It was astonishing how soon she really seemed to make it her home. Kind
Duchess Sophia, who had watched the whole first night by the little
bride’s silver cradle, in the Inn at Eisenach, looked carefully, in
the days that followed their return to the Wartburg, for a sign of
home-sickness. But, except that the child’s great dark eyes would
sometimes fill with tears when they rested on Frau Bertha, she could
find none. Little princesses are early schooled to stoicism, and before
the tiny Hungarian’s “Königstochter,” left her father and mother, she
had received lessons which, young as she was, she was not too young to
understand.
So, after a time, she became, to all intents and purposes, a little
German girl, as much one of the family as Agnes, or Heinrich, or Conrad,
who shared the Kinderstube with her. She was more in awe of Hermann than
anybody else; for Hermann had realised that, instead of its adding to
his “manliness,” it made him rather ridiculous to be the “Bräutigam” of
a mere baby like that—and his behaviour showed it. For Ludwig, on the
contrary, she developed a shy friendship, which went straight to the
boy’s chivalrous heart, and made her, in a manner, dearer to him than
his blood-sister Agnes. For the rest, the little maid did not often see
either Hermann or Ludwig, who were most of the day with their governor
serving the first grade of their apprenticeship to the great profession
of knighthood.
A mediæval nursery was a merry place, and mediæval children had nothing
to envy their modern brothers and sisters, whether in the matter of
toys or games. A lover of the romantic Middle Ages, Zingerle, in his
wanderings through the Märchenwald of Middle High German poetry, or over
the more prosaic lands ploughed by the Middle High German Moralists and
“Didaktiker”—Thomasin von Zirclarie, Freidank, Hugo von Trimberg, and
others—has found many a happy group of children, and gathered themselves
and their games into a very charming book: “Das deutsche Kinderspiel im
Mittelalter.” With the aid of it, we can easily reconstruct the life led
by little Elizabeth in her nursery at the end of the “Kemenate” (women’s
apartments).
While she and Agnes played with their dolls (“tocken”), or kept house
with their toy cooking-vessels, Heinrich and Conrad jousted rather
noisily on hobby horses, or, failing these, on two mettlesome steeds,
which, outside the nursery, would have been taken for sticks. Nurse
(“amme”) was as important a personage then as now, and had as many rôles
to fill. Sometimes she presided over tourneys where wooden swords wrought
frightful havoc on wooden shields. If anybody came out of the combat with
bruised knee or finger, it was hers to dress the warrior’s wound—and,
maybe, make it well again with kisses. At the tourneys where she presided
there were nothing but victors. Everybody won the prize of painted egg or
apple. (By the way, did you ever notice that the Christ Child of mediæval
artists has always an apple in His chubby hand?) Sometimes she went
visiting the stately “halls” where Elizabeth and Agnes played Châtelaine,
and ate the wonderful things they cooked for her, and inquired about
their doll-children, just as nurse does to-day. In a carved wooden box
she kept the “best” toys, the birds and animals in coloured clay, or
wood, or metal, which were too fine to be played with every day. In the
nursery door there was always a hole cut near the ground, just large
enough for a tiny dog or a cat to creep through. That, I am sure, was a
kind thought of nurse’s. When games got too noisy, and little boys and
girls were tiring themselves into crossness, she had a way of gathering
them into the shelter of the great fire-place, and telling them the most
fascinating stories. Some of the tales that are prime nursery-favourites
to-day were told, without a doubt, by her “Amme” to Saint Elizabeth when
she was a little girl. “The Seven Wild Swans,” “The Sleeping Beauty,”
“Clever Else,” “The Fox and the Geese,” and many, many others. Some of
the “Lügenmärchen” (of the kind definitely associated in later years with
the name of the immortal Munchhausen) go back equally far. Nobody knows,
for instance, how old is the legend of “Schlaraffenland”—“the Land of
Cockayne”—of which our Middle Irish “Vision of Mac Conglinghe” is an
interesting variant.
Young wits were sharpened by guessing riddles. Here are some Thirteenth
Century ones, which Saint Elizabeth may have tried to guess:—
“The Full of the Valley, the Full of the Land,
But never the Full of a little girl’s Hand.”
The answer to that must often have lain before her, making her feel, as
she stood in her high window-niche in the Kinderstube of the Wartburg, as
if she were looking out from a tall ship on a great sea, beneath which
towns, and fields, and woods lay buried, and unseen. For it was the
Mist—above which the Wartburg, on its high crag, stood upraised.
Here is another which helped little boys and girls (who would presently
be studying their “Comput”) to remember the divisions of time.
In my father’s garden stands a _tree_;
(The year).
Upon it twelve fine _branches_ see.
(The months).
Thirty _birds_ on every bough;
(The days).
_Eggs_ enough for each I trow—
(The hours).
Four-and-twenty in each nest.
Hurry up and guess the rest.
Little stammerers and lispers had their tongues exercised in difficult
sound combinations, like our “Three grey geese in a green field grazing.”
This one is very old, though I give it in a modern form: “Meiner Mutter
Magd macht mir mein Mus mit meiner Mutter Mehl.”
The ceremony of “being put to bed” was not very different in mediæval
nurseries from what it is to-day. Mediæval children, like their modern
counterparts, probably got cross with sleep, and were naughty, and _would
not_ say their prayers or go to bed. And mediæval nurses had to threaten
them with the “Wolf,” or the “Man,” the great bogies of the period; and,
when they had captured their small refractory charges, they had to coax
them into good humour again with rhymes about their little bare toes,
or their ten small fingers, like our “this is the one that went to the
market.” One comes across these rhymes in grave books of German erudition
with the oddest effect.
Before the child went to sleep, of course, he or she had his or her
prayers to say. Even the smallest child had to repeat the “Our Father”
and the “Apostles’ Creed.” The “Hail Mary” was learned later. The great
preacher, Berthold von Regensburg, says that, if a child of seven can say
the Ave Maria, as well as the Pater Noster, and the Credo, “daz ist vil
wunderguot,” “better than good,” as we say in Anglo-Irish.
Mediæval children commissioned a bigger troup of angels “to guard
their bed” than ours do, who are content with a protector for each
corner:—“There are four corners on my bed.” Elizabeth claimed twelve
angels when she “laid her down to sleep”: “Two at my head, two by my
sides, two at my feet, two to cover me, two to waken me, two to show me
the way to the Heavenly Kingdom.”
And, if the mediæval child awoke in the night, there was always the
night-lamp burning before the Crucifix, or the picture of the dear
Mother, just as it burns in so many Catholic homes to-night!
The joys of child-life in the Middle Ages only really began with the
spring. We who have, in our comfortable houses, learned to rob winter
of his terrors, have paid the price by losing much of that joy in the
spring, which is so persistent a note in Middle High German poetry. One
must realise how dreary the winter must have been in those mediæval
castles to realise the “Wonne des Frühlings”—for mediæval souls—the
children’s especially. Think of being shut up in semi-darkness all the
winter; for there was no glass in the windows, and if the storms raged
(and how they must have raged round the Wartburg!) there was nothing
for it but to pull down the heavy wooden shutters, and crouch round the
fire for light, and heat, and comfort. And sometimes the fire smoked,
for mediæval chimneys did not “draw” well; and how little eyes must have
smarted, and young nerves suffered! The heavy clothes, too, one had to
wear in those cold draughty rooms must have been a torture to little
bodies. No wonder they greeted the spring as the “Freudenzeit.” There
was a great ceremony when they went out into the spring woods in search
of the first violet. The coming of swallow and stork was treated as a
great event. Many games, too, “came in” with the spring; and if a little
boy of to-day could, by any chance, have a chat with a little boy of
the Middle Ages, he would find that the same rigid convention which
makes it impossible for a self-respecting lad to play marbles, when “it
is the time” for spinning tops, or to spin tops when “it is the time”
for rolling hoops, ruled in the Middle Ages. Except that it was not a
“convention” then, but the result of hard necessity. Little girls play
jack-stones and skip with ropes to-day at certain seasons, because their
small ancestresses of seven or eight hundred years ago were forced to
confine these games to this season.
But do modern children get the same delight out of nature that the
children of olden times did? Except the story of little Eoin in Mr.
Pearse’s exquisite book of studies of Irish childlife, _Iosagan_, I know
of nothing in modern literature that at all reminds one of the glorious
passage in which Wolfram describes the effect of the bird-song on his
child hero, Parzifal. I wish I could take some dear little boys and girls
I know, a-roaming the spring woods with those little German children of
so many centuries ago, and see them consult their flower-oracles, and
catch butterflies, and bore holes in the birch-tree and drink the sweet
sap, and learn to whistle a tune on a leaf, and look for strawberries in
the glades. But, alas! space is limited, and I must try to get as much
of a wide subject into it as possible.
There is one amusing ceremony I must mention, particularly as it forms a
convenient stepping-stone to the next division of my subject. It was a
ceremony which lasted quite to the end of the Middle Ages, and fittingly
belonged to a period when Grammar, the first of the Seven Liberal
Arts, was always represented with a rod. On a certain day in the early
summer, mediæval children went out to the woods to cut the rods, which
were afterwards to be used with such effect on their own sturdy little
persons. The mediæval schoolmaster had no need of a proverb to convince
him that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. And even when Walther
protests against the abuse of the “Gerte,” he, by no means, desires its
abolition.
At the age of seven the boys passed out of the women’s apartments and
were given into the hands of a governor. The girls stayed behind with a
“Meisterinne”; and it was the custom at princely courts to receive the
daughters of the vassals to share the lessons of the Princesses. Thus
we know that, among the companions who studied with Elizabeth was her
faithful friend of the bitter years to come, Guta.
Though girls and boys were educated separately, it is impossible to
separate the ideals of education in the case of the two sexes. In order,
indeed, to arrive at any comprehension of the ideals towards which the
educators of girls in the Catholic Middle Ages strained, we must strive
to realize the mediæval conception of the “verie parfit gentil knight.”
For if ever it needed a certain type of woman to help to produce a
certain type of man, it was during the Age of Chivalry. Moreover, the
Catholic Church, the one great pedagogic authority of the Middle Ages,
has always held that Education must concern itself with the Soul as well
as the body of man. And “there is no sex in soul” to side with Bishop
Spalding against Francis Thompson. The educational ideals held up by
the Church before those who set themselves to train her sons, were for
those who trained her daughters, too. The knightly virtues, “Staete” and
“Maeze” (Steadfastness and Moderation) were womanly virtues, too. The
pillars of chivalry, “theumuot” (= Demut, humility), and Treue (fidelity)
are the pillars of all true womanhood.
Something of the spirit of the education of the period may be gathered
from the definition of the word Zûht (Zucht) in the Middle High
German vocabulary: “that lofty culture of the mind, which is a fruit
of education, and which expresses itself in outward modesty, inward
chastity, self-restraint and self-denial, and in the externals of good
breeding.” The chivalrous education aimed at cultivating “Self-Knowledge,
Self-Reverence and Self-Control” in a man or woman whose corporal form
had been developed to something as nearly approaching the ideal of
perfection as possible. And it sought perfection in all things, because
of Him Who is Infinite Perfection.
While the boys were undergoing that thorough course of physical training,
and practising the Seven “Brumicheiten,” which correspond in the
education of the future Knight to the Seven Liberal Arts in the education
of the future cleric—riding, swimming, running, jumping, wrestling,
shooting with bow and arrow, and hunting—the girls had also their
physical exercises, carefully designed to develop the grace of the body.
Much attention was paid to deportment. To walk with great strides, to
swing one’s arms, to sit with one’s legs crossed, to take the initiative
in addressing a strange man, to look at him boldly, to speak loud,
to laugh noisily, were all great offences against “Zucht.” A girl was
drilled to walk gracefully, with downcast eyes, to hold her mantle on her
breast with a certain gesture, to lift her train with another. She had,
moreover, to learn to ride, to tame falcons, and to acquire the ritual
and language of the chase.
Book-learning for a woman was held of more importance than for a man.
Little Elizabeth must have been stirred to great efforts in this
direction by her eagerness to read the beautiful psalter which she loved
to open in her frequent visits to the chapel. The old chaplain who taught
her had no difficulty with her. When she had learned to read, she had a
whole new world open to her, which, alas! is closed to us now. For which
of us can Natural History have the same appeal, for instance, as for one
who studied it in the fascinating pages of the “Physiologus”?
The Middle Ages did not lay a very great stress on the school-room as a
factor of education. A great part of the training of boys and girls was
got by what I might call the system of “direct apprenticeship to life.”
Elizabeth and Agnes were being trained for the noble profession of wife
and mother, Christian Châtelaine and great lady. They were early set
to acquire the womanly arts and crafts, spinning, and tapestry, and
embroidery. In the garden, where sweet-scented flowers and herbs were
cultivated, they gathered simples, and made them, under skilled guidance,
into unguents and potions. They took their places in the hall, and had
the privilege of hearing the best poetry the period produced. They
followed the direction of the great world-currents of the century from
the talk of the travellers who claimed the Wartburg hospitality—returned
crusaders, and pilgrims, or wandering scholars from some of the
universities which were just then springing up. And once upon a time two
men came to the Wartburg, two men in grey habits, with bare feet and
a cord around their waist. And the story they had to tell was of the
“Poor Little Man” of Assisi, their master! Oh! story to be remembered by
Elizabeth through all her life!
It was never the custom of Duchess Sophia to keep her girls shut up in
the women’s apartments. We are constantly meeting her and them, making
the long descent from the Wartburg to the town of Eisenach. Sometimes it
would be to take their part in a church festival; sometimes, perhaps,
to listen to the preaching of a “Kreuzzug prediger,” and sometimes for
that direct training in Christian Charity, which was so characteristic of
the Middle Ages. There was no hiding away of the poor in those days in
their own slums. They displayed themselves, and their sores, and their
nakedness at the doors of Princes, and claimed the noblest as their
servants. So Duchess Sophia and her girls went into the huts of the
poorest, and tended them like sisters.
And all this time the great realities of life were playing their part in
Elizabeth’s education. She had hardly been two years in the Wartburg when
the dreadful news of her mother’s assassination was brought to her. Was
she too young, little six-year-old girl that she was, fully to understand?
But on the Saint Sylvester Day of the year 1216, another blow befell,
not her alone, but all those who dwelt on the Wartburg—young Hermann,
her betrothed, died suddenly, and amid the wailing of the “Media Vita,”
which surrounded the bier of his son, Duke Hermann lost his reason. For
a year he sat in darkness and the shadow of death, murmuring ever the
terrible psalm: “In the Midst of Life we are in Death.” He died in the
year following, 1217. He was laid to rest in the convent he had founded,
and young Ludwig reigned in his stead.
What was to become of Elizabeth? There were many who said, “let her be
sent back to her father. The Arpad rule is weakening in Hungary, as
witness Queen Gertrude’s murder. Her dowry, too, hath never been paid in
full.” Duchess Sophia was of this way of thinking. She was nervous and
irritable after the terrible strain of her husband’s illness, and the
shock of her son’s death.
But there were two people who were determined that justice should be done
to the little stranger, who had left home and kindred, on the promise
of becoming, one day, Landgräfin of Thuringia. One of these two was old
Walther of Varilla, who had brought her from her Hungarian home, and
watched over her tenderly ever since.
The other was Landgraf Ludwig, into whose heart she had stolen, all
unknown, when she was a tiny girl; and whose chivalrous soul could not
bear to inflict an ignominy on her.
So it came to pass that, in the Burgkapelle, whither Elizabeth had turned
so often from her play, she stood one day with her hand in Ludwig’s, and
plighted her eternal troth.
CECILIA GONZAGA
A Little Italian Schoolgirl of the Renaissance