POSITION OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY. 433 How far the position of woman in England was raised during the twelfth century by chivalry, is difficult or impossible to decide. The splendid tournaments of Provence, at which women presided, and where knights contended as minstrels, are as foreign to early English history as adventures like that of the Provençal troubadour, who tried to win his lady's love by disguising himself in a wolf's skin, and allowing himself to be hunted by shepherds' dogs on the mountains. Our national sobriety never wandered into these exotic extravagances. Marriage seems to have been chiefly regarded as an arrangement for transferring property and consolidating estates. There is still a contract on record from the middle ages, in which a husband assigned his wife to another man at pleasure. The ecclesiastical courts declared the parties purged of adultery; but the secular courts were less complaisant, and barred the lady of dower at her husband's death. The proprietary theory of marriage is in general, however, favourable to its purity. That singular preference of the adulterer to the husband, which still distinguishes continental romance, was always rather French and Italian than English: Arthur was our hero, and Lancelot was and blood-thirstiness, belong to continental history, and are traits of a particular nation, not of European society. The massacre of Limoges by the Black Prince is indefensible, but it was the storm of a town; and the coldblooded language of Froissart which describes it, could, I fear, be paralleled from modern military historians. Moreover, the sentiment of race was a fact of the times; a source of bitter enmity, and of much misery: but not derived from chivalry. After all, I know nothing in early English history, except William's devastation of the north, and the civil war under Stephen, that approaches the horrors which our troops have committed in putting down the Indian revolt; or any language in medieval writers so revolting as that in which an Anglo-Indian civilian has related a butchery he presided over. 1 This madman was Pierre Vidal of Toulouse. The delicacy of the compliment lay in an allusion to the lady's name, Louve de Penautier.-Sismondi's Literature of the South, vol. i., chap. 5. 2 John Comoy's grant of his wife. "Noveritis me tradidisse et demisisse spontancâ meâ voluntate domino Gul. Paynell militi Margaretam uxorem meam; et concedo quod Marg. cum prædicto Gul. remaneat pro voluntate ipsius Gul."-Hargrave's Coke upon Littleton, p. 32, b, note. The last William Paynell mentioned in Nicholas's Synopsis of the Peerage, was of the reign of Edward II., but there were several in the preceding century. FF 434 GRADAUL ELEVATION OF WOMEN. most popular in France. Nevertheless, even in the Morte d'Arthur it has been well remarked that the knights are pure, or set purity before them, while the women are uniformly unchaste. In fact, the society of men and women who were uncultivated, idle, and lived high, could scarcely be otherwise than corrupt. The conversation and repartee of a mediæval circle would disgrace a modern tavern. The influences of the church on woman's position were various. It opposed the prestige of monasticism to the sacramental character of marriage, and regarded as impure the sex of her whom it reverenced as the mother of God. Unbelief in womanly virtue animates the ribald songs and gross stories which convent brothers have handed down. It was impossible that chivalry should teach men to respect what none around them respected, and what was not respectable. But as they grew in moral greatness themselves, by incorporating the spirit of self-sacrifice with their lives, they raised the tone of all around them, and of women more than all. The knight was strong and gentle, precisely because he believed in a cause which was grander in failure than evil could be in success. His idealism made him ready to see good, and his compassion to sympathize with weakness. Safe from outrage and insult, women began to 1 For some historical evidence of this, see Gul. Cant.; Vitæ Beck., vol. ii., p. 31; and Chron. Joc. de Brak., p. 52. 2 See Wright's Anecdota Literaria, pp. 74-76. 3 The right at common law which a woman has to marry, if her husband be absent, and no tidings of him procurable during seven years, was no doubt derived from Roman law through the canonists.-Exc. Ecgb., 123, 124; A. S. Laws, vol. ii., p. 116; Dictionary of Antiquities, Art. Postliminium. It is a curious proof of the conflict of theories that the church should have allowed one of its sacraments to be overridden by the feudal oath, and cancelled for the time by captivity. There is, however, this difference between the Roman and our ⚫wn common law, that the first husband, in Roman law, could not, if he returned, reclaim his wife, except with her own consent. A curious instance of the older view of woman occurs in an ancient version of the Morte d'Arthur. Meleagans challenges any knight of Arthur's court to joust with him, and proposes to wager the ladies in his castle against queen Guenever. Arthur consents; his champion, Kay, is overthrown, and Guenever carried off, but finally rescued by Lancelot.-Ellis's Metrical Romances, pp. 145-150. CHIVALRY AN ELEMENT OF PROGRESS. 435 respect themselves, and refined passion into love. Ovid was the master of song in the twelfth century: two hundred years brought with them "the legend of good women." It is these human elements in chivalry, its regard for life and infinite tenderness, that were the secret of its strength. With sympathies so wide, it could not restrict itself to the narrow circle of caste. Society tended to unalterable distinctions of ranks the sons of the conqueror and the conquered. The spirit of medieval legists aimed at solidifying what existed, at shutting out all change, at constructing a perfect logical fabric, and imprisoning man within it. Even poets betrayed the cause of the world, and delighted to show in their romances how the soldier, who seemed to be the peasant's son, was really begotten by a knight. But throughout English history, the man who had won his spurs by fair conduct in the field might wear them; the gentleman without fortune might command barons in war, and be called brother by his king. To be brave, loyal, and generous, established a claim to the title-deeds which were good through Europe. The universal church, with its one tongue and democratic hierarchy, did much for society; but it formed a world by itself. Chivalry invaded the very strongholds of rank, and clung like ivy round the grey battlements of feudalism, beautifying at once and destroying it. Accordingly, chivalry, as a system, perished when Garnier, however, has some fine lines (p. 89): "Mielz valt filz a vilain qui est preux et senez, Again, in "The Four Sons of Aymon" the valiant knight Renaud becomes a mason, to testify his sense of human equality. But I suspect the feeling of the times would have endured a descent of this sort more cheerfully than the rising of a parvenu from the ranks. 2 "Then spoke Sir Joce: Friend burgess, you are very strong and valiant. * * You shall live with me, and I will never fail you.' Joce thought he had been a burgess: for burgesses really have put armour on," &c. --Hist. of Fulk Fitz-Warine, p. 31. So king Arthur knights Tor, believing him to be a cow-herd's son.-Morte d'Arthur, cap. 47. Our chronicles prove that a man had a fair chance of rising from the ranks under all our early Norman kings, either from the chances of war, or, in the cases of Henry I. and Henry II., from policy. 436 DECAY OF CHIVALRY. men departed from its first principles. Nothing could seem more severely logical than the union of monk and knight in the Templars. But the order was a caste; it struck at the very existence of common society; it joined in one the Janissary and Jesuit. An outburst of wrath throughout Europe swept it from the earth. Nothing could be more natural than that knighthood should be looked upon as a mere ornament of position and wealth; that the noble should take it up with his coronet. But men felt that birth, which conferred precedence and power, could not give honour; a poet of the people noted the change that was coming in as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, and sang sorrowfully:-1 "Knights should weare weden in their manere, Knightship is debased, and diversely y-dight, Can a boy now break a spear, he shall be called a knight. And envenometh that order, that should be so good." There were periods of revival under Edward III. and Henry V.; earl Rivers was a knight of the old stamp. But a change was coming upon the world; old faiths and old systems were broken up; and chivalry was left to the graves where the stone warriors lie, with their hands folded crosswise. Honour, manhood, and tenderness are imperishable, and have survived knighthood. 1 Wright's Political Songs, p. 335 (Camd. Soc.) The preceding stanza had aid, "they should go to the Holy Land. * * And fight there for the cross, and show the order of knight, and avenge Jesus Christ," &c. MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. TENDENCIES OF ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE.-CONSTRUCTIVE CHARACTER OF PHILOSOPHY.-ANSELM'S METAPHYSICS.-INFLUENCES OF PHILOSOPHY ON RELIGION.CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY.-CYCLE OF POLITICAL ROMANCES. GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH.-DISCOVERY OF ARTHUR'S REMAINS. -CHIVALROUS ROMANCES ABOUT ARTHUR.-EXTENT AND DIFFUSION MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. OF WITHIN a hundred years from the Norman conquest, four important literary movements inspired English thought with new energies, and diverted it into new channels. The study of the best Latin authors produced a classical renaissance, which may be traced in the historical narratives of the time. The Christian church, freed from the danger of pagan conquerors, began to remodel its philosophical creed, and to occupy itself with the doubts of sceptical believers and the polemics of Jewish writers. In the dearth of experimental science, and under the influences of monastic life, the highest speculative thought of the times was concentrated on theology. The metaphysics of the schoolmen may be said to date from Anselm; his predecessors were few and far between; but the golden chain of subtle disputants is unbroken from Anselm downwards to the fifteenth century. Men of more secular or more practical habits of mind occupied themselves with Roman law, and 'Anselm tells us, in the preface to his "Monologium," that it was written at the request of his pupils, who wanted an independent proof of Christianity. In the preface to his "Cur Deus homo," he says that his first book is an answer to the objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational. Gilbert, abbot of Westminster and a contemporary of Anselm, wrote a " Disputatio Judæi cum Christiano," the report of an actual discussion, which seems to have converted a Jew present. Compare Malmesbury, lib. iv., p. 500, and the story of a knight in Joinville (p. 16, ed. Michel), who stops a controversy between Jews and Christians, "Car ✶✶ avoit il séans grant foison de bons chrétiens qui s'en feussent parti touz miscréanz," &c. |