Life in a Medieval Castle (12 page)

An everyday dinner, served between 10:00
A.M.
and noon, comprised two or three courses, each of several separate dishes, all repeating the same kinds of food except the last course, which consisted of fruits, nuts, cheese, wafers, and spiced wine.

On such festive occasions as holidays and weddings, fantastic quantities of food were consumed. When Henry III’s daughter married the king of Scotland on Christmas Day 1252 at York, Matthew Paris reported that “more than

sixty pasture cattle formed the first and principal course at table…the gift of the archbishop. The guests feasted by turns with one king at one time, at another time with the other, who vied with one another in preparing costly meals.” As for the entertainment, the number and apparel of the guests, the variety of foods: “If I were more fully to describe [them]…the relation would appear hyperbolical in the ears of those not present, and would give rise to ironical remarks.” Such feasts included boars’ heads, venison, peacocks, swans, suckling pigs, cranes, plovers, and larks.

During dinner, even on ordinary days, the party might be entertained with music or jokes and stories. Many households
regularly employed harpers and minstrels. Adam the harper was a member of Bogo de Clare’s household, and on occasion Bogo hired
ystriones
(“actors”) and at least once a
ioculator
(“jester”), William Pilk of Salisbury. When the meal was over, one of the guests might regale the company with a song; many a knight and baron composed songs in the tradition of the trouvères, the knightly poets who were the troubadours of the North (although in some cases the tunes for their verses seem to have been written by the traveling professional minstrels known as jongleurs). They might be accompanied by the harp, the lute, or the viele, ancestor of the violin. Sometimes the accompanist played chords as a prelude to the song and as background to an occasional phrase; sometimes the singer accompanied himself in unison on the viele and played the tune over once more when he had finished singing, as a coda. The verses—in French—were sophisticated in form and stylized in subject matter, usually falling into established categories: dawn songs, spinning songs, political satires (
sirventes
), laments, debates, love songs. They might be May songs, like the following celebrated poem by Bernard de Ventadour, protégé of Eleanor of Aquitaine (the notation is modern;

medieval music was normally recorded without division into measures, the rhythm being supplied by the words—except in part-singing or polyphonic music, where more precise time was necessary for synchronization):

(When the flower appears beside the green leaf, when I see the weather bright and serene and hear in the wood the song of the birds which brings sweetness to my heart and pleases me, the more the birds sing to merit praise, the more joy I have in my heart and I must sing, as all my days are full of joy and song and I think of nothing else.)

Or they might be songs of the Crusade, like the following, by the early thirteenth-century trouvère Guiot de Dijon:

(I shall sing to cheer my heart, for fear lest I die of my great grief or go mad, when I see none return from that wild land where he is who brings comfort to my heart when I hear news of him. O God, when they cry “Forward,” help the pilgrim for whom I am so fearful, for the Saracens are evil.)

Or lively picaresque songs like one by Colin Muset, another thirteenth-century poet:

(When I see winter return, then would I find lodging, if I could discover a generous host who would charge me nothing, who would have pork and beef and mutton, ducks, pheasants, and venison, fat hens and capons and good cheeses in baskets.)

Sometimes songs were sung with refrains to be repeated by a chorus; there were also lays, in which each verse had a different structure and musical setting.

The meal finished, tables were cleared, the company washed hands again, and turned to the afternoon’s tasks and amusements. “The ladies and the bachelors danced and sang caroles after dinner,” on a festive occasion in
The

Castellan of Coucy.
A carole was a kind of round dance in which the dancers joined hands as they sang and circled. Guests could be entertained with parlor games such as hot cockles, in which one player knelt blindfolded and was struck by the other players, whose identity he had to guess, or a variety of blind man’s bluff called hoodman blind, in which a player reversed his hood to cover his face and tried to catch the others. In
The Castellan of Coucy
, “after dinner there were wine, apples, ginger; some played backgammon and chess, others went to snare falcons.” Chess, widely popular, was played in two versions, one similar to the modern game, the other a simpler form played with dice. Either was commonly accompanied by gambling—the
household accounts of John of Brabant on one occasion recorded two shillings lost at chess. Dice games were played in all ranks of society, and even the clergy indulged. Bogo de Clare’s accounts reported three shillings handed to him on Whitsunday 1285 to play at dice. Bowls, a favorite outdoor pastime, also was accompanied by betting.

Recreation included horseplay. Matthew Paris described disapprovingly how Henry III, his half brother Geoffrey de Lusignan, and other nobles, while strolling in an orchard, were pelted with turf, stones, and green apples by one of Geoffrey’s chaplains, a man “who served as a fool and buffoon to the king…and whose sayings, like those of a silly jester…excited their laughter.” In the course of his buffoonery, the chaplain went so far as to press “the juice of unripe grapes in their eyes, like one devoid of sense.”

Supper was served in the late afternoon. Robert Grosseteste recommended “one dish not so substantial, and also light dishes, and then cheese.”

There were also late suppers, just before bedtime, drawing suspicion from such moralists as Robert Mannyng, who described midnight “rere suppers” of knights, “when their lords have gone to bed,” as giving rise to gluttony and waste, not to mention lechery.

The romance
L’Escoufle
(“The Kite”) pictures an evening in a castle, after supper: The count goes to relax in front of the fire in the damsels’ chamber, taking off his shirt to have his back scratched and resting his head in the lap of the heroine, Aelis, while the servants stew fruits over the hearth.

The household of the castle retired early. Manuals for household management describe the activities of the chamberlain in preparing his lord for bed:

Take off his robe and bring him a mantle to keep him from cold, then bring him to the fire and take off his shoes and his hose…then comb his head, then spread down his bed, lay the head sheet and the pillows, and when your

Juggler. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Harl. 4951, f. 298v)

The end of the day. (Trinity College, Cambridge. MS. 0.9.34, f. 37r)

sovereign is in bed, draw the curtains…Then drive out dog or cat, and see that there be basin and urinal set near your sovereign, then take your leave mannerly that your sovereign may take his rest merrily.