
which the ten contracting parties averaged less than eleven years. Maurice
the Third, born in 1281, was only eight years old when he married a wife
apparently of the same age; their eldest child was born before the father
was fifteen; and the loyal Smyth comforts himself by reciting from Holy
Scripture the still more precocious examples of Josiah and Solomon. It
would be idle to multiply instances of so notorious a fact; but let us
take one more case which touched all England, and must have come directly
under Chaucer's notice. When the good Queen Anne of Bohemia was dead, for
whose sake Richard II. would never afterwards live in his palace of Shene,
it was yet necessary for his policy to take another wife. He chose the
little daughter of the French King, then only seven years old, in spite of
the remonstrances of his subjects. The pair were affianced by proxy in
1395; "and then (as I have been told) it was pretty to see her, young as
she was; for she very well knew already how to play the queen." Next year,
the two Kings met personally between Guines and Ardres, the later "Field
of the Cloth of Gold," and sat down to meat together. "Then said the Duc
de Bourbon many joyous and merry words to make the kings laugh.... And he
spake aloud, addressing himself to the King of England, 'My Lord King of
England, you should make good cheer; you have all that you desire and ask;
you have your wife, or shall have; she shall be delivered to you!' Then
said the King of France, 'Cousin of Bourbon, we would that our daughter
were as old as our cousin the lady de St. Pol. She would bear the more
love to our son the King of England, and it would have cost us a heavy
dowry.' The King of England heard and understood this speech; wherefore he
answered, inclining himself towards the King of France (though, indeed,
the word had been addressed to the Duke, since the King had made the
comparison of the daughter of the Comte de St. Pol), 'Fair father, we are
well pleased with the present age of our wife, and we love not so much
that she should be of great age as we take account of the love and
alliance of our own selves and our kingdoms; for when we shall be at one
accord and alliance together, there is no king in Christendom or elsewhere
who could gainsay us.'"[203] The Royal pair proceeded at once to Calais,
and the formal wedding took place three days later in the old church of
St. Nicholas, which to Ruskin was a perpetual type of "the links unbroken
between the past and present."
What kings were obliged to do at one time for political purposes, they
would do at other times for money; and their subjects followed suit. As
one of the authors of "Piers Plowman" puts it, the marriage choice should
depend on personal qualities, and Christ will then bless it with
sufficient prosperity.
"But few folk now follow this; for they give their children
For covetise of chattels and cunning chapmen;
Of kin nor of kindred account men but little ...
Let her be unlovely, unlovesome abed,
A bastard, a bondmaid, a beggar's daughter,
That no courtesy can; but let her be known
For rich or well-rented, though she be wrinkled for elde,
There is no squire nor knight in country about,
But will bow to that bondmaid, to bid her an husband,
And wedden her for her wealth; and wish on the morrow
That his wife were wax, or a wallet-full of nobles!"[204]
Moreover, this picture is abundantly borne out by plain facts and plain
speech from other quarters. Richard II.'s first marriage, which turned out
so happily when the boy of sixteen and the girl of fifteen had grown to
know each other, was, in its essence, a bargain of pounds, shillings, and
pence. A contemporary chronicler, recording how Richard offered an immense
sum for her in order to outbid his Royal brother of France, heads his
whole account of the transaction with the plain words, "The king buys
himself a wife."[205] Gaston, Count of Foix, whom Froissart celebrates as
a mirror of courtesy among contemporary princes, had a little ward of
twelve whose hand was coveted by the great Duc de Berri, verging on his
fiftieth year. But Gaston came most unwillingly to the point: "Yet was he
not unwilling to suffer that the marriage should take place, but he
intended to have a good sum of florins; not that he put forward that he
meant to sell the lady, but he wished to be rewarded for his wardship,
since he had had and nourished her for some nine years and a half,
wherefore he required thirty thousand francs for her."[206] Dr. Gairdner
has cited equally plain language used in the following century by a member
of the noble family of Scrope, whose estate had become much impoverished.
"'For very need,' he writes, 'I was fain to sell a little daughter I have
for much less than I should have done by possibility'--a considerable
point in his complaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got for
his own child." Down to the very lowest rung of the social ladder,
marriage was to a great extent a matter of money; and if we could look
into the manor-rolls of Chaucer's perfect gentle Knight, we should find
that one source of his income was a tax on each poor serf for leave to
take a fellow-bondmaid to his bosom.[207] If, on the other hand, the pair
dispensed with any marriage ceremony, then they must pay a heavy fine to
the archdeacon. Yet, even so, marriage was not business-like enough for
some satirists. Chaucer's fellow-poet, Eustache Deschamps, echoes the
complaint, already voiced in the "Roman de la Rose," that one never buys a
horse or other beast without full knowledge of all its points, whereas one
takes a wife like a pig in a poke.[208] The complaint has, of course, been
made before and since; but Bishop Stapledon's register may testify that
it was seldom less justified than in Chaucer's time.
Such was one side of marriage in the days of chivalry. A woman could
inherit property, but seldom defend it. The situation was too tempting to
man's cupidity; and no less temptation was offered by the equally helpless
class of orphans. A wardship, which in our days is generally an honourable
and thankless burden, was in Chaucer's time a lucrative and coveted
windfall. In London the city customs granted a guardian, for his trouble,
ten per cent. of the ward's property every year.[209] This was an open
bargain which, in the hands of an honourable citizen, restored to the ward
his patrimony with increase, but gave the guardian enough profit to make
such wardships a coveted privilege even among well-to-do citizens.
Elsewhere, where the customs were probably less precisely marked--and
certainly the legal checks were fewer--wardships were treated even more
definitely as profitable windfalls. We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley
paid L10,000 in modern money for a single ward; Chaucer, as we know from a
contemporary document, made some L1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a
proportionately greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not blush to
buy and sell wardships, from the King downwards. The above-quoted Stephen
Scrope, who sold his own daughter as a matter of course, is indignant with
his guardian, Sir John Fastolf, who had sold him to the virtuous Chief
Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks, "through which sale I took a sickness
that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing; whereby I am disfigured
in my person, and shall be whilst I live." Gascoigne had purchased Scrope
for one of his own daughters. Fastolf bought him back again to avoid such
a _mesalliance_; but the costs of each transfer, and something more, came
out of the hapless ward's estate. "He bought and sold me as a beast,
against all right and law, to mine own hurt more than a thousand marks."
Moreover, the means that were taken to avoid such disastrous wardships
became themselves one of the most active of the many forces which
undermined the strict code of chivalry. A knight, in theory, was capable
of looking after himself; therefore careful and influential parents like
the Berkeleys sought to protect their heirs by knighthood from falling
into wardships as minors, in defiance of the rule which placed the
earliest limit at twenty-one. Thus Maurice de Berkeley (IV.) was knighted
in 1339 at the age of seven, and one of his descendants in 1476 at the age
of five; and Eustache Deschamps complains of the practice as one of the
open sores of contemporary chivalry--
"Et encore plus me confond,
Ce que Chevaliers se font
Plusieurs trop petitement,
Qui dix ou qui sept ans n'ont."[210]
The practice shows equally clearly how hollow the dignity was becoming,
and how little an unprotected child could count upon chivalric
consideration, in the proper sense of the word.
Nor can these bargains in women and orphans be treated as a mere accident;
they formed an integral part of medieval life, and influenced deeply all
social relations. The men who bought their wives like chattels were only
too likely to treat them accordingly. Take from the 14th and early 15th
centuries two well-known instances, which would be utterly inconceivable
in this unchivalrous age of ours. Edward I. hung up the Countess of Buchan
in a wooden cage on the walls of Berwick "that passers-by might gaze on
her"; and when a woman accused a Franciscan friar of treasonable speeches,
the King's justiciar decided that the two should proceed to wager of
battle, the friar having one hand tied behind his back. At the best, the
knight's oath provided no greater safeguard for women than the unsworn but
inbred courtesy of a modern gentleman. When the peasant rebels of 1381
broke into the Tower, and some miscreants invited the Queen Mother to kiss
them, "yet (strange to relate) the many knights and squires dared not
rebuke one of the rioters for acts so indecent, or lay hold of them to
stop them, or even murmur under their breath."[211]
But the strangest fact to modern minds is the prevalence of wife-beating,
sister-beating, daughter-beating. The full evidence would fill a volume;
but no picture of medieval life can be even approximately complete without
more quotations than are commonly given on this subject. In the great
epics, when the hero loses his temper, the ladies of his house too often
suffer in face or limb. Gautier, in a chapter already referred to, quotes
a large number of instances; but the words of contemporary law-givers and
moralists are even more significant. The theory was based, of course, on
Biblical texts; if God had meant woman for a position of superiority, he
would have taken her from Adam's head rather than from his side.[212] Her
inferiority is thus proclaimed almost on the first page of Holy Scripture;
and inferiority, in an age of violence, necessarily involves subjection
to corporal punishment. Gautier admits that it was already a real forward
step when the 13th-century "Coutumes du Beauvoisis" enacted that a man
must beat his wife "only in reason." A very interesting theological
dictionary of early 14th century date, preserved in the British Museum (6
E. VI. 214A), expresses the ordinary views of cultured ecclesiastics.
"Moreover a man may chastise his wife and beat her by way of correction,
for she forms part of his household; so that he, the master, may chastise
that which is his, as it is written in the Gloss [to Canon Law]." Not long
after Chaucer's death, St. Bernardino of Siena grants the same permission,
even while rebuking the immoderate abuse of marital authority. "There are
men who can bear more patiently with a hen that lays a fresh egg every
day, than with their own wives; and sometimes when the hen breaks a pipkin
or a cup he will spare it a beating, simply for love of the fresh egg
which he is unwilling to lose. O raving madmen! who cannot bear a word
from their own wives, though they bear them such fair fruit; but when the
woman speaks a word more than they like, then they catch up a stick and
begin to cudgel her; while the hen, that cackles all day and gives you no
rest, you take patience with her for the sake of her miserable egg--and
sometimes she will break more in your house than she herself is worth, yet
you bear it in patience for the egg's sake! Many fidgetty fellows who
sometimes see their wives turn out less neat and dainty than they would
like, smite them forthwith; and meanwhile the hen may make a mess on the
table, and you suffer her.... Don't you see the pig too, always squeaking
and squealing and making your house filthy; yet you suffer him until the
time for slaughtering, and your patience is only for the sake of his flesh
to eat! Consider, rascal, consider the noble fruit of thy wife, and have
patience; it is not right to beat her for every cause, no!" In another
sermon, speaking of the extravagant and sometimes immodest fashions of
the day, he says to the over-dressed woman in his congregation, "Oh, if it
were my business, if I were your husband, I would give you such a drubbing
with feet and fists, that I would make you remember for a while!"[213]
Lastly, let us take the manual which Chaucer's contemporary, the Knight of
La Tour Landry, wrote for the education of his daughters, and which became
at once one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages.[214] The good
knight relates quite naturally several cases of assault and battery, of
which the first may suffice. A man had a scolding wife, who railed
ungovernably upon him before strangers. "And he, that was angry of her
governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth; and then with his
foot he struck her in the visage and brake her nose, and all her life
after she had her nose crooked, the which shent and disfigured her visage
after, that she might not for shame show her visage, it was so foul
blemished: [for the nose is the fairest member that man or woman hath, and
sitteth in the middle of the visage]. And this she had for her evil and
great language that she was wont to say to her husband. And therefore the
wife ought to suffer and let the husband have the words, and to be
master...."
What was sauce for women was, of course, sauce for children also.
Uppingham is far from being the only English school which has for its seal
a picture of the pedagogue dominating with his enormous birch over a group
of tiny urchins. At the Universities, when a student took a degree in
grammar, he "received as a symbol of his office, not a book like Masters
of the other Faculties, but two to him far more important academical
instruments--a 'palmer' and a birch, and thereupon entered upon the
discharge of the most fundamental and characteristic part of his official
duties by flogging a boy 'openlye in the Scolys.' Having paid a groat to
the Bedel for the birch, and a similar sum to the boy 'for hys labour,'
the Inceptor became a fully accredited Master in Grammar."[215] At home,
girls and boys were beaten indiscriminately. One of the earliest books of
household conduct, "How the Good Wife taught her Daughter," puts the
matter in a nutshell--
"And if thy children be rebel, and will not them low,
If any of them misdoeth, neither ban them nor blow [curse nor cuff
But take a smart rod, and beat them on a row
Till they cry mercy, and be of their guilt aknow." [acknowledge
[Illustration: SEAL OF UPPINGHAM SCHOOL]
[Illustration: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN A 14TH-CENTURY CLASSROOM
(FROM MS. ROY. VI. E. 6. f. 214)]