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From Trails of the Troubadours, by Ramon de Loi [pseud. Raymond de Loy Jameson], Illustrated by Giovanni Petrina, New York: The Century Co., 1926; pp. 101-128.




TRAILS OF THE TROUBADOURS

by Raimon de Loi




Cover Figure embossed with Gilt knight on horseback.




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Chapter V

The Trail of a Petulant Prince

LE MANS TO POITIERS

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[103]

Chapter V


1


THE king fought with his sons. The whelps ate their sire. There were gatherings of the barons and knights, of the kings and bishops; there were leagues against the kings; the bishops fought each other; and the barons swayed from side to side as the gold jingled. Over the fair face of France was danced a saraband; the dancers slipped across the English Channel; they danced through the lush green fields of Normandy; they rushed through Touraine, Limousine, and Aquitaine. They combined with each other; they broke; they shouted. The age of chivalry was in its flower. It was a “great sight to see the moats filled with the bodies of the dead, to see a great charger limping through the forest with a lance hanging in his side.” There were blood and blows, curses and obscenity. And during the dance the continental empire of England weakened and crashed.

There were five principals in this dance, of which the mazes are so intricate that only the professional historian can disentangle them or the professional psychologist make clear the obscure motives which were, no doubt, as little understood in those days as they are now. Around Poitiers, [104] Tours, Le Mans, Périgueux, over as much space as the flat thumb of a man will cover on a small map of France, the figures were thickest and the dancing was most intense. Rushing through this country, with occasional vivid dashes to Normandy or London on the north, to Paris in the west, or to Toulouse in the south were four young men, all sons of King Henry II of England and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Richard of the Lion Heart was stupid in politics but shrewd, cruel, and indomitable in warfare. He was a maker of poems and was called, by courtesy, a troubadour. Henry, the young king, had been crowned while his father was still alive to insure succession and to keep the scepter from the hands of his mother’s darling, Richard. The third of these charming gentlemen was John Lackland, still a shadowy figure. He pirouetted, frequently alone, in the marches of Brittany and stepped furtively through the massed warriors to the court at Paris. The fourth of these was Count Geoffrey, who supported during these years the maneuvers of young King Henry. The princes and their followers formed, in the central part of France, one figure in the dance. “It is the custom in my family,” said Richard cynically, “for the sons to make war on their father.” Geoffrey announced, “We hate our father only slightly more than we hate each other.”

The next dancer is the fat king himself, Henry II of England. He has become so fat that he is grotesque; yet despite this obesity he is never quiet, he never sits down, he is always a-horse. “Where will we find a bed large enough for this creature?” cried the French when he visited Paris. He is a Falstaffian king, a very mountain of [105] flesh. But underneath this is a shrewd hard mind, the mind of the Middle Ages, eclipsed now by the more modern intelligence of Philip of France. His secretary said that he was more violent than a lion; when he became angry his eyes filled with blood, his face became purple, and his voice trembled with emotion. In an access of fury he bit one of his pages in the shoulder. Humet, his favorite, once contradicted him. The king rushed at the courtier, who fled down the stairs. The king tore up a plank from the floor and threw it after the knight. “Never,” said a cardinal after a long conversation with the king, “have I seen a man lie so hardily.” Grotesque Henry II, whose wife and sons were in league against him and against each other, rushed through Normandy and Aquitaine, followed by a rout of histriones and parasites, pimps and prostitutes, men-at-arms, churchmen, and the bully boys of the world. He was trying to hold his vast kingdoms together against the attacks of his sons, of his wife, of Philip of France, of the barons of England and elsewhere, and of the church at Rome and Avignon, all of whom wanted it for themselves. He had held it together for twenty years, but now the whelps were gouging at his entrails and the king of France was beating him at every move.

The third, dancing solo, between Le Mans, Saumur, Chinon, and Poitiers is a danseuse, a bitter old hag of a woman, Eleanor, by the grace of God, queen of England. She is listed among the troubadours; she was granddaughter of one of the earliest and mother of one of the worst. She made a cuckold of her first husband, the king of France; then she cast him aside as too weak and chose as her master [106] the strongest man she could find, Henry, the young duke of Anjou. She brought wealth and power, men, ships, and lands, for his shrewd intelligence to use; but even when supported by all these, he could not break her. All he could do was to hold her in leash as he had held his turbulent barons in leash for a span of years. For this she never forgave him, and her hatred followed him to his grave. She was too weak herself to master her lord, so she bred him a race of sons and taught them the custom of their family. She is now sixty years old and a very old woman indeed. Eleanor the hag danced, and ever as she danced she whetted the appetite of her darling son Richard for the blood of his father. It was grotesque.

The king and his wife and their sons were moderns, people of their own age. The fourth dancer was “advanced.” He was Philip the crafty, Philip Augustus of France, the son of Eleanor’s first husband. He was a quiet man but shrewd. He preferred directing battles to fighting them. When he was a boy on a hunting party he was separated one day from his companions. He wandered alone in the forest for many hours and was found overcome by terror. His life was despaired of. Louis VII, his father and Eleanor’s first husband, made a personal pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray for him. St. Thomas à Becket, the patron of Canterbury, once led a splendid embassy to Paris to treat with King Louis; the king now paid his respects to the dead saint. King Henry II rode all night from London to meet Louis at Dover and later entertained him at London and Winchester, where Eleanor was kept safely locked in her tower. As part of [107] the celebration, bushels of silver pieces were heaped on the floor, and the knights were told to take as many as they pleased. Philip recovered. He played the princes against the king, the church against them all. He organized a popular secret society. The members had to vow to protect the country against foreigners and to preserve the peace. The costume was a linen hood. In 1183 the organization contained seven thousand tramps and cutthroats and fifteen hundred prostitutes. “They burned monasteries and churches and drove along before them the priests and the nuns. . . . ” Their concubines, according to another chronicle, made chemises of altar-clothes. They wanted to protect France against foreigners; they wanted to preserve the peace, and they were 100 per cent pure. Mass was chanted for Philip at all hours of the day and night. Whoever was the enemy of Henry of England was the friend of Philip of France.

Finally, Bertrand de Born, the last of the principals in this dance, is a slighter figure and less important. If you will go to hell with Dante you will see him carrying his head in his arms suffering eternal punishment for having stirred up strife between Henry and his sons, as though anybody could stir up strife between those elemental forces created to make war on each other. Sitting sideways on his horse, with a cynical smile on his face, he has gone to the Christmas court at Le Mans where the dancers are massed for a moment before entering in solemn procession the great cathedral on the hill where they will celebrate God’s birthday. There is a spark and a flame. Richard spurts south to Saumur and on to Poitiers, where he prepares [108] for a siege. Bertrand de Born pauses to sing a song to the Princess Matilda. There is another flash. Bertrand spurs his horse to the southwest, to his great castle at Hautefort near Périgueux. As he goes he sings war-songs and inflames the hatred of the barons against Richard. From Hautefort he makes the grand circle and sings at every castle, Ventadour, Cambron, Ségur, Turenne, Montfort, Gordon, Puyguilhem, Clarensac, Astier, Angoulême, Bernay, Givaudon, Armagnac, Tartas, and hundreds of others in the rough triangle Périgueux, Bordeaux, Toulouse.

The Christmas court began only one of the many movements of the maze and that one not the most important. You will see the young king die a traitor, and the old king, broken at last by his wife and her sons, turn his face to the wall with the words, “He too has deserted me? Let me die.”




2



The king is holding court at Le Mans. The birthday of God is being made the occasion of subtle maneuvering for position. He who can dance longest and quickest will secure for his pains the sovereignty of western Europe. There was solemn music in the cathedral which is now all that remains of the feudal pride of Le Mans. On the summit of an eminence it looks down on the one side over the Sarthe and the green valleys and the peasant women washing their clothes in the river; and on the other side over the modern city that has grown up at its feet. Opposite the cathedral was once the château where Henry II was born, and down the street was a house which tradition assigns to Queen [109] Berengaria, the wife of Henry’s rebellious, son, Richard the Lion-Heart. But to reconstruct these things one must cut away ruthlessly the pleasant eighteenth-century houses that cluster around the cathedral and with them the seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, fourteenth, and thirteenth century foundations upon which the modern houses were built. One must cut away the transept of the church, which is thirteenth-century, and leave only the Romanesque nave, which is a great church in itself but was in Henry’s time already old-fashioned, out-dated, and in need of renovation. The old nave was left standing but was called the transept. The new Gothic nave was built on to it at right angles. The old nave, now the transept, is good enough for God, who is very old himself; the new nave is for the world.

Into the church streamed a motley company of dancers. The old king waddled on legs bowed with too much riding; the young king, Henry, the flower of chivalry, walked proudly close to his father. There followed Richard, suspicious of this new amiability of his father’s, fearing and expecting some move to be made against his lordship over Aquitaine, acquired from his mother, the old queen. Perhaps Berengaria was there, a saintly maiden and a figure peculiarly improper in this gallery of rogues. There too was Bertrand de Born, the troubadour, the journalist, the trouble-maker. He was a shrewd observer of affairs and was amusing himself this season with the Princess Matilda, sister to these violent brethren, who was completing her education at the court of her father.

Following these come others: nobles, barons, clerks, [110] poets; the rout of prostitutes that always darted like flies about the courts of Henry and his sons, now crowding into the church to atone by a moment of prayer for a year of sin. The church is too small. They need a larger church, a modern church. The crowd is thick on the steps; it spreads out into the square. And old woman faints; a cavalier slips up behind a young wife and whispers in her ear. She pretends not to hear him. Her lips move in prayer or in assignation. The sanctus bell rings and announces to the mob that can neither hear nor see the service that the host is being elevated. Two monks look slyly at the choir-boy. There is an angry shout when several knights who have stepped on each other’s toes swear by God’s bonnet that the insult shall be wiped out in blood. Pushing and worming through the crowd are begging friars, imploring alms for the love of God, and loosening, when they can, jeweled bits from the brocaded dresses of the knights and ladies. Henry is restless. The stench of humanity, unbathed for generations, mingles with incense and floats out of the door of the cathedral. There is solemn chanting. Emasculate clerks with the torsos of full-grown men and the voices of women sing the soprano. Henry is restless. There are councils to be arranged, barons to be persuaded, work to be done. . . . The priest chants Nunc Dimittis — “Now let thy servant depart in peace.” Then the benediction . . . “In the name of the Father, the Son  . . . ” Henry and his party leave, cross the square to the hall of the château.

In order to understand the square they crossed, it is necessary to reconstruct for a certain extent the attitude [111] of the Middle Ages toward streets and roads. We of the present time like to look back on the medieval city as a small, clean, compact place. Then there were no elevated trains to violate the afternoon; nor did soot from factories cover your face with a veil when you left the house. One thinks of neat, clean little Rothenburg, built in the sixteenth century, and of the polished cobblestones of Monaco on the rock opposite Monte Carlo, and one thinks wrong. For Rothenburg and Monaco are medieval only in architecture and not very medieval even in that. The life of these cities is dominated and directed by the heresies of the twentieth century, that “cleanliness is next to godliness,” and the germ theory. To see the medieval street in its glory, one should walk fifty miles into the hills behind Monaco, or into some of the villages near Würzburg, Germany, or into the walled cities of China. Here the Middle Ages still live, worldly, pious, and unashamed. The streets, like the square which the royal party crossed to return to the château, bear upon their bosoms the filth of the ages. If one could have dug down deeply enough through the mud and slime, one would have found cobblestones scattered here and there, the refuse from the large blocks that went into building the houses. The square was simply the place where nothing had been built. It was every man’s club. It was the place where the common people lived. The house was the place where they slept. The square which the royal party crossed was not a bright clean little square between a picture château and a picture cathedral. It was a medieval square, which is to say, a dirty square.

[112]

In the hall of the château, a large oblong room, raftered, with a balcony at one end and windows cut in the thick walls forming large alcoves, dinner was served; but since meats of many kinds were the only dishes, Bernard and his friends called it more properly sitting at meat. Long heavy tables had been pushed into the center of the room, which was now filled to overflowing with all manner and ranks of hungry creatures, flea-bitten dogs, flea-bitten nobles snarling for charters and grants, unwashed servants, hangers-on, suitors, effeminate young men who hoped to become favorites of the king and his sons, and other effeminate young men who were favorites of the king and his sons; people from all conceivable ranks of society, sitting at meat with the fat king of the ingrowing toe-nail. The atmosphere was uproarious. Everybody was shouting and wrangling in a dozen different dialects, in all the dialects of western Europe except English, the language of a conquered race which none of its kings of that century could speak. Ragout was served in large bowls which were placed at intervals along the table. Everybody dipped in with his ladle. Everybody spilled it over everybody’s clothes, over the clothes of everybody’s neighbor, and spat upon the floor for the hungry dogs pieces of bone and gristle. The dish was highly spiced. Meat, in the days before the arts of refrigeration had developed to the present subtlety, wanted spices to make it palatable. The Crusades which were then in progress had brought into France in a single year more spices than France had imported during the five hundred years preceding. Although the king of England, fabulously wealthy, could no doubt [113] have squandered his wealth in spices when an ounce cost a duke’s ransom, now that spices were cheap, his cooks spiced it with spendthrift hands. The roast meats, smoky and burned, were served on the spit. The knights whipped out their knives and began carving. They tore the meat off with their fingers and stuffed it into their faces.

At the upper end of the room on a slight dais was the king’s table. He stood — Henry seldom sat, even at meat — surrounded by his counselors and body-guard. One carved for him, another tasted for him, and then he ate. While he ate, he argued fundamentalism with one of his nobles, a disciple of Abelard’s. The fire of fundamentalism, fanned by the blood and fat of an occasional eager revolutionary who overstepped the limits of propriety, was burning more brightly in those days than it is now. In the beginning of the century, Abelard, a young exquisite of good family, attempted to rationalize religion. He spoke of the mysteries of God in terms that the lords and ladies could understand. He pointed out that a sin committed in ignorance is not a sin, that the soldiers who, ignorant of Christ’s nature, nailed him to the cross were not sinning. As modern liberalists, working with a cruder logic, attempted to abolish hell, so Abelard, gallant, sophisticated, and worldly, attempted to abolish sin. Christ’s act of redemption was an act of pure love. Thus God is a kindly gentleman, a fastidious judge, and his passion is love. Henry, with his fat belly, his ingrowing toe-nail, and his gross manners, liked to argue these subtleties with his courtiers and his clerks. He and his friends built up the civilization, debated the doctrines, and evolved the principles which envelop [114] us in the twentieth century. The difference is not a difference of fundamental vision; it is a difference of technique.

After meat the tables were cleared and the hall was transformed into a council-room. The king and his body-guard, still watchful for attempts at murder, stood on the dais and argued. Young Henry, about to receive the homage of his barons, stood a little at one side talking to the ambassador of his good friend the king of France. On the other side was Richard, cordially hating the world. Beside him was Matilda, his mother’s representative, Bertrand de Born, and Marcabrun the troubadour making epigrams. “I have never loved,” said Marcabrun, “and I never shall.” “Love is a worse curse than war, epidemic, or famine.” “He who makes a bargain with love,” he continued, “makes a bargain with the devil.” “Love stings no more than a mosquito, but the cure is much more difficult.” Other things he said too, things not to be translated, for the mind of the Middle Ages was of a certain frankness which has been lost to the mind of the twentieth century.

A herald announced that young King Henry would receive the oath of fealty from his barons. The first to be called was his brother Richard, lord of Aquitaine. There was a moment of suspense. The break that was coming had been anticipated by all the world. Some hoped that young Henry would show a politic disposition and not demand the oath from his brother. Others like Bertrand de Born who were made for trouble smiled as Richard clapped Marcabrun on the back and whispered in his ear. [115] The herald called again, and still Richard paid no attention. Henry II, a man of scant ceremony even in those times, called to him that young Henry was ready to accept the oath of allegiance. What Richard replied is not known. His argument, however, was that he held Aquitaine by direct gift from his mother. It had come to her from William IX of Aquitaine with the stipulation that it was to remain always in her gift. Henry II had served there merely as regent. Richard was now an independent duke, and by God’s body he would swear allegiance for it to no b—— English king. Bertrand de Born was bored by the crudities of this court. The Princess Matilda was solicitous. “There is neither true laughter nor gaiety at this court,” said Bertrand, “and a court without these is merely a park for barons. Boredom and stupidity would have murdered me without doubt,” he continued, “had not the sweet compassion, the complaisance, and the conversation of your Highness saved my life.”

Richard left the hall and went to the cathedral, there for a moment he was safe from the attacks of his brother’s friends and refused to see anybody. Several clerics tried to pacify him, and others tried to pacify young Henry. “Forgive him his oath,” they urged the young king: “to-day his allegiance is merely a form. He might have taken the oath with the intention of breaking it. Overlook the fault.”

Young Henry, however, said: “If I forgive him the oath now, I leave him free to offer it to Philip of France. Philip, to be sure, is at present my good friend; but he is equally eager to be the good friend of Richard. Nothing [116] would delight France more than to get control of Aquitaine. Moreover, if I forgive him now, the shrewd fox my father will make up to him. I will remain forever a king without land.” Henry ordered the cathedral surrounded and commanded his men to arrest Richard when he tried to leave.

To Richard the peacemakers said: “What after all is it that the young king demands? It is merely an oath of fealty. The young king is powerless and holds his title in name only. The lord of Aquitaine is rich in money and men; he is still free to do as he pleases.” Richard finally consented and sent word that he would take the oath his father and brother saw fit to force upon him. Henry refused to accept an oath under these conditions, and Richard stormed out of the vestiary, broke through the circle of men-at-arms set to guard him, leaped on his horse, and, breathing threats and contumely on his brother and father, fled southward to Saumur.




3



If you wish to follow his route to-day, you must leave Le Mans by the road that runs along the railroad-track toward Parigné. Where the road turns toward the left, you continue straight ahead until the place where the road branches in three directions. The road at the left is the short cut to La Flèche, the road at the right is a more or less direct road to Tours. The dim bicycle-path between them, however, which leads through the forest of Les Mortes Œuvres and Les Guégilets to reach ultimately the Château l’Hermitage and the main road, is the one followed by Richard the Lion-Heart when he fled from the court [117] of his father and brother that Christmas day. At the Château l’Hermitage he crossed the main road and passed the modern village of Requeil, where, if you can find the hostess of the tavern, she may give you a bottle of her own special vin rouge to drink with your bread and cheese, a vin rouge which will put wings beneath your feet as you proceed south by west through green prairies and forests to La Flèche and an afternoon’s walk further to Baugé.

Now there are two Baugés, and let you not be mistaken by them. One is the modern city, a kind of Manchester, bustling and busy, gossipy and well fed. The other is Le Viel Baugé. It too is on the Loire, hardly a village and hardly worth the attention of the modern tourist except for its creeping streets and its general air of somnolence. A few kilometers further is the Château de Bois Bure. There is a sleepiness about these cities, disturbed sometimes when a wealthy American buys them up and renovates the castle or when a party of tourists, on excursion from Tours, comes clacking up the quiet hills. Then for a moment there is tumult in the hills again and the clicking of cameras. But for the most part, as my hostess said, “On dort bien ici!” And indeed, if one is trying to follow the turbulent dance danced by those lords a thousand years ago, one needs to sleep well. . . . 

From Le Viel Baugé Richard the Lion-Heart passed southward another eight leagues to Saumur through the country of smiles and laziness. Countless favorites of countless French kings took this country as theirs by right of nature and covered it thick with châteaux of a comparatively modern period. In the middle of August here the [118] fields are as lush and green as in the beginning of May, a fact which makes the country pleasant to look at; but if one is fleeing for one’s life through the by-paths of the lowlands, the country is heartbreaking.

The château of Saumur, built by Henry II to be a stronghold for his barons, rises from the plain a stark monument. When Richard reached there, it was still comparatively new and the latest thing in military architecture. Although it has been restored in recent years, its plan remains much as it was when Richard drove his horse up the high hill to the great south entrance now closed. Some fifty years after the conclusion of the saraband in which Richard participated, there was a dinner in Saumur which bears description.

It was the year 1242 when Louis of France held

a full court there, and I was there and can testify that it was the best ordered court that ever I saw. For, at the king’s table, ate after him, the Count of Poitiers, whom he had newly made knight at the Feast of St. John; and after the Count of Poitiers ate the Count of Dreux . . . and before the king’s table, opposite the Count of Dreux, ate my lord the king of Navarre, in tunic and mantle of samite, well bedight with a belt and clasp, and a cup of gold; and I carved for him.

Before the king, the count of Artois, his brother, served the meat, and before the king the good Count John of Soissons carved with the knife. In order to guard the king’s table, there were my lord Imbert of Beaujeu . . . and my lord Enguerra of Coucy, and my lord Archambaud of Bourbon. Behind these barons stood some thirty of their knights, in tunics of silken cloth to keep guard over them; and behind these knights there was a great quantity of sergeants bearing on their clothing the arms of the Count of Poitiers [119] embroidered in taffeta. The king was clothed in a tunic of blue satin, and surcoat and mantle of vermeil samite lined with ermine, and he had a cotton cap on his head which suited him very badly, because he was at that time a young man.

The king held his banquets in the great halls of Saumur which had been built, so it was said, by the great king Henry of England in order that he might hold his great banquets therein; and this hall is built after the fashion of the cloisters of the white monks of the Cistercian order. But I think there is none other hall so large and by a great deal. And I will tell you why I think so — it is because by the wall of the cloister, where the king ate, surrounded by his knights and sergeants who occupied a great space, there was also room for a great table where ate twenty bishops and archbishops. The Queen Blanche, the king’s mother, ate near their table at the head of the cloister at the other side from the king.

And to serve the queen there was the Count of Bologne who afterwards became the king of Portugal, and the good Count Hugh of St. Paul, and a German the age of eighteen years, who was said to be the son of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, for which cause it is told that the Queen Blanche kissed him on the forehead, as an act of devotion because she thought that his mother must ofttimes have kissed him there. . . . 

At the end of the cloister on the other side, were the kitchens and cellars, the pantries and the butteries; from this end were served to the king and to the queen meats and wine and bread. And in the wings and in the central court ate the knights in such numbers that I knew not how to count them. And many said they had never at any feast seen together so many surcoats and other garments, of cloth of gold and of silk; and it was said also that no less than three thousand knights were there present.

When Richard the Lion-Heart reached Saumur he found it held by a garrison of barons which his father had left there in readiness for activities against his restless subjects. [120] Richard prepared the castle for siege, and sent out embassies to the comparatively small number of lords in that part of the country on whose loyalty he could count. During his lifetime Richard had comparatively few friends. His popularity is largely posthumous. Although the Aquitanian lords feared Henry II, they both hated and feared Henry’s son Richard. Henry was stern but just and had the gift of winning confidence. Richard was stern, suspicious, and arrogant. Although his virtues show with comparative brilliance against the vices of his brother John, his vices are black against the brilliance of his father’s genius.

There are two roads which Richard may have followed on his angry ride from Saumur to Poitiers. One is now merely a little country road, well made as all French roads are, but obscure and unimportant. That it was once a thoroughfare is indicated by two facts. It runs through a country dotted by old castles, broken-down monasteries now used as farm-houses and barns, and churches which were built in another era. It follows a streamlet called La Dive out of Saumur, twists from one side to the other, gets lost in marshland, turns its back on the river, then, suddenly changing its mind, runs suddenly into it again near Moncontour, which contains an old donjon and keep. Since medieval roads cost nothing at all to build, and the trail which was used least was frequently less worn than the highroads, the traveler may have turned off, if he followed this trail, at a dozen or so châteaux to sow discontent against his father, to urge the barons to remain loyal to him, and to build fences.

If Richard went directly southwest on this trail or as [121] directly as the trail would permit, he passed within a league or two of Thouars, which has preserved its walls and a gate or two. The viscount of Thouars was just then rising to political power. A few years later he was to play an important though not a particularly savory part in the fall of the English continental power. Despite this viscount Thouars remained English for another two hundred years. When all of Aquitaine, Poitiers the proud, Angoumois and Saintonge, had driven out the English and had capitulated on terms which were very satisfactory to the lords of these cities, all the loyal English nobles left in the country gathered at Thouars, where they stood a bitter siege. Du Guesclin, the French general, agreed to an armistice. “If help does not reach us before November,” said the English, “we will capitulate.” The old king Edward III and the Black Prince set out from Southampton in the teeth of the autumn gales. For weeks they struggled against the wind, and finally, on November 1, the day of capitulation, realizing that the English power in France had finally been broken, they put back to England.




4



Beyond Moncontour the trail has been made into a highroad and joins at Mirebeau the national route which is the other trail Richard may have followed between Saumur and Poitiers. This national route runs east from Saumur, up the Loire, under the hills dotted with caves where the good wine of the district is being ripened to a luscious sweetness and smoothness. At Montsorbeau the road turns south to the famous abbey of Fontevrault.

[122]

The curious dichotomy in the religious thought of all times shown by the existence of a religious consciousness which expresses itself both by elaborate ritual, magnificent pomp, and display, and also by an insistence on a complete annihilation of physical demonstration and a denial of ritual and pomp, seems to have been more marked in the twelfth century than it is to-day only because the twelfth century failed to reach perfection and balance eight hundred years earlier than we. These eight hundred years are an imperfect glass through which we see only the extremes of the Middle Ages. We miss the infinitely small variations and gradations of thought. God is, after all, both body and spirit, and both those who exalt God’s body and those who praise his soul may find justification. Thus, in the century of the troubadours, bishops attired in cloth of gold studded with precious jewels carved their meat on silver platters and listened to and loved monks whose bodies were emaciated by fasting and religious passion. And the monks loved and listened to the bishops and the popes.

Robert d’Arbrissel, a Breton, was one of these fanatics. He understood the soul of God, and he pitied the bodies of men and women. After mastering the art of debate, he spent his youth exercising his talents against the lechery and simony of the prelates his masters. Failing to find martyrdom in this, he retired from the world. He went into the forest, built himself a hut of leaves, and, trusting to the antiseptic love of God, went unbathed for two years. In a land of superb wines he drank only water, and when his clothes wore out he covered his nakedness and [123] what was left of his emaciated body with a sack. The keenness of his intellect, his remarkable gift of words, his acts of faith, as well as the undoubted mercy of God in protecting and preserving him in his asceticism, attracted to his retreat a crowd of followers and the notice of Pope Urban II, who commanded him to evangelize the surrounding country.

Imagine him then, Robert the Breton, with matted beard and sunken eyes, with skinny arms protruding from a coat of sacking, paddling on bare feet and bare legs through the mud and slime of the medieval villages of the district, preaching hell-fire and damnation on the church steps, exhorting sinners to repentance and performing miracles. His labors were rewarded. He was followed by a mob of old and young, of men and women. Married women left their homes and good husbands to follow him; prostitutes deserted their ancient profession; mothers left their children. Rich and poor, saints and sinners, left their accustomed tasks to hang on his words and join in the halleluiah chorus. But there were, as usual, gossips. Husbands raised some protests when their young wives left comfortable homes to follow this wild man through the fields of Aquitaine. Husbands in those days knew what they knew about wives, and when the young gallants of the city whom husbands had no reason to trust were also fired by this religious zeal and joined the mad rout, the husbands of an age where public morals were controlled neither by police-court regulations nor societies for the improvement of public manners knew what they thought and said what they knew.

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Robert himself was sensitive on the subject of their complaints. He therefore chose a “wild and barbarous desert inhabited only by wild beasts and robbers,” half-way between the important castles of Saumur and Chinon, and there at Fontevrault established his order. In one place he built huts of leaves for the women, and some distance away — not more than a four or five minute journey — he built other huts of leaves for the men. The men were set to work in the fields to support the women, who spent their time keeping house and singing hymns. Even this arrangement had its drawbacks, and, as the settlement increased, Robert found himself forced to build a stone abbey for the women and another for the men and to separate these abbeys by a thick high wall. But another difficulty arose. For some reason reformed prostitutes began joining the order in large numbers. The “respectable women of the order” protested, and Robert had to build still another abbey not far away where the magdalens found asylum. The popularity of the abbey increased mightily during the eleventh century. The Angevin dukes and the Angevin kings treated it with particular charity, and when Richard passed it on his trip southward it was an institution of great fame. Later he was to return to it, and fat old Henry was to be carried in feet foremost; and bitter old Eleanor — but that is another story.




5



There is a short cut between Fontrevault and Chinon and a good old road from Chinon to Tours, but Richard probably pressed southward to the city of Mirebeau where, [125] twenty years later, his mother and his friends were to enact one episode in a great drama. In that strange family, where all well bred sons spent the greater part of their lives striking at their parents, it happened that Eleanor, whose bitter spirit would not face death, found herself one fine day at Mirebeau besieged by her grandson, the young Prince Arthur of Brittany, a stripling of sixteen, whose ambition to be sole lord of western France was supported by King Philip and opposed by the old queen and her son, the reigning King John. Young Arthur’s army, which contained a goodly number of rebel knights, had already penetrated the outer walls of the city when her messengers reached John at Le Mans. John, by forced marches (he traveled via Saumur and Fontevrault), covered the forty leagues between Le Mans and Mirebeau in three days, and succeeded not only in saving his city and his mother, but also in capturing many knights and the young Prince Arthur himself. Those knights who could pay ransom and took the oath of fealty, which to be sure was little more than a form, were released. Others were released after having their arms and legs chopped off; others were killed outright; and still others — a comparatively small number — were sent to England.

John had promised to save Arthur’s life, and what actually did happen to that impudent young prince is still a matter of conjecture. Scholars are agreed on only one point: he never got out of John’s hands. Some say his eyes were put out and that he finally lost his life trying to escape. Others pretend that John murdered him with his own hands and threw the body into the Seine. [126] It is rather difficult to be fair both to Prince Arthur and to King John with the words of Shakspere and the pathetic and unhistorical figure of the young boy before us. Yet when one has admitted that John was no more cruel than his predecessors and contemporaries, one does not by that declare that John could have learned from them to look on death with the repugnance of a well bred English vicar or that his or their manners were those of the English gentleman of good family. Arthur was a troublemaker and must be put out of the way. The fact that he was only sixteen years old does not count in his favor. Lads of sixteen in those days were accounted men and were thought to be responsible for their acts. The Aquitanian revolt was broken, and the great outcry that was raised by the beaten barons has been the cause for the shedding of many tears over the fate of the unfortunate Arthur. Although to this day nobody knows exactly what happened to the young prince, John is supposed to have perpetrated terrible atrocities. The putting out of eyes and the cutting off of legs and arms were among the amenities of chivalrous warfare. The Norman barons, John’s supporters, were disappointed that the king should by this stroke of luck have acquired sudden power. With Arthur out of the way, the king’s power was no longer dependent on the affability of his barons. Finally, political murder was not a new device then, nor is it entirely unknown to-day. During the last decade in France two important parties have carried out successful assassinations, and though both assassins were tried before legal courts, neither was convicted.

[127]

It must have been a great sight to see John’s men come riding down from Le Mans to Mirebeau, forty leagues in three days. There must have been a pretty scrap when Arthur’s men found themselves hemmed in between the outer and the inner walls of the city, caught like rats and cut down like wheat. There must have been screams and curses and brave words. Many a young boy there fought his first battle, and many an old warrior his last. Eleanor from her tower, part of which is still standing, grinned down on the battle, bitter old Eleanor, doddering now through the last steps of her long and tiresome dance. She had known many a young man in her time; she had seen many a young man killed. In her girlhood she had been called queen of the troubadours; in her womanhood she was queen of France; and now, in her haghood, she signed herself, Eleanor, by the grace of God, queen of England. Poor Eleanor.

All of these things were to happen in twenty years after Richard the Lion-Heart clattered into Mirebeau vowing, like a good son, curses and damnation on his father and worse than that on his brother Henry who was trying to do him out of a duchy. From Mirebeau it is but a step to the south to Poitiers the proud, famous for its vipers and devils, its beautiful women, its good church or two, and its hospitality to saints and troubadours.


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Gold embossed guitar from spine of this book.









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