Читать книгу The Conquerors: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 26

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The life into which the princess entered after her marriage with Henry at Westminster on November 11, St. Martin’s Day, was not as exalted and brilliant as might be supposed. In those days even rulers existed in the most complete discomfort. It may be advisable to pause at this stage for a quick glimpse at the times.

The castles of the nobility were towering piles of frowning masonry which had been designed for one purpose and one only, security. The living quarters were bare apartments behind thick, cold walls. The Great Hall was always of imposing proportions, stretching up into realms of darkness in which drafts set banners and tapestries to a ghostly rustling and flapping. It had a raised dais on which a table was set impressively with silver ewers and standing cups and tall candlesticks for the meals of the family and guests. Below this were trestle tables which were brought out at each meal for the retainers, who consumed their food, with much noise, below the salt. The floors were never cleaned, and the continual adding of fresh rushes over the bones left by the household dogs created heavy and sickening odors. From a gallery opposite the dais, minstrels played and sang while the great people dined. There was a stateliness about all this, but it must be said at once that it was deceptive. Manners were not good. Forks had not yet been invented, and so food was conveyed to the mouth by the hand. The food was very plain. The Crusaders had not yet introduced the spices of the East which later brought such delight to the palate of the Middle Ages (the cinnamon, cloves, pepper, galangal, fennel), and to make up for its flatness food was served in enormous quantities. The monks at Canterbury were accustomed to sixteen courses and they objected fiercely when the number was reduced to twelve. Heavy drinking was, of course, a part of every meal. Wines were imbibed on the dais, mead and pigment along the creaking trestles.

The homes of the smaller nobility were bare and sparsely furnished. Some contained not more than one bed, an enormous affair in which the lord of the manor and his lady slept, in company with the dowager, perhaps, an uncle or two, and almost certainly a venerable aunt. The bed would be vacated for special occasions, such as a wedding or the arrival of distinguished guests, and its usual occupants would then betake themselves to the straw pallets on which less important members of the household rested at all times. The servants slept on skins or rags or heaps of straw wherever they could find an untenanted corner, in winter as close to the fire as they could get. More rarely the lower orders slept on raised wooden platforms with beams for pillows, the early forerunner of what later was called the barrack bed.

The larger castles boasted more than one bed, of course, but they possessed most of the discomforts of the lesser. The bathhouse, a steamy hole in which there were hogsheads of water and raised planks on which bathers could sit while sloshing themselves, was most often one of the outbuildings which clustered in the inner bailey, in company with the bakehouse, the malthouse, the salt-house, and the squillery, and so it was inconveniently conspicuous and hard to reach without advertising a ladylike addiction to soap and water. The garderobe (if there is doubt as to the meaning of this word, consider that it was a polite term for the department vulgarly called the jakes) was usually on an upper floor and as far removed from the stately entrance as possible. This cold and acrid chamber was at least equipped with pipes which ran to the outer surface of the wall and allowed the filth to ooze down the masonry to the moat, fouling the water and creating an odor which filled the air in both inner and outer bailey and could be depended on to assail the nostrils of visitors as they rode in over the drawbridge.

The castles of the kings were on a higher level than this, it is hardly necessary to state, but they contained no luxuries which the nobility lacked. Henry and his bride lived at first in the two royal homes, Westminster and Winchester. A little later they began to fit up a part of the Tower of London, which was safe and dry and could be kept warm in winter, and the conversion of this grim-appearing pile to domestic occupation was an achievement of the Queen. Later still, perhaps with the desire of making his wife more comfortable, Henry decided to build a castle of his own at a place called Windsor. It stood high up above the Thames on steep clay bluffs, and there had always been a Saxon hunting lodge there. William the Conqueror had seen other possibilities in the site and had erected a keep there to serve as a prison, a circular tower of such strength that escape from it was impossible. Henry decided to have his new castle as much apart from the keep as possible. He built it outside the walls, a long and narrow structure with a tower at one end and a chapel at the other, named St. Edward’s. What later became the Jousting Grounds lay between it and the river. It was not large and it could not have stood any kind of siege, but it had plenty of windows and a delightful view of the greenest and loveliest countryside, dotted with thick patches of wood and at intervals the spires of churches and the bell towers of monasteries. On a still day the bells could be heard and the distant lowing of cattle. Three years were taken in the building, and the pretty Queen on her first visit found it filled with sunshine, the rooms large and airy, the walls warm with tapestries.

Matilda became attached to her new home (in after years it was called the First King’s House) and spent much of her time there. It was to Windsor that the German ambassadors came to ask for the hand of little Ethelric for their master, the Emperor. The child was married by proxy in St. Edward’s Chapel.

The Queen may not have been aware that she had a most unhappy neighbor at Windsor, Robert de Mowbray, who had rebelled against William Rufus and who was still living deep down in his dungeon at the very bottom of the keep. The former earl’s young wife, who had been much attached to him, had been given her divorce on the strength of the inexorable nature of his confinement and had married another man. Her second husband left the country and found another wife, so the countess had the unique distinction of being in a sense the widow of two men, both of them alive. It could hardly be said that the once arrogant Earl of Northumberland, who had refused to take off his hat in the presence of the King of Scotland, was still alive. The half-crazed thing, existing in the darkness in rags and filth, had ceased to have a name with the jailers. She would not have done anything for him had she known who he was. Her countrymen, remembering his cruel exactions, would not have thanked her for the release of Robert de Mowbray.

When the royal couple came to Windsor they must have been hard pressed to find quarters for the whole court. Royal abodes were always hives of activity. All the high officials of the government and the members of the Council lived with the monarch. The place was overrun with bishops, confessors, and chantry priests; justiciars, clerks, and scriveners. It was a rule that members of the nobility should visit the King three or four times a year, and this kept the halls filled with loud talk and loud laughter and the rustling of rich robes from dawn to dark (people went to bed soon after the setting of the sun and rose with the first cockcrow, kings and queens and nobles alike), and an army of servants was needed to look after them. There were stallers and sewers, squires of the horse, yeomen of the ewery and the bedchamber, hordes of cellarers and larderers and almoners, not to mention such humble denizens as cooks and drawers and maids.

There had been many shifts and changes in such matters from Anglo-Saxon days. The staller had been an important fellow at the court of the Confessor, even having the rank of constable, but now he had been cut down to something in the nature of a household officer. The sewer, on the other hand, had gone up in the world. His responsibility was the table, even extending to the seating of guests and the first tasting of food and wine. Henry, however, had a sewer named Eudes who was much more than that. Eudes seems to have been always at his master’s elbow and he witnessed most of the writs issued during the reign. A writ which did not contain his attesting signature was one granting to himself and his wife Rohaise the city of Colchester with keep and castle. This seems an excessive reward for a man who, no matter how much he pleased the King, was only a sewer. Henry and Matilda, however, seem to have liked the officials about them and were so prone to give rewards that they laid themselves open to charges of favoritism. Following through one series of appointments will demonstrate how often creatures of the court were sent out to important posts. The see of Hereford fell vacant and the King appointed as new bishop—Roger, his larderer! This unexpected grandeur and responsibility may have weighed too heavily on the larderer. At any rate, he died soon after and the bishopric then fell to Reinhelm, the Queen’s physician. Reinhelm held it for several years before passing on, and it was then the turn of Geoffert, the King’s physician. This was very generous and democratic, but doubts cannot be suppressed as to how this series of appointments affected the spiritual welfare of the people of Hereford.

Queens were always provided with extensive apartments for themselves and their ladies. It must have been the rule to locate these in the sunniest parts, for how otherwise could such masterpieces of historical recording as the Bayeux tapestry, made by William the Conqueror’s Matilda and her ladies, have been possible? English Matilda was equally diligent, but she did not accomplish anything to rank with the enduring work of her deceased mother-in-law. Perhaps she was too busy. She was undoubtedly one of the busiest queens England ever had. In addition to the supervision of the royal household and the part she played in the councils of the King (she must have been consulted continually, for her signature appears on more writs even than that of Eudes, the sewer), she was left with state responsibilities for many long stretches when Henry crossed the Channel to fight a never-ending series of wars with his brother Robert of Normandy and the French King. She was as pious as her sainted mother had been, spending much time at her prayers and going each day in Lent to Westminster Abbey with bare feet and dress of the coarsest haircloth to pray and wash the feet of the poor. And of course she brought several children into the world.

She was fond of dress, as all beautiful women are, and was responsible for many innovations, as is always true of queens, beautiful or not. After her ride through London to the Council at Lambeth, all women began to wear their hair loose instead of having it in tight braids. The Anglo-Saxons were a saving people and made their cloth of such enduring strength that costumes often passed through three generations of wearers. Matilda, as Saxon as her bright hair, did not bring these frugal notions to the court of her King and husband. She loved gay colors, and the skirts in which she swished happily through her stately apartments were blue and red and green, and made of the costliest materials. She was one of the first, if not the first, to wear the full circular skirt which fell to the feet in voluminous folds, and to make use of cords and tassels under the cloak to hold that necessary article in place. She may or may not have been responsible for banning the attempts at lacing which had been noticed during the peacock era of William Rufus. It had been no more than a mild attempt to draw in bodices to a nicety of fitting, and it could not have been prejudicial to the health. However, the fact remains that lacing went out completely, and loose-fitting bodices came back into favor at court. There had been much preaching on the subject and much predicting of torments in hell, and so it seems certain that the devout queen had been the one to put down a foot.

Chivalry was just beginning to take hold of knightly imaginations. It was a code with some fine points but forever to be condemned because it was rooted in a fanatical system of caste. A knight had to be fair and generous with equals and superiors, but he need have no consideration for those under him. If ill-born men were killed in the keeping of knightly vows, if children were crushed under the hoofs of galloping horses, it did not matter. What did matter was carrying out the vow to the letter. With chivalry, however, came minstrelsy and the holding of absurd Courts of Love where knights vied in the trolling of ballads, and all this stilted posturing and trumpeting of praise to a lady’s eyebrow had one beneficial effect. Ladies were the judges in the Courts of Love, and for almost the first time they had power in their hands. Men had not been prone to give much thought or consideration to their wives after the first enraptured days of marriage consummation. Now they began to treat them almost as equals.

It is recorded that Queen Matilda had a pleasant voice and that she encouraged the visits of minstrels and poets at court. Henry was fond of them also. It is certain, however, that in his absence many a gallant waxed unusually eloquent as he sought to please with his sirventes the queen whose delicate features reflected none of the coarseness of the Saxon face. It is even more certain, however, that her interest was confined to the quality of the voices and the poetic merit of the lines and never in the singers themselves. Matilda was a good wife as well as a queen above reproach. Even in the spiteful atmosphere of the court, where a word spoken in haste would be seized up and repeated and warped, and the flutter of an eyelash could be magnified into proof of infidelity, the English Queen held herself above all criticism.