Life on a
Mediaeval Barony

A Picture of a Typical
Feudal Community in the
Thirteenth Century

By
William Stearns Davis, Ph.D.

Professor of History in the University of Minnesota

ILLUSTRATED

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
MCMXXIII

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Copyright, 1922
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition
G-1

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To Ephraim Emerton
Master Interpreter of Mediæval History
this book is dedicated by
an ever-grateful pupil.

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Table of Contents

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Illustrations

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@46455@[email protected]#i_001" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Frontispiece The Castle of St. Aliquis Page xiv Typical Castle of the Middle Ages " 17 View of the Court and the Donjon " 25 Upper Hall of the Donjon " 31 Interior of a Thirteenth-century Apartment Facing p. 36 A Thirteenth-century Bed Page 39 A Game of Chess " 54 A Game of Ball " 57 Lady with a Falcon on Her Wrist " 58 The Falcon Hunt " 59 Noble Holding a Falcon in Each Hand " 61 A Hunter " 63 The Stag Hunt " 66 Coiffure of a Noblewoman " 71 Cradle " 81 A King in the Twelfth Century Wearing Pellison " 90 Wreath Made of Metal Flowers Sewed on Braid " 91 Felt Shoe " 93 Winter Costume in the Twelfth Century " 94 Headdress of a Man " 95 Costume of a Nobleman " 96 Coiffure of a Woman " 97 A Royal Marriage in the Thirteenth Century " 99 Cooks " 114 Pork Butchers (Bourges) " 115 Servants Bringing the Food to the Table " 123 Young Girls of the Nobility Serving at the Table " 126 A Feast of Ceremony in the Twelfth Century Facing p. 128 Small Portable Organ of the Thirteenth Century Page 132 Acrobats Page 134 Dancer of the Twelfth Century " 137 Thirteenth-century Harp "

class="tdr">139 Listening to a Trouvère in a Château of the Thirteenth Century Facing p. 140 Banner of the Thirteenth Century Page 147 The Coat of Arms of the Dukes of Bretagne (Thirteenth Century) " 148 Seal of the Duke Jean of Bretagne (Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries) " 149 Homage in the Twelfth Century Facing p. 156 Costume of a Nobleman (Thirteenth Century) Page 177 Gothic Writing " 179 A Teacher Holding a Ferule in His Hand " 180 Maneuvering with a Lance in the Thirteenth Century " 185 A Knight at the End of the Thirteenth Century " 190 German Helmets of the Thirteenth Century " 192 A Thirteenth-century Shield " 193 Thirteenth-century Swords " 194 Horse Trappings " 196 A Knight of the Thirteenth Century " 198 A Thirteenth-century Knight " 199 A Thirteenth-century Knight " 200 A Beggar " 201 A Tournament in the Twelfth Century Facing p. 214 Knightly Combat on Foot Page 219 A Combat in the Twelfth Century " 221 A Catapult " 236 An Attack with the Aid of a Tower " 237 A Mantelet in Wood " 238 Attack on a Wall with the Aid of the Sap " 239 Group of Peasants and of Shepherds " 255 Peasants at Work " 260 A Laborer (Thirteenth Century) " 264 Peasant Shoes " 265 A Reaper " 265 A Marriage in the Thirteenth Century "

class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">266 A Plow " 267 A Leper " 278 A Thirteenth-century Doctor " 281 A Thirteenth-century Burial Scene Page 284 A Group of Priests (Thirteenth Century) " 287 A Shrine in the Form of an Altar (Thirteenth Century) in the Cathedral at Rheims " 324 Richard Cœur de Lion Facing p. 302 View of an Abbey of the Thirteenth Century Page 313 The Galleries of the Cloister of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel (Thirteenth Century) " 316 The Refectory at the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel (Thirteenth Century) " 318 A Benedictine Monk (Thirteenth Century) " 320 A Piece of Furniture Serving as a Seat and a Reading Desk " 335 Cloth Merchants " 358 A Commoner (Thirteenth Century) " 362 Money-changers (Chartres) " 365 A Fair in Champagne in the Thirteenth Century Facing p. 366 The Sale of Peltries (Bourges) Page 370 Episcopal Throne of the Thirteenth Century " 374 A Bishop of the Twelfth Century " 376 A Bishop of the Thirteenth Century " 379 A Deacon (Thirteenth Century) " 388 Notre Dame and the Bishop's Palace at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century " 395 Thirteenth-century Window in the Cathedral of Chartres, Representing Saint Christopher Carrying Christ " 400

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Preface

This book describes the life of the Feudal Ages in terms of the concrete. The discussions center around a certain seigneury of St. Aliquis. If no such barony is easily identifiable, at least there were several hundred second-grade fiefs scattered over western Christendom which were in essential particulars extremely like it, and its Baron Conon and his associates were typical of many similar individuals, a little worse or a little better, who abounded in the days of Philip Augustus.

No custom is described which does not seem fairly characteristic of the general period. To focus the picture a specific region, northern France, and a specific year, A.D. 1220, have been selected. Not many matters have been mentioned, however, which were not more or less common to contemporaneous England and Germany; nor have many usages been explained which would not frequently have been found as early as A.D. 1100 or as late as 1300.

Northern France was par excellence the homeland of Feudalism and hardly less so of Chivalry, while by general consent the years around 1220 mark one of the great turning epochs of the Middle Ages. We are at the time of the development of French kingship under Philip Augustus, of the climax and the beginning of the waning of the crusading spirit, of the highest development of Gothic architecture, of the full blossoming of the popular Romance literature, and of the beginning of the entirely dissimilar, but even more important, Friar movement.

To make the life of the Middle Ages live again in its pageantry and its squalor, its superstition and its triumph of Christian art and love, is the

object of this study. Many times has the author been reminded of the intense contrasts between sublime good and extreme evil everywhere apparent in the Feudal Epoch. With every effort at impartiality, whether praising or condemning, it is dangerously easy to write in superlatives.

Although the preparation of this book was not undertaken without that knowledge and investigation of those mediæval authors, ecclesiastics, and laymen upon which every significant study of this kind must rest, every scholar will recognize the author's debt to many modern specialists. To Th. Wright, Lacroix, Luchaire, Justin H. Smith, Viollet-le-Duc, and Chéruel the acknowledgments are very specific. To Leon Gautier they must be more specific still. It is a great misfortune that his masterpiece, Le Chivalrie, is no longer current in a good English translation. The words in quotation, sprinkled through the text, are usually from pertinent mediæval writers, except where they purport to be direct snatches of conversation.

To my colleague in this university, Prof. August C. Krey, who has read and criticized the manuscript with friendly fidelity and professional alertness and acumen, there are due many hearty thanks.

W. S. D.

The University of Minnesota.
Minneapolis, Minn.

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Chapter I: The Fief of St. Aliquis: Its History and Denizens.

In the duchy of Quelqueparte there lay, in the later days of the great King Philip Augustus, the barony of St. Aliquis. Perhaps you may have trouble in finding any such places upon the maps of Mediæval France. In that case, I must tell you that they did not lie so far from Burgundy, Champagne, and Blois that the duke and his vassal, the baron, could not have many brave feuds with the seigneurs of those principalities, nor so far from Paris that peddlers and pilgrims could not come hence or go thither pretty often, nor the baron of St. Aliquis sometimes journey to the king's court, to do his loyal devoir to his high suzerain, or to divert himself with many lordly pleasures.

About A.D. 1220, when King Philip Augustus was near his end, there was exceptional peace in northern France, and conditions around St. Aliquis were entirely normal. We purpose, therefore (with the help of Our Lady, of holy St. Aliquis himself, and perhaps also of that very discreet fée Queen Morgue, "the wife of Julius Cæsar and the mother of King Oberon"), to visit the aforesaid barony as it existed at that time. We shall look around us unseen by the inhabitants, but able to ask many questions and to get pertinent answers. Thereby shall we gather much knowledge, and that, too, not about St. Aliquis only; for this little world by itself is a cross-section, as it were, of a great part of France; nay, of all feudal Europe.

It is fortunate that we are suffered, when we make this return journey to the Middle Ages, to arrive not long after the year 1200. A century or two earlier one might have found conditions decidedly more crude, semi-barbarous, disgusting; one would have indeed been tempted to doubt whether from so lawless and uncultivated a world any progressive civilization could really develop. On the other hand, had we postponed the excursion until, say, A.D. 1400, we would have found a society already becoming sophisticated and to no slight extent modernized. The true mediæval flavor would have been partially lost. But A.D. 1220 represents the epoch when the spirit of the Middle Ages had reached its full development. The world was still full of ignorance, squalor, and violence, yet there were now plenty of signs of a nobler day. France was still scattered with feudal castles and tales of baronial ruthlessness abounded, but the rise of the royal power and the growth of the chartered communal towns were promising a new political era. The bulk of the people were still illiterate peasants, and many of the nobility even felt very awkward when fumbling over books; but the monasteries had never been so full of worthy activities and of very genuine learning. Thousands of scholars were trudging to the University of Paris; and meantime, even in the more starving towns were rising Gothic churches and cathedrals, combining in their soaring fabrics not merely the results of supreme architectural genius, but a wealth of masterpieces of sculpture and of colored glass which were to draw visitors of later days from the very ends of the earth.

The crusading fervor had somewhat waned, but around the castles there were still elderly knights who had once followed Richard the Lion Hearted or Philip Augustus upon the great Third Crusade to Palestine, likewise a good many younger cavaliers who had shared the military glory and moral disgrace of the Fourth Crusade, which had ended not with the recovery of Jerusalem, but the sack and seizure of Christian Constantinople. At Rome the great and magnanimous Pope Innocent III had hardly ceased to reign (1216); while the founders of the remarkable Friar movement—that new style of monasticism which was to carry the message of the Church closer to the people—St. Francis, the apostle of love, and St. Dominic, the apostle of learning, were still alive and active. The world, therefore, was looking forward. The Middle Ages were close to apogee.

We purpose to tell what may be found on the barony of St. Aliquis, first at the castle itself and in the household of Messire the Seigneur, then in the villages of peasants round about; next in the abbey slightly removed; and lastly in the chartered town and cathedral seat of the bishop a few miles further off. But first one must ask about the origin of the principality and how there came to be any such barony at all, for St. Aliquis would have been an exceptional seigneury if it had not had considerable history behind it, and had not represented the growth of several different elements.

The castle of St. Aliquis lies at the junction of two rivers. The smaller of these, the Rapide, tumbles down from some hills, cutting a gorge through the dense beech forest until it runs under a precipitous slope, then dashes into the greater, more placid current of the Claire. The Claire is an affluent, perhaps of the Seine, perhaps of the Loire. It is navigable for flat barges a good many miles above its junction with the Rapide, and the tolls upon this commerce swell the baron's revenue.

At the triangle formed by the converging streams rises an abrupt rocky plateau practically inaccessible from the banks of either river and which can be approached only from the third side, where the land slopes gently away from the apex of the triangle. Here rise some jagged crags marking out the place as a natural fortress. Most castles which dot feudal Europe are thus located in the most advantageous spot in their respective regions.

Possibly human habitations have existed upon this promontory ever since God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. If we consult Brother Boniface, the librarian at the local monastery, the best-read person in the district, the good old man will tell us that long before the Romans came, the ancient Druids ("now in hell") had their pagan altars here, and sacrificed human victims under a great oak. Some chiseled masonry found on

the spot also indicates an extensive settlement in Roman days, when Gaul was a province of the Cæsars. Of course, all the pious people know that under the persecuting Emperor Diocletian, the holy Aliquis himself, a centurion in the Legions, was shot to death with burning arrows because he preferred Christ to Jupiter, and that the place of his martyrdom is at the new abbey church about a league from the castle.

Nevertheless, secular history is not precise until after the time of the mighty Charlemagne. Under his feeble successor, Charles the Bald, tradition affirms that the vikings, Scandinavian barbarians, came up the greater river, ascended the Claire in their long dragon ships; then on the site of the present castle they established a stockaded camp, whence they issued to ravage the country. This was about A.D. 870, but after a year they departed, leaving desolation behind them. About A.D. 880 another band of vikings came with similar foul intent, but they met a different reception. The saints had raised up a brave protector for the Christian folk of those lands.

Very uncertain is the ancestry of the redoubtable warrior Heribert, who about A.D. 875 seized the rocky triangle at the mouth of the Rapide, and built the first castle of St. Aliquis. Perhaps he was descended from one of Charlemagne's famous Frankish "counts." He did, indeed, only what was then being done everywhere to check the Scandinavian hordes: he built a castle and organized the levies of the region, hitherto footmen, into an effective cavalry force. This castle was anything save the later majestic fortress. It was merely a great square tower of rough masonry, perched on the crag above the streams. Around it was a palisade of heavy timbers, strengthened on the landward side by a ditch. Inside this compound were huts for refugees, storehouses for fodder, and rude stalls for the cattle. To stop passage up the Claire a heavy chain of iron was stretched across the river and stone piers were sunk at shallow places, thus forcing boats to pass close under the fortress in range of descending missiles. Where the chain was landed there was built another smaller stone tower. All the crossing then had to be by skiffs, although somewhat later an unsteady bridge was thrown over the stream.

The second expedition of vikings found that these precautions had ruined their adventure. They lost many men and a dragon ship when they tried to force the iron chain. Heribert's new cavalry cut off their raiding parties. Finally they departed with thinned numbers and scant spoils. Heribert was hailed as savior of the region, just as other champions, notably the great Count Odo at the siege of Paris, won similar successes elsewhere on a larger scale. The vikings had departed, but Heribert's tower remained. So began the castle of St. Aliquis.

Heribert had taken possession ostensibly as the king's "man," claiming some royal commission, but as the power of Charlemagne's feeble rulers dwindled, Heribert's heirs presently forgot almost all their allegiance to their distant royal "master." This was merely as seemed the case about A.D. 900 all through the region then coming to be called "France." Castles were rising everywhere, sometimes to repel the vikings, sometimes merely to strengthen the power of some local chief. Once erected, the lords of those castles were really little princes, able to defy the very weak central authority. To capture a considerably less formidable fortalice than St. Aliquis implied a tedious siege, such as few kings would undertake save in an emergency.

The result was that ere A.D. 1000 Heribert's great-grandsons had almost ceased to trouble about the king. The person they genuinely feared was the local Duke of Quelqueparte, another feudal seigneur with more followers and more castles than they. Partly from prudence, partly from necessity, they had "done homage" to him, become "his men," and as his vassals rode to his wars. The dukes, in turn, full of their own problems, and realizing the strength of St. Aliquis, seldom interfered in the fief, save on very serious occasions. The barons of St. Aliquis therefore acted very nearly like sovereign princes. They, of course, had their own gallows with power of life and death, waged their own personal wars, made treaties of peace, and even coined a little ill-shapen money with their own superscription.[1] "Barons by the Grace of God," they boasted themselves, which meant that they obeyed the duke and his suzerain, the king, very little, and, we fear, God not a great deal.

In the recent centuries, however, the barony had changed hands several times. About 1070 the lord had the folly to refuse his ordinary feudal duty to the Duke of Quelqueparte. The latter roused himself, enlisted outside aid, and blockaded and starved out the castle of St. Aliquis. The unfortunate baron—duly adjudged "traitor and felon" by his "peers," his fellow vassals—was beheaded. The duke then bestowed the fief, with the hand of the late owner's niece, upon Sire Rainulf, a younger son of a south-country viscount, who had visited the duke's court, bringing with him an effective battle-ax and fifty sturdy followers. Sire Rainulf, however, died while in the First Crusade. The reigning duke next tried to give the barony to another favorite warrior, but the son of the late baron proved himself of sturdy stuff. He fought off his suzerain and enlisted allies from Burgundy. The duke was forced, therefore, to leave him in peace.

Presently, about 1140, another baron died, survived only by a daughter. Her uncles and cousins did their best to expel this poor lady and induced the suzerain duke to close his eyes to their deeds, but, fortunately, the new baroness had been very pious. The influence of the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux was exerted, thereby persuading King Louis VII to warn the duke that if he could not protect his vassals "the king would do justice." So the Lady Bertrada was given in marriage to a respectable Flemish cavalier Gui, who ruled the barony with only the usual wars. He left two sons, Garnier and Henri. Sire Henri, the younger, lived at the inferior castle of Petitmur, went on the Fourth Crusade (1203-04), and perished in the fighting around Constantinople ere the French and Venetians sacked the city. Garnier, the elder, received, of course, the great castle. He was the uncle of the Baron Conon III, the son of Henri, and the present lord of St. Aliquis.

It is well said by the monks that the blessed feel joys in paradise all the keener because a little earlier they have escaped from the pangs and fires of purgatory. Certes, for all laymen and clerics on the St. Aliquis fiefs, there was purgatory enough in Baron Garnier's day to make the present "sage" rule of Baron Conon seem tenfold happy.

The late seigneur ruled about twenty years, filled up with one round of local wars, oppression of the small, and contentions with the great. Baron Garnier was assuredly a mighty warrior. Never was he unhorsed in jousting or in mêlée. His face was one mass of scars and he had lost an ear. Plenty of landless knights and wolfish men at arms rioted around his donjon. His provosts and foresters knew how to squeeze the poor of the seigneury, and by this income and by the ransoms from numerous captives he was able to rebuild the castle of St. Aliquis according to the first military art of the day.