THE PEASANT BODO
LIFE ON A COUNTRY ESTATE IN THE TIME OF CHARLEMAGNE
Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of
milk from the cow's dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn
upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.
Three sounds of increase: the lowing of a cow in milk; the din of a
smithy; the swish of a plough.
--From _The Triads of Ireland_ (9th century)
Economic history, as we know it, is the newest of all the branches of
history. Up to the middle of the last century the chief interest of the
historian and of the public alike lay in political and constitutional
history, in political events, wars, dynasties, and in political
institutions and their development. Substantially, therefore, history
concerned itself with the ruling classes. 'Let us now praise famous
men,' was the historian's motto. He forgot to add 'and our fathers that
begat us'. He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of
the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the
prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the
political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he
praised. To speak of ordinary people would have been beneath the dignity
of history. Carlyle struck a significant note of revolt: 'The thing I
want to see,' he said, 'is not Red-book lists and Court Calendars and
Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did,
thought, suffered, enjoyed.... Mournful, in truth, it is to behold what
the business called "History" in these so enlightened and illuminated
times still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes
go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men
lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they
got and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot.... History,
as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more
instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board.'
Carlyle was a voice crying in the wilderness. Today the new history,
whose way he prepared, has come. The present age differs from the
centuries before it in its vivid realization of that much-neglected
person the man in the street; or (as it was more often in the earliest
ages) the man with the hoe. Today the historian is interested in the
social life of the past and not only in the wars and intrigues of
princes. To the modern writer, the fourteenth century, for instance, is
not merely the century of the Hundred Years' War and of the Black Prince
and Edward III; more significantly it is for him the era of the slow
decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long
run, than the struggle over our French provinces. We still praise famous
men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great
figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we
praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great
individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses
of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in
the story. Our fathers that begat us have come to their own at last. As
Acton put it, 'The great historian now takes his meals in the kitchen.'
This book is chiefly concerned with the kitchens of History, and the
first which we shall visit is a country estate at the beginning of the
ninth century. It so happens that we know a surprising amount about such
an estate, partly because Charlemagne himself issued a set of orders
instructing the Royal stewards how to manage his own lands, telling them
everything it was necessary for them to know, down to the vegetables
which they were to plant in the garden. But our chief source of
knowledge is a wonderful estate book which Irminon, the Abbot of St
Germain des Prés near Paris, drew up so that the abbey might know
exactly what lands belonged to it and who lived on those lands, very
much as William I drew up an estate book of his whole kingdom and
called it _Domesday Book_. In this estate book is set down the name of
every little estate (or _fisc_ as it was called) belonging to the abbey,
with a description of the land which was worked under its steward to its
own profit, and the land which was held by tenants, and the names of
those tenants and of their wives and of their children, and the exact
services and rents, down to a plank and an egg, which they had to do for
their land. We know today the name of almost every man, woman, and child
who was living on those little _fiscs_ in the time of Charlemagne, and a
great deal about their daily lives.
Consider for a moment how the estate upon which they lived was
organized. The lands of the Abbey of St Germain were divided into a
number of estates, called _fiscs_, each of a convenient size to be
administered by a steward. On each of these _fiscs_ the land was divided
into seigniorial and tributary lands; the first administered by the
monks through a steward or some other officer, and the second possessed
by various tenants, who received and held them from the abbey. These
tributary lands were divided into numbers of little farms, called
manses, each occupied by one or more families. If you had paid a visit
to the chief or seigniorial manse, which the monks kept in their own
hands, you would have found a little house, with three or four rooms,
probably built of stone, facing an inner court, and on one side of it
you would have seen a special group of houses hedged round, where the
women serfs belonging to the house lived and did their work; all round
you would also have seen little wooden houses, where the household serfs
lived, workrooms, a kitchen, a bakehouse, barns, stables, and other farm
buildings, and round the whole a hedge carefully planted with trees, so
as to make a kind of enclosure or court. Attached to this central manse
was a considerable amount of land--ploughland, meadows, vineyards,
orchards, and almost all the woods or forests on the estate. Clearly a
great deal of labour would be needed to cultivate all these lands. Some
of that labour was provided by servile workers who were attached to the
chief manse and lived in the court. But these household serfs were not
nearly enough to do all the work upon the monks' land, and far the
greater part of it had to be done by services paid by the other
landowners on the estate.
[Illustration: _January--Ploughing_]
[Illustration: _March--Breaking Clods_]
[Illustration: _August--Reaping_]
[Illustration: _December--Threshing and Winnowing_]
1. BODO AT HIS WORK
[Illustration: II. EMBARKATION OF THE POLOS AT VENICE]
Beside the seigniorial manse, there were a number of little dependent
manses. These belonged to men and women who were in various stages of
freedom, except for the fact that all had to do work on the land of the
chief manse. There is no need to trouble with the different classes, for
in practice there was very little difference between them, and in a
couple of centuries they were all merged into one common class of
medieval villeins. The most important people were those called _coloni_,
who were personally free (that is to say, counted as free men by the
law), but bound to the soil, so that they could never leave their farms
and were sold with the estate, if it were sold. Each of the dependent
manses was held either by one family or by two or three families which
clubbed together to do the work; it consisted of a house or houses, and
farm buildings, like those of the chief manse, only poorer and made of
wood, with ploughland and a meadow and perhaps a little piece of
vineyard attached to it. In return for these holdings the owner or joint
owners of every manse had to do work on the land of the chief manse for
about three days in the week. The steward's chief business was to see
that they did their work properly, and from every one he had the right
to demand two kinds of labour. The first was _field work_: every year
each man was bound to do a fixed amount of ploughing on the domain land
(as it was called later on), and also to give what was called a
_corvée_, that is to say, an unfixed amount of ploughing, which the
steward could demand every week when it was needed; the distinction
corresponds to the distinction between _week work_ and _boon work_ in
the later Middle Ages. The second kind of labour which every owner of a
farm had to do on the monks' land was called handwork, that is to say,
he had to help repair buildings, or cut down trees, or gather fruit, or
make ale, or carry loads--anything, in fact, which wanted doing and
which the steward told him to do. It was by these services that the
monks got their own seigniorial farm cultivated. On all the other days
of the week these hard-worked tenants were free to cultivate their own
little farms, and we may be sure that they put twice as much elbow
grease into the business.
But their obligation did not end here, for not only had they to pay
services, they also had to pay certain rents to the big house. There
were no State taxes in those days, but every man had to pay an army due,
which Charlemagne exacted from the abbey, and which the abbey exacted
from its tenants; this took the form of an ox and a certain number of
sheep, or the equivalent in money: 'He pays to the host two shillings of
silver' comes first on every freeman's list of obligations. The farmers
also had to pay in return for any special privileges granted to them by
the monks; they had to carry a load of wood to the big house, in return
for being allowed to gather firewood in the woods, which were jealously
preserved for the use of the abbey; they had to pay some hogsheads of
wine for the right to pasture their pigs in the same precious woods;
every third year they had to give up one of their sheep for the right to
graze upon the fields of the chief manse; they had to pay a sort of
poll-tax of 4_d_. a head. In addition to these special rents every
farmer had also to pay other rents in produce; every year he owed the
big house three chickens and fifteen eggs and a large number of planks,
to repair its buildings; often he had to give it a couple of pigs;
sometimes corn, wine, honey, wax, soap, or oil. If the farmer were also
an artisan and made things, he had to pay the produce of his craft; a
smith would have to make lances for the abbey's contingent to the army,
a carpenter had to make barrels and hoops and vine props, a wheelwright
had to make a cart. Even the wives of the farmers were kept busy, if
they happened to be serfs; for the servile women were obliged to spin
cloth or to make a garment for the big house every year.
All these things were exacted and collected by the steward, whom they
called _Villicus_, or _Major_ (Mayor). He was a very hard-worked man,
and when one reads the seventy separate and particular injunctions which
Charlemagne addressed to his stewards one cannot help feeling sorry for
him. He had to get all the right services out of the tenants, and tell
them what to do each week and see that they did it; he had to be careful
that they brought the right number of eggs and pigs up to the house, and
did not foist off warped or badly planed planks upon him. He had to look
after the household serfs too, and set them to work. He had to see about
storing, or selling, or sending off to the monastery the produce of the
estate and of the tenants' rents; and every year he had to present a
full and detailed account of his stewardship to the abbot. He had a
manse of his own, with services and rents due from it, and Charlemagne
exhorted his stewards to be prompt in their payments, so as to set a
good example. Probably his official duties left him very little time to
work on his own farm, and he would have to put in a man to work it for
him, as Charlemagne bade his stewards do. Often, however, he had
subordinate officials called _deans_ under him, and sometimes the work
of receiving and looking after the stores in the big house was done by a
special cellarer.
That, in a few words, is the way in which the monks of St Germain and
the other Frankish landowners of the time of Charlemagne managed their
estates. Let us try, now, to look at those estates from a more human
point of view and see what life was like to a farmer who lived upon
them. The abbey possessed a little estate called Villaris, near Paris,
in the place now occupied by the park of Saint Cloud. When we turn up
the pages in the estate book dealing with Villaris, we find that there
was a man called Bodo living there.[1] He had a wife called Ermentrude
and three children called Wido and Gerbert and Hildegard; and he owned a
little farm of arable and meadow land, with a few vines. And we know
very nearly as much about Bodo's work as we know about that of a
smallholder in France today. Let us try and imagine a day in his life.
On a fine spring morning towards the end of Charlemagne's reign Bodo
gets up early, because it is his day to go and work on the monks' farm,
and he does not dare to be late, for fear of the steward. To be sure, he
has probably given the steward a present of eggs and vegetables the week
before, to keep him in a good temper; but the monks will not allow their
stewards to take big bribes (as is sometimes done on other estates), and
Bodo knows that he will not be allowed to go late to work. It is his day
to plough, so he takes his big ox with him and little Wido to run by its
side with a goad, and he joins his friends from some of the farms near
by, who are going to work at the big house too. They all assemble, some
with horses and oxen, some with mattocks and hoes and spades and axes
and scythes, and go off in gangs to work upon the fields and meadows and
woods of the seigniorial manse, according as the steward orders them.
The manse next door to Bodo is held by a group of families: Frambert
and Ermoin and Ragenold, with their wives and children. Bodo bids them
good morning as he passes. Frambert is going to make a fence round the
wood, to prevent the rabbits from coming out and eating the young crops;
Ermoin has been told off to cart a great load of firewood up to the
house; and Ragenold is mending a hole in the roof of a barn. Bodo goes
whistling off in the cold with his oxen and his little boy; and it is no
use to follow him farther, because he ploughs all day and eats his meal
under a tree with the other ploughmen, and it is very monotonous.
Let us go back and see what Bodo's wife, Ermentrude, is doing. She is
busy too; it is the day on which the chicken-rent is due--a fat pullet
and five eggs in all. She leaves her second son, aged nine, to look
after the baby Hildegard and calls on one of her neighbours, who has to
go up to the big house too. The neighbour is a serf and she has to take
the steward a piece of woollen cloth, which will be sent away to St
Germain to make a habit for a monk. Her husband is working all day in
the lord's vineyards, for on this estate the serfs generally tend the
vines, while the freemen do most of the ploughing. Ermentrude and the
serf's wife go together up to the house. There all is busy. In the men's
workshop are several clever workmen--a shoemaker, a carpenter, a
blacksmith, and two silversmiths; there are not more, because the best
artisans on the estates of St Germain live by the walls of the abbey, so
that they can work for the monks on the spot and save the labour of
carriage. But there were always some craftsmen on every estate, either
attached as serfs to the big house, or living on manses of their own,
and good landowners tried to have as many clever craftsmen as possible.
Charlemagne ordered his stewards each to have in his district 'good
workmen, namely, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, shoemakers,
turners, carpenters, swordmakers, fishermen, foilers, soapmakers, men
who know how to make beer, cider, perry, and all other kinds of
beverages, bakers to make pasty for our table, netmakers who know how to
make nets for hunting, fishing, and fowling, and others too many to be
named'.[2] And some of these workmen are to be found working for the
monks in the estate of Villaris.
But Ermentrude does not stop at the men's workshop. She finds the
steward, bobs her curtsy to him, and gives up her fowl and eggs, and
then she hurries off to the women's part of the house, to gossip with
the serfs there. The Franks used at this time to keep the women of their
household in a separate quarter, where they did the work which was
considered suitable for women, very much as the Greeks of antiquity used
to do. If a Frankish noble had lived at the big house, his wife would
have looked after their work, but as no one lived in the stone house at
Villaris, the steward had to oversee the women. Their quarter consisted
of a little group of houses, with a workroom, the whole surrounded by a
thick hedge with a strong bolted gate, like a harem, so that no one
could come in without leave. Their workrooms were comfortable places,
warmed by stoves, and there Ermentrude (who, being a woman, was allowed
to go in) found about a dozen servile women spinning and dyeing cloth
and sewing garments. Every week the harassed steward brought them the
raw materials for their work and took away what they made. Charlemagne
gives his stewards several instructions about the women attached to his
manses, and we may be sure that the monks of St Germain did the same on
their model estates. 'For our women's work,' says Charlemagne, 'they are
to give at the proper time the materials, that is linen, wool, woad,
vermilion, madder, wool combs, teasels, soap, grease, vessels, and other
objects which are necessary. And let our women's quarters be well looked
after, furnished with houses and rooms with stoves and cellars, and let
them be surrounded by a good hedge, and let the doors be strong, so that
the women can do our work properly.'[3] Ermentrude, however, has to
hurry away after her gossip, and so must we. She goes back to her own
farm and sets to work in the little vineyard; then after an hour or two
goes back to get the children's meal and to spend the rest of the day in
weaving warm woollen clothes for them. All her friends are either
working in the fields on their husbands' farms or else looking after the
poultry, or the vegetables, or sewing at home; for the women have to
work just as hard as the men on a country farm. In Charlemagne's time
(for instance) they did nearly all the sheep shearing. Then at last Bodo
comes back for his supper, and as soon as the sun goes down they go to
bed; for their hand-made candle gives only a flicker of light, and they
both have to be up early in the morning. De Quincey once pointed out,
in his inimitable manner, how the ancients everywhere went to bed, 'like
good boys, from seven to nine o'clock'. 'Man went to bed early in those
ages simply because his worthy mother earth could not afford him
candles. She, good old lady ... would certainly have shuddered to hear
of any of her nations asking for candles. "Candles indeed!" she would
have said; "who ever heard of such a thing? and with so much excellent
daylight running to waste, as I have provided _gratis_! What will the
wretches want next?"'[4] Something of the same situation prevailed even
in Bodo's time.
This, then, is how Bodo and Ermentrude usually passed their working day.
But, it may be complained, this is all very well. We know about the
estates on which these peasants lived and about the rents which they had
to pay, and the services which they had to do. But how did they feel and
think and amuse themselves when they were not working? Rents and
services are only outside things; an estate book only describes routine.
It would be idle to try to picture the life of a university from a study
of its lecture list, and it is equally idle to try and describe the life
of Bodo from the estate book of his masters. It is no good taking your
meals in the kitchen if you never talk to the servants. This is true,
and to arrive at Bodo's thoughts and feelings and holiday amusements we
must bid goodbye to Abbot Irminon's estate book, and peer into some very
dark corners indeed; for though by the aid of Chaucer and Langland and a
few Court Rolls it is possible to know a great deal about the feelings
of a peasant six centuries later, material is scarce in the ninth
century, and it is all the more necessary to remember the secret of the
invisible ink.
Bodo certainly _had_ plenty of feelings, and very strong ones. When he
got up in the frost on a cold morning to drive the plough over the
abbot's acres, when his own were calling out for work, he often shivered
and shook the rime from his beard, and wished that the big house and all
its land were at the bottom of the sea (which, as a matter of fact, he
had never seen and could not imagine). Or else he wished he were the
abbot's huntsman, hunting in the forest; or a monk of St Germain,
singing sweetly in the abbey church; or a merchant, taking bales of
cloaks and girdles along the high road to Paris; anything, in fact, but
a poor ploughman ploughing other people's land. An Anglo-Saxon writer
has imagined a dialogue with him:
'Well, ploughman, how do you do your work?' 'Oh, sir, I work very hard.
I go out in the dawning, driving the oxen to the field and I yoke them
to the plough. Be the winter never so stark, I dare not stay at home for
fear of my lord; but every day I must plough a full acre or more, after
having yoked the oxen and fastened the share and coulter to the plough!'
'Have you any mate?' 'I have a boy, who drives the oxen with a goad, who
is now hoarse from cold and shouting,' (Poor little Wido!) 'Well, well,
it is very hard work?' 'Yes, indeed it is very hard work.'[5]
Nevertheless, hard as the work was, Bodo sang lustily to cheer himself
and Wido; for is it not related that once, when a clerk was singing the
'Allelulia' in the emperor's presence, Charles turned to one of the
bishops, saying, 'My clerk is singing very well,' whereat the rude
bishop replied, 'Any clown in our countryside drones as well as that to
his oxen at their ploughing'?[6] It is certain too that Bodo agreed with
the names which the great Charles gave to the months of the year in his
own Frankish tongue; for he called January 'Winter-month', February
'Mud-month', March 'Spring-month', April 'Easter-month', May
'Joy-month', June 'Plough-month', July 'Hay-month', August
'Harvest-month', September 'Wind-month', October 'Vintage-month',
November 'Autumn-month', and December 'Holy-month'.[7]
And Bodo was a superstitious creature. The Franks had been Christian now
for many years, but Christian though they were, the peasants clung to
old beliefs and superstitions. On the estates of the holy monks of St
Germain you would have found the country people saying charms which were
hoary with age, parts of the lay sung by the Frankish ploughman over his
bewitched land long before he marched southwards into the Roman Empire,
or parts of the spell which the bee-master performed when he swarmed his
bees on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Christianity has coloured these
charms, but it has not effaced their heathen origin; and because the
tilling of the soil is the oldest and most unchanging of human
occupations, old beliefs and superstitions cling to it and the old gods
stalk up and down the brown furrows, when they have long vanished from
houses and roads. So on Abbot Irminon's estates the peasant-farmers
muttered charms over their sick cattle (and over their sick children
too) and said incantations over the fields to make them fertile. If you
had followed behind Bodo when he broke his first furrow you would have
probably seen him take out of his jerkin a little cake, baked for him by
Ermentrude out of different kinds of meal, and you would have seen him
stoop and lay it under the furrow and sing:
Earth, Earth, Earth! O Earth, our mother!
May the All-Wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee
Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing,
Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength;
Hosts of grain shafts and of glittering plants!
Of broad barley the blossoms,
And of white wheat ears waxing,
Of the whole land the harvest....
Acre, full-fed, bring forth fodder for men!
Blossoming brightly, blessed become!
And the God who wrought with earth grant us gift of growing
That each of all the corns may come unto our need.[8]
Then he would drive his plough through the acre.
The Church wisely did not interfere with these old rites. It taught Bodo
to pray to the Ever-Lord instead of to Father Heaven, and to the Virgin
Mary instead of to Mother Earth, and with these changes let the old
spell he had learned from his ancestors serve him still. It taught him,
for instance, to call on Christ and Mary in his charm for bees. When
Ermentrude heard her bees swarming, she stood outside her cottage and
said this little charm over them:
Christ, there is a swarm of bees outside,
Fly hither, my little cattle,
In blest peace, in God's protection,
Come home safe and sound.
Sit down, sit down, bee,
St Mary commanded thee.
Thou shalt not have leave,
Thou shalt not fly to the wood.
Thou shalt not escape me,
Nor go away from me.
Sit very still,
Wait God's will![9]
And if Bodo on his way home saw one of his bees caught in a brier bush,
he immediately stood still and wished--as some people wish today when
they go under a ladder. It was the Church, too, which taught Bodo to add
'So be it, Lord', to the end of his charm against pain. Now, his
ancestors for generations behind him had believed that if you had a
stitch in your side, or a bad pain anywhere, it came from a worm in the
marrow of your bones, which was eating you up, and that the only way to
get rid of that worm was to put a knife, or an arrow-head, or some other
piece of metal to the sore place, and then wheedle the worm out on to
the blade by saying a charm. And this was the charm which Bodo's heathen
ancestors had always said and which Bodo went on saying when little Wido
had a pain: 'Come out, worm, with nine little worms, out from the marrow
into the bone, from the bone into the flesh, from the flesh into the
skin, from the skin into this arrow.' And then (in obedience to the
Church) he added 'So be it, Lord'.[10] But sometimes it was not possible
to read a Christian meaning into Bodo's doings. Sometimes he paid visits
to some man who was thought to have a wizard's powers, or
superstitiously reverenced some twisted tree, about which there hung old
stories never quite forgotten. Then the Church was stern. When he went
to confession the priest would ask him: 'Have you consulted magicians
and enchanters, have you made vows to trees and fountains, have you
drunk any magic philtre?'[11] And he would have to confess what he did
last time his cow was sick. But the Church was kind as well as stern.
'When serfs come to you,' we find one bishop telling his priests, 'you
must not give them as many fasts to perform as rich men. Put upon them
only half the penance.'[12] The Church knew well enough that Bodo could
not drive his plough all day upon an empty stomach. The hunting,
drinking, feasting Frankish nobles could afford to lose a meal.
It was from this stern and yet kind Church that Bodo got his holidays.
For the Church made the pious emperor decree that on Sundays and saints'
days no servile or other works should be done. Charlemagne's son
repeated his decree in 827. It runs thus:
We ordain according to the law of God and to the command of
our father of blessed memory in his edicts, that no servile
works shall be done on Sundays, neither shall men perform
their rustic labours, tending vines, ploughing fields,
reaping corn and mowing hay, setting up hedges or fencing
woods, cutting trees, or working in quarries or building
houses; nor shall they work in the garden, nor come to the
law courts, nor follow the chase. But three carrying-services
it is lawful to do on Sunday, to wit carrying for the army,
carrying food, or carrying (if need be) the body of a lord to
its grave. Item, women shall not do their textile works, nor
cut out clothes, nor stitch them together with the needle,
nor card wool, nor beat hemp, nor wash clothes in public, nor
shear sheep: so that there may be rest on the Lord's day. But
let them come together from all sides to Mass in the Church
and praise God for all the good things He did for us on that
day![13]
Unfortunately, however, Bodo and Ermentrude and their friends were not
content to go quietly to church on saints' days and quietly home again.
They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery,
as country folk have always done until our own gloomier, more
self-conscious age. They were very merry and not at all refined, and the
place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and
unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan
songs of their forefathers, left over from old Mayday festivities, which
they could not forget, or ribald love-songs which the Church disliked.
Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the
peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with
a chorus of dancing women,' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil
and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil';[14] over and over
again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain. In every
country in Europe, right through the Middle Ages to the time of the
Reformation, and after it, country folk continued to sing and dance in
the churchyard. Two hundred years after Charlemagne's death there grew
up the legend of the dancers of Kölbigk, who danced on Christmas Eve in
the churchyard, in spite of the warning of the priest, and all got
rooted to the spot for a year, till the Archbishop of Cologne released
them. Some men say that they were not rooted standing to the spot, but
that they had to go on dancing for the whole year; and that before they
were released they had danced themselves waist-deep into the ground.
People used to repeat the little Latin verse which they were singing:
Equitabat Bovo per silvam frondosam
Ducebat sibi Merswindem formosam.
Quid stamus? Cur non imus?[15]
Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-riding
And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him--
Why are we standing still? Why can't we go away?
Another later story still is told about a priest in Worcestershire who
was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard and
singing a song with the refrain 'Sweetheart have pity', so that he could
not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of
saying 'Dominus vobiscum', he said 'Sweetheart have pity', and there was
a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle.[16]
Sometimes our Bodo did not dance himself, but listened to the songs of
wandering minstrels. The priests did not at all approve of these
minstrels, who (they said) would certainly go to hell for singing
profane secular songs, all about the great deeds of heathen heroes of
the Frankish race, instead of Christian hymns. But Bodo loved them, and
so did Bodo's betters; the Church councils had sometimes even to rebuke
abbots and abbesses for listening to their songs. And the worst of it
was that the great emperor himself, the good Charlemagne, loved them
too. He would always listen to a minstrel, and his biographer, Einhard,
tells us that 'He wrote out the barbarous and ancient songs, in which
the acts of the kings and their wars were sung, and committed them to
memory';[17] and one at least of those old sagas, which he liked men to
write down, has been preserved on the cover of a Latin manuscript, where
a monk scribbled it in his spare time. His son, Louis the Pious, was
very different; he rejected the national poems, which he had learnt in
his youth, and would not have them read or recited or taught; he would
not allow minstrels to have justice in the law courts, and he forbade
idle dances and songs and tales in public places on Sundays; but then he
also dragged down his father's kingdom into disgrace and ruin. The
minstrels repaid Charlemagne for his kindness to them. They gave him
everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of
Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being
the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages. Every
different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about
him. What the monkish chroniclers in their cells could never do for
Charlemagne, these despised and accursed minstrels did for him: they
gave him what is perhaps more desirable and more lasting than a place in
history-they gave him a place in legend. It is not every emperor who
rules in those realms of gold of which Keats spoke, as well as in the
kingdoms of the world; and in the realms of gold Charlemagne reigns with
King Arthur, and his peers joust with the Knights of the Round Table.
Bodo, at any rate, benefited by Charles's love of minstrels, and it is
probable that he heard in the lifetime of the emperor himself the first
beginnings of those legends which afterwards clung to the name of
Charlemagne. One can imagine him round-eyed in the churchyard, listening
to fabulous stories of Charles's Iron March to Pavia, such as a
gossiping old monk of St Gall afterwards wrote down in his
chronicle.[18]
It is likely enough that such legends were the nearest Bodo ever came to
seeing the emperor, of whom even the poor serfs who never followed him
to court or camp were proud. But Charles was a great traveller: like all
the monarchs of the early Middle Ages he spent the time, when he was not
warring, in trekking round his kingdom, staying at one of his estates,
until he and his household had literally eaten their way through it, and
then passing on to another. And sometimes he varied the procedure by
paying a visit to the estates of his bishops or nobles, who entertained
him royally. It may be that one day he came on a visit to Bodo's masters
and stopped at the big house on his way to Paris, and then Bodo saw him
plain; for Charlemagne would come riding along the road in his jerkin of
otter skin, and his plain blue cloak (Einhard tells us that he hated
grand clothes and on ordinary days dressed like the common people);[19]
and after him would come his three sons and his bodyguard, and then his
five daughters. Einhard has also told us that:
He had such care of the upbringing of his sons and daughters
that he never dined without them when he was at home and
never travelled without them. His sons rode along with him
and his daughters followed in the rear. Some of his guards,
chosen for this very purpose, watched the end of the line of
march where his daughters travelled. They were very beautiful
and much beloved by their father, and, therefore, it is
strange that he would give them in marriage to no one, either
among his own people or of a foreign state. But up to his
death he kept them all at home saying he could not forgo
their society.[20]
Then, with luck, Bodo, quaking at the knees, might even behold a portent
new to his experience, the emperor's elephant. Haroun El Raschid, the
great Sultan of the 'Arabian Nights' had sent it to Charles, and it
accompanied him on all his progresses. Its name was 'Abu-Lubabah', which
is an Arabic word and means 'the father of intelligence[A]', and it died
a hero's death on an expedition against the Danes in 810.[21] It is
certain that ever afterwards Ermentrude quelled little Gerbert, when he
was naughty, with the threat, 'Abu-Lubabah will come with his long nose
and carry you off.' But Wido, being aged eight and a bread-winner,
professed to have felt no fear on being confronted with the elephant;
but admitted when pressed, that he greatly preferred Haroun El Raschid's
other present to the emperor, the friendly dog, who answered to the name
of 'Becerillo'.
[Footnote A: _Abu-Lubabah_.--It is remarkable that the name should have
suffered no corruption in the chronicles.]
It would be a busy time for Bodo when all these great folk came, for
everything would have to be cleaned before their arrival, the pastry
cooks and sausage-makers summoned and a great feast prepared; and though
the household serfs did most of the work, it is probable that he had to
help. The gossipy old monk of St Gall has given us some amusing pictures
of the excitement when Charles suddenly paid a visit to his subjects:
There was a certain bishopric which lay full in Charles's
path when he journeyed, and which indeed he could hardly
avoid: and the bishop of this place, always anxious to give
satisfaction, put everything that he had at Charles's
disposal. But once the Emperor came quite unexpectedly and
the bishop in great anxiety had to fly hither and thither
like a swallow, and had not only the palaces and houses but
also the courts and squares swept and cleaned: and then,
tired and irritated, came to meet him. The most pious Charles
noticed this, and after examining all the various details, he
said to the bishop: 'My kind host, you always have everything
splendidly cleaned for my arrival.' Then the bishop, as if
divinely inspired, bowed his head and grasped the king's
never-conquered right hand, and hiding his irritation, kissed
it and said: 'It is but right, my lord, that, wherever you
come, all things should be thoroughly cleansed.' Then
Charles, of all kings the wisest, understanding the state of
affairs said to him: 'If I empty I can also fill.' And he
added: 'You may have that estate which lies close to your
bishopric, and all your successors may have it until the end
of time.' In the same journey, too, he came to a bishop who
lived in a place through which he must needs pass. Now on
that day, being the sixth day of the week, he was not willing
to eat the flesh of beast or bird; and the bishop, being by
reason of the nature of the place unable to procure fish upon
the sudden, ordered some excellent cheese, rich and creamy,
to be placed before him. And the most self-restrained
Charles, with the readiness which he showed everywhere and on
all occasions, spared the blushes of the bishop and required
no better fare; but taking up his knife cut off the skin,
which he thought unsavoury and fell to on the white of the
cheese. Thereupon the bishop, who was standing near like a
servant, drew closer and said: 'Why do you do that, lord
emperor? You are throwing away the very best part.' Then
Charles, who deceived no one, and did not believe that anyone
would deceive him, on the persuasion of the bishop put a
piece of the skin in his mouth, and slowly ate it and
swallowed it like butter. Then approving of the advice of the
bishop, he said: 'Very true, my good host,' and he added: 'Be
sure to send me every year to Aix two cartloads of just such
cheeses.' And the bishop was alarmed at the impossibility of
the task and, fearful of losing both his rank and his office,
he rejoined: 'My lord, I can procure the cheeses, but I
cannot tell which are of this quality and which of another.
Much I fear lest I fall under your censure.' Then Charles,
from whose penetration and skill nothing could escape,
however new or strange it might be, spoke thus to the bishop,
who from childhood had known such cheeses and yet could not
test them: 'Cut them in two,' he said, 'then fasten together
with a skewer those that you find to be of the right quality
and keep them in your cellar for a time and then send them to
me. The rest you may keep for yourself and your ¸clergy and
your family.' This was done for two years, and the king
ordered the present of cheeses to be taken in without remark:
then in the third year the bishop brought in person his
laboriously collected cheeses. But the most just Charles
pitied his labour and anxiety and added to the bishopric an
excellent estate whence he and his successors might provide
themselves with corn and wine.[22]
We may feel sorry for the poor flustered bishop collecting his two
cartloads of cheeses; but it is possible that our real sympathy ought to
go to Bodo, who probably had to pay an extra rent in cheeses to satisfy
the emperor's taste, and got no excellent estate to recompense him.
A visit from the emperor, however, would be a rare event in his life, to
be talked about for years and told to his grandchildren. But there was
one other event, which happened annually, and which was certainly looked
for with excitement by Bodo and his friends. For once a year the king's
itinerant justices, the _Missi Dominici_, came round to hold their court
and to see if the local counts had been doing justice. Two of them would
come, a bishop and a count, and they would perhaps stay a night at the
big house as guests of the abbot, and the next day they would go on to
Paris, and there they would sit and do justice in the open square before
the church and from all the district round great men and small, nobles
and freemen and _coloni_, would bring their grievances and demand
redress. Bodo would go too, if anyone had injured or robbed him, and
would make his complaint to the judges. But if he were canny he would
not go to them empty-handed, trusting to justice alone. Charlemagne was
very strict, but unless the _missi_ were exceptionally honest and pious
they would not be averse to taking bribes. Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans,
who was one of the Emperor's _missi_, has left us a most entertaining
Latin poem, in which he describes the attempts of the clergy and laymen,
who flocked to his court, to buy justice.[23] Every one according to his
means brought a present; the rich offered money, precious stones, fine
materials, and Eastern carpets, arms, horses, antique vases of gold or
silver chiselled with representations of the labours of Hercules. The
poor brought skins of Cordova leather, tanned and untanned, excellent
pieces of cloth and linen (poor Ermentrude must have worked hard for
the month before the justices came!), boxes, and wax. 'With this
battering-ram,' cries the shocked Bishop Theodulf, 'they hope to break
down the wall of my soul. But they would not have thought that they
could shake _me_, if they had not so shaken other judges before,' And
indeed, if his picture be true, the royal justices must have been
followed about by a regular caravan of carts and horses to carry their
presents. Even Theodulf has to admit that, in order not to hurt people's
feelings, he was obliged to accept certain unconsidered trifles in the
shape of eggs and bread and wine and chickens and little birds, 'whose
bodies' (he says, smacking his lips) 'are small, but very good to eat.'
One seems to detect the anxious face of Bodo behind those eggs and
little birds.
Another treat Bodo had which happened once a year; for regularly on the
ninth of October there began the great fair of St Denys, which went on
for a whole month, outside the gates of Paris.[24] Then for a week
before the fair little booths and sheds sprang up, with open fronts in
which the merchants could display their wares, and the Abbey of St
Denys, which had the right to take a toll of all the merchants who came
there to sell, saw to it that the fair was well enclosed with fences,
and that all came in by the gates and paid their money, for wily
merchants were sometimes known to burrow under fences or climb over them
so as to avoid the toll. Then the streets of Paris were crowded with
merchants bringing their goods, packed in carts and upon horses and
oxen; and on the opening day all regular trade in Paris stopped for a
month, and every Parisian shopkeeper was in a booth somewhere in the
fair, exchanging the corn and wine and honey of the district for rarer
goods from foreign parts. Bodo's abbey probably had a stall in the fair
and sold some of those pieces of cloth woven by the serfs in the women's
quarter, or cheeses and salted meat prepared on the estates, or wine
paid in rent by Bodo and his fellow-farmers. Bodo would certainly take a
holiday and go to the fair. In fact, the steward would probably have
great difficulty in keeping his men at work during the month;
Charlemagne had to give a special order to his stewards that they should
'be careful that our men do properly the work which it is lawful to
exact from them, and that they do not waste their time in running about
to markets and fairs'. Bodo and Ermentrude and the three children, all
attired in their best, did not consider it waste of time to go to the
fair even twice or three times. They pretended that they wanted to buy
salt to salt down their winter meat, or some vermilion dye to colour a
frock for the baby. What they really wanted was to wander along the
little rows of booths and look at all the strange things assembled
there; for merchants came to St Denys to sell their rich goods from the
distant East to Bodo's betters, and wealthy Frankish nobles bargained
there for purple and silken robes with orange borders, stamped leather
jerkins, peacock's feathers, and the scarlet plumage of flamingos (which
they called 'phoenix skins'), scents and pearls and spices, almonds and
raisins, and monkeys for their wives to play with.[25] Sometimes these
merchants were Venetians, but more often they were Syrians or crafty
Jews, and Bodo and his fellows laughed loudly over the story of how a
Jewish merchant had tricked a certain bishop, who craved for all the
latest novelties, by stuffing a mouse with spices and offering it for
sale to him, saying that 'he had brought this most precious
never-before-seen animal from Judea,' and refusing to take less than a
whole measure of silver for it.[26] In exchange for their luxuries these
merchants took away with them Frisian cloth, which was greatly esteemed,
and corn and hunting dogs, and sometimes a piece of fine goldsmith's
work, made in a monastic workshop. And Bodo would hear a hundred
dialects and tongues, for men of Saxony and Frisia, Spain and Provence,
Rouen and Lombardy, and perhaps an Englishman or two, jostled each other
in the little streets; and from time to time there came also an Irish
scholar with a manuscript to sell, and the strange, sweet songs of
Ireland on his lips:
A hedge of trees surrounds me,
A blackbird's lay sings to me;
Above my lined booklet
The thrilling birds chant to me.
In a grey mantle from the top of bushes
The cuckoo sings:
Verily--may the Lord shield me!--
Well do I write under the greenwood.[27]
Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and men with performing
bears, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo's few pence out of his pocket. And
it would be a very tired and happy family that trundled home in the cart
to bed. For it is not, after all, so dull in the kitchen, and when we
have quite finished with the emperor, 'Charlemagne and all his peerage',
it is really worth while to spend a few moments with Bodo in his little
manse. History is largely made up of Bodos.