Читать книгу Life on a Mediaeval Barony - William Stearns Davis - Страница 13

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If Baron Conon has been fortunate enough to receive a noble guest, almost the first question is how to divert the stranger. The inevitable program will be to constrain the visitor to tarry at least long enough to cast hawks or to chase down a deer. If that is not possible, at least he will be courteously urged to attempt some game, and it will be most "ungentle" of him to refuse.

Indoor games are in great demand where bad weather often makes open sports impossible and where bookish diversions are limited. The baron frequently plays with his own family when there are no outside guests, and all the household are more or less expert. To understand them is part of a gentle education for both sexes. Indeed, there is no better way for a noble dame and a cavalier to begin a romance than to sit through a long afternoon studying one another's faces no less than the gaming table.

Some of these diversions are decidedly like those of a later age. For example, if all present are reasonably literate they can play "ragman's roll"! Burlesque verses—some suitable for men, some for women, and all often deplorably coarse—are written on slips of parchment wound in a roll. On each slip is a string with some sign showing for which sex it is intended. Everybody has to draw a roll, then open and read it aloud to the mirthful company. The verses are supposed to show the character of the person drawing the same. Also, even grown-up folk are not above "run around" games which are later reserved for children. High barons play blind-man's buff; seigneurs and dames sometimes join in the undignified "hot cockles." A blindfolded player kneels with his face on the knee of another and with his hands held out behind him. Other players in turn strike him on the hand, and he tries to guess who has hit him. If he is correct, the person last striking takes his place. Of course, a large part of the sport is to deliver very shrewd blows. The fact that such a game can be in vogue shows again that even the high and mighty are often like hot-blooded children abounding in animal spirits.

These games Conon will not press upon his guests. He will urge on them backgammon, checkers, chess or, if they seem young and secular, perhaps dice. Backgammon is called "tables." It is a combination of dice playing plus the motion of pieces on a board which goes back to Roman times. The boards and methods of play are so like those of a later age that one need not comment thereon.

Backgammon is a popular diversion, but hardly more so than checkers (Anglice "draughts") known in France as "dames." Here also is a game that hardly changes essentially from age to age. The checkermen at St. Aliquis are square, not round. Otherwise, no explanation is needed.

Backgammon, Checkers and Dice

What men like Conon really enjoy, however, are games of dice. Nevertheless, since the Church has often censured these cubes of ivory, he and his baroness do not dare to use them too often; besides, they realize the havoc often wrought among the young by dice throwing, and wish to keep their own sons from temptation. In parts of France there are laws reading: "Dice shall not be made in this dominion, and those using them shall be looked upon as suspicious characters."[14] All such enactments are usually dead letters, and a high justiciar can ordinarily punish merely the manufacture and use of loaded dice. Although church prelates rail vigorously, their complaints are not merely that games of chance are, ipso facto, sinful, but that the blasphemies constantly uttered by losing dice players form a means of populating hell.

Dice playing assuredly is extremely common. It is even impiously called "the game of God," because the regulation of chance belongs to Providence. Did not the Holy Apostles cast lots between Justus and Matthias to select a successor to the wicked Judas; and can good Christians question means acceptable to St. John and St. Peter? So gamesters will quiet their consciences. Vainly does King Philip Augustus command that any person swearing over dice in his royal presence, no matter how high his rank, shall be cast into the river. Dice are everywhere—in the travelers' and pilgrims' wallets and in almost every castle, hut, or town dwelling. Let any three or four men come together for an idle hour and fortunate it is if a set of dice does not appear to while away the time. The thirteenth century is innocent of cards; dice form the substitute.

The swearing is evil, but the gambling is worse. There are at least ten gambling games, some with three dice, some needing six. Adela has been warning François, her eldest son, concerning a recent instance of reckless playing. A young squire, whose father held lands of Conon, set forth to seek his fortune at the king's court. He halted at Pontdebois, where he met an older soldier of fortune at the tavern. The poor young man was induced "to try a few casts." Soon he had lost his travel money; next his horse; next his armor. In desperation he began pledging his ordinary vesture to the tavern keeper (who acted as a kind of pawnbroker). Ill luck still pursued, and he was reduced to his bare shirt[15] before a friend of his father's, chancing about the inn, recovered his necessary clothes between them and sent him home, utterly humiliated. Such calamities are constant. Dice are daily the ruin of countless nobles and villeins—but the accursed gaming continues. It is even rumored that in certain disorderly monasteries these tools of the devil often intrude further to demoralize the brethren.

THE GAME OF CHESS

An ivory plaque of the fourteenth century

(Musée du Louvre).

Chess in Great Esteem

No such ill odor, however, attends that game in which Conon delights most. To play at chess is part of an aristocratic education. In a jongleur's romance we hear of a young prince who was brought up "first to know his letters," and then "to play at tables (backgammon), and at chess; and soon he learned these games so well that no man in this world could 'mate' him." François and Anseau, the baron's sons, make no such boasts, but both know the moves, and François takes great pride in having lately forced a visiting knight to a stalemate. Great seigneurs and kings carry chessboards around with them on campaigns and are said to amuse themselves with chess problems immediately before or after desperate battles. Plenty of other anecdotes tell of short-tempered nobles who lost self-control when checkmated, broke the chessboards over their opponents' heads, and ended the contest in a regular brawl.

This royal game has doubtless come from the Orient. Caliphs of the Infidels have long since boasted their skill in taking rooks and pawns, but in western lands about the first record comes from the time of Pope Alexander II (1061–73), to whom complaint was made that a bishop of Florence was "spending his evenings in the vanity of chess playing." The bishop's enemies alleged that this was forbidden by the canons prohibiting dice. But the bishop retorted that "dice and chess were entirely different things: the first sinful; the second a most honorable exercise for Christians." The Pope tactfully refrained from pressing the matter. Nevertheless, austere churchmen regarded the game as worldly, and impetuous religious reformers insisted on confounding it with games of chance. It was only in 1212 that a Council of Paris forbade French clerics to play chess, just as it (for about the thousandth time) forbade dice—despite which fact the Bishop of Pontdebois spent a whole afternoon over the chessboard the last time he visited the castle and could test his skill on the baron.

As for the nobility, no one thinks of refusing to play, although naturally it is the older knights who have the patience for long contests. According to the Song of Roland, after Charlemagne's host had taken Cordova the Emperor and all his knights rested themselves in a shady garden. The more sedate leaders immediately played chess, although the younger champions selected the more exciting backgammon.

The chessmen are often made of whalebone and imported from Scandinavia. They are models of warriors. The kings have their swords drawn; the knights are on horseback; in place of castles we have "warders," a kind of infantrymen; the bishops hold their croziers; and the queens upbear drinking horns like the great ladies in a northern house. Conon, however, has a fine ivory set made in the East; and Oriental models differ from the Norse. The Infidels, of course, have no bishops; instead there is a phil—a carved elephant; and since Moslems despise women, instead of a queen there is a phrez, or counselor. Chessboards are usually made of inlaid woods, or even metals, and Conon has an elegant one with squares of silver and gilt, the gift of a count whose life he once saved in battle.

Needless to say, chess is a game in which the women can excel. Alienor is well able to defeat her brother, despite his boasting; and among the duties of the ladies of a castle is to teach the young squires who are being "nourished" by its lord how to say "check."

Chess is supposed to be a game of such worth and intricacy as not to need the stimulus of wagering. But, alas! such is the old Adam in mankind that scandalous gambling often goes on around a chessboard. At festivals when nobles assemble, if two distinguished players match their skill, there is soon an excited, if decently silent, crowd around their table. Soon one spectator after another in whispers places wagers to support a contestant; the players themselves begin to bet on their own skill. The final result may leave them almost as poverty-stricken as the dicers in the tavern, as well as compromising salvation by awful oaths.

A GAME OF BALL (STRUTT)

Young nobles also kill much time with out-of-door games resembling tennis and billiards. The tennis is played without rackets, by merely striking the ball with the open hand. The billiards require no tables, but are played on level ground with wooden balls struck with hooked sticks or mallets, somewhat resembling the hockey of another age. Here again reckless youths often wager and lose great sums. Lads and young maidens are fond, too, of guilles—a game resembling ninepins, although the pins are knocked down, not with balls, but with a stick thrown somewhat like a boomerang. Of course, they also enjoy tossing balls, and young ladies no less than their brothers practice often with the arbalist, shooting arrows with large heads for bringing down birds which take refuge in bushes when pursued by the hawks.

Hawking

But chess, dice and every other game indoors or outdoors pales before the pleasure of hawking or hunting. There is no peace-time sensation like the joy of feeling a fast horse whisk you over the verdant country, leaping fences, and crashing through thickets with some desperate quarry ahead. It is even a kind of substitute for the delights of war. If a visiting knight shows the least willingness, the baron will certainly urge him to tarry for a hunting party. It will then depend on the season, the desire of the guests, and reports from the kennels and mews and the forest whether the chase will be with hawks or with hounds.

Master huntsmen and falconers are always at swords' points. Their noble employers also lose their tempers in the arguments as to venery and falconry, but the truth is that both sports are carried on simultaneously at every castle. If fresh meat is needed, if most of the riders are men, if time is abundant, probably the order is "bring out the dogs." If only the sport is wanted, and the ladies can ride out merely for an afternoon, the call is for the hawks.

LADY WITH A FALCON ON HER WRIST

From a thirteenth-century seal (Archives nationales).

Hunting hawks are everywhere. Last Sunday Adela and Alienor rode over to mass at the abbey church. The good brethren chanting the service were nowise disturbed when each of their high-born worshipers kept a great hooded hawk strapped to her wrist during the whole service.[16] It is well to take your hawks everywhere with you, especially when there are crowds of people, to accustom them to bustle and shouting; but we suspect another reason for always taking hawks about is that the carrying of a hunting bird on your wrist is a recognized method of saying, "I am of gentle blood and need not do any disagreeable work with my hands."

Complicated Art of Falconry

Falcons are counted "noble birds"; they rank higher in the social hierarchy of beasts than even eagles. If one cannot afford large hawks and falcons one can at least keep sparrow hawks; and "sparrow hawk" is the nickname for poor sires who only maintain birds large enough to kill partridges and quails. In short, the possession of a hawk of some kind is almost as necessary for a nobleman as wearing a sword, even with knights who can seldom go out hunting. However, it takes a rich noble like Conon to possess a regular falconry with special birds, each trained for attacking a certain kind of game—hares, kites, herons—with the expert attendants to care for them.

THE FALCON HUNT

Thirteenth century; from a German manuscript in the Bibliothèque de Bruxelles.

Falconry has become a complicated art. Very possibly the good folk in St. Aliquis will have their bodies physicked or bled by physicians much less skillful in treating human ills than Conon's falconers are in treating birds. To climb high trees or crags and steal the young hawk out of the nest is itself no trifling undertaking.[17] Then the prizes must be raised to maturity, taught to obey whistles and calls, and to learn instantly to do the bidding of the master. In the baron's mews are more than a score of birds; gerfalcons, saker hawks, lanners, merlins, and little sparrow hawks squawk, peck, and squabble along with huge goshawks. The male birds are generally smaller than the female, and the latter are reserved for striking the swiftest game, such as herons. Some birds will return of their own accord to the hand of the master after taking game, but many, including all sparrow hawks, have to be enticed back by means of a lure of red cloth shaped like a bird. The falconer swings his lure by a string, and whistles, and, since the falcon is accustomed to find a bit of meat attached to the lure, he will fly down promptly and thus be secured.

Conon's head falconer is only a villein, but he is such an expert that recently the Count of Champagne offered a hundred Paris livres for him. This important personage is himself the son of a falconer, for the science runs in families. He is a man of shrewd knowledge and a real wizard at breaking in young birds, teaching them to strike dummies and decoys, to remain contented in their cages or hooded on their perches, and yet not lose their hunting spirit. He has precise methods of feeding—so much meat, preferably poultry, and so much of vegetables, preferably fresh fruit. He takes long counsel with Conon how a recalcitrant goshawk can be induced to sit quietly on the baron's fist. He also teaches young François to carry his little sparrow hawk so it will not be incommoded by any horse motion or be beaten upon unpleasantly by the wind, and how to adjust its hood.