Life in a Medieval Castle (17 page)

The reeve, the most important of the village officers, was commonly elected by the tenants from among their own number—“the best husbandman in the village,” according to
Seneschaucie.
His responsibilities embraced every aspect of the manorial economy: overseeing all the activities of the villagers and the manorial servants, hailing them before the manorial court when they failed in their service, seeing to the upkeep of manorial buildings and implements and to the care of the lord’s livestock. Himself intimately connected with the village, the reeve had an understanding of his neighbors that an outsider like the steward or bailiff could never have. This close relationship must also have added to the difficulties of his position, in which he belonged to the village while serving the lord. Although the reeve was usually released from all customary services, paid a stipend, and allowed to keep his horse in the lord’s pasture and eat at the lord’s table during the harvest, men often avoided the office if possible and even paid fines to be released from having to serve in it. When villages sent representatives to the royal courts, the reeve usually headed the delegation of four of the “best men” of the village.

The men of a medieval village were members of a parish which coincided with the village rather than the manor. The church was usually the only stone building of the village. On its altar stood the principal image of the saint to whom the church was dedicated. The rood (cross) over the entrance to the choir was lit by candles endowed by the pious.

The parish priest was supported partly by tithes—every tenth sheaf, or the crop of every tenth acre—partly by offerings on feast days, and partly by the
glebe,
land that belonged to the church and was tilled sometimes by tenants, sometimes by the priest himself. In many parts of England and Europe the “second-best beast” of every villein who died belonged to the priest. According to custom he returned a third of his revenues in alms and hospitality to

the poor, to repair the church, and to pay his chaplain or clerk, but abuse of the office was common. Often the holder of the benefice was an absentee who lived at the university or at court and hired a vicar to take his place. Sometimes an abbot or convent held the church and appointed a vicar. Poor vicars were often villeins whose fathers had paid the lord to allow them to enter the church. Such ill-educated clerics were sometimes accused of using their churches as barns, threshing corn in the nave, and pasturing cattle in the churchyard. Late in the thirteenth century Archbishop of Canterbury John Peckham was constrained to order parish priests to preach at least four times a year.

Despite its shortcomings, the parish church played an important part in the life of every villager. He worked in the fields to the sound of its bells, and though its Latin remained a mystery to him, he regularly attended Mass. The church’s festivals marked the turning points of the year, and its rites every stage of a man’s passage through life: birth, marriage, and death.

The ideal of the village community, where within each class opportunity was rendered equal, where neighbors worked together, where status and blood line were carefully preserved, century after century, endured for a long time. By contrast, the similar ideal of the medieval city dweller, toward which the craft guilds worked and legislated—every
man practicing his craft and selling what he made, none very rich, none very poor—was only briefly and partially realized before the revival of commerce brought the rise of the great merchants and an increasing gap between rich and poor.

Much of the explanation for the greater durability of the village ideal lay in the slowness with which the money economy penetrated the countryside. Under the manorial system there was little scope for the kind of enterprise and industry that enriched the more successful city dwellers. Not until the sixteenth century did capitalist farmers appear in England, enclosing cultivated land, converting it to pasture, and changing tenants into wage laborers. Then, in the words of historian R. H. Tawney, “Villeinage ceases but the Poor Laws begin.”

When [Geoffrey of Anjou] entered the inner chamber of the king’s hall [at Rouen], surrounded by his knights and those of the king and a crowd of people, the king…went to meet him, affectionately embracing and kissing him, and, taking him by the hand, led him to a seat…All that day was spent in joyful celebration. At the first dawn of the next day, a bath was prepared, according to the custom for novice knights…After bathing, Geoffrey donned a linen undergarment, a tunic of cloth of gold, a purple robe, silk stockings, and shoes ornamented with golden lions; his attendants, who were being initiated into knighthood with him, also put on gold and purple. [Geoffrey], with his train of nobles, left the chamber to appear in public. Horses and arms were brought and distributed. A Spanish horse of wonderful beauty was provided for Geoffrey, swifter than the flight of birds. He was then armed with a corselet of double-woven mail which no lance or javelin could pierce, and shod with iron boots of the same double mesh; golden
spurs were girded on; a shield with golden lions was hung around his neck; a helmet was placed on his head gleaming with many precious stones, and which no sword could pierce or mar; a spear of ash tipped with iron was provided; and finally from the royal treasury was brought an ancient sword…Thus our novice knight was armed, the future flower of knighthood, who despite his armor leapt with marvelous agility on his horse. What more can be said? That day, dedicated to the honor of the newly made knights, was spent entirely in warlike games and exercises. For seven whole days the celebration in honor of the new knights continued.

Thus, in the description of chronicler Jean of Tours, was fifteen-year-old Geoffrey of Anjou initiated into knighthood by his future father-in-law, Henry I, in 1128. To the secular ritual the later twelfth century added a religious element. The aspirant kept a nightlong vigil in the castle chapel, purifying his soul as the bath cleansed his body. At daybreak a priest celebrated mass, after which the youth joined family and friends for breakfast. He then dressed in new clothes made especially for the occasion, usually of pure white rather than the purple-and-gold of Geoffrey of Anjou—white silk shirt, trunks, and tunic, and an ermine robe.

The dubbing ceremony commonly took place in the open air, on a platform or carpet, amid flourishes of trumpets and the music of minstrels. The youth’s father and several other knights, often including the father’s lord, helped him with his armor and equipment. The sword, blessed the night before by the priest, was brought; the young man reverently kissed its hilt, in the hollow of which holy relics might be encased.

Now came the climax, the
colée,
or buffet, usually executed by the father. Far from being a gently symbolic blow, the
colée
was an open-handed whack that often

knocked its recipient, prepared though he was, off his feet. According to the Spanish writer Ramon Lull, the purpose of the
colée
was an aid to memory, so that the young knight would not forget his oath, now administered.

“Go, fair son! Be a true knight, and courageous in the face of your enemies,” says the father in one romance. “Be thou brave and upright, that God may love thee—and remember that thou springest from a race that can never be
false,” says another. The young man replies, “So shall I, with God’s help!”

The ceremony over, the new-made knight sometimes entered the church and placed his sword on the altar, in sign of its dedication to the Holy Church.

He was now a knight, a member of the order of chivalry. His war horse, a gift of his father or lord, was led up in full harness. As soon as he was in the saddle, the young man was given his lance and shield, and after a gallop about, attacked the quintain, a dummy fashioned of chain mail covered with a shield and set on a post. Sometimes there was more than one post for the new knight to knock down, to make the test more difficult and more interesting. The show was usually topped off with mock fighting with lance and shield.

On occasion, knights were dubbed on the battlefield. William Marshal was knighted in 1167 by his sponsor and older cousin, William of Tancarville, hereditary chamberlain of Normandy, during the war between Henry II and Louis VII of France. On his way with reinforcements for the count of Eu at Drincourt, the chamberlain summoned the Norman barons under his command for the ceremony. Dressed in a new mantle, William Marshal stood before his cousin, who “girt him with a sword” and gave him the
colée.
Several years later, in 1173, William Marshal similarly knighted young Henry, Henry II’s eldest son, as preparation for battle. Henry handed the sword to William, saying, “I wish this honor to come from God and from you,” and in the presence of Henry’s entourage and assembled barons and knights, William “girt on the sword.” Instead of a buffet, William bestowed a kiss on the young man, “and,” in the words of William’s biographer, “so he was a knight.” More than four decades later William knighted another royal personage, nine-year-old Henry III, on the eve of his coronation.

Originally the term
chevalier
(
caballero, cavaliere, Ritter
—the

word in all languages, except the English “knight,” means horseman) simply indicated a warrior who fought on horseback, but even in its earliest stage it connoted a superiority of class, since only a man of means could afford a horse. The foundation of the crusading Order of the Temple in the twelfth century contributed both to the formalization of knighthood and to its association with Christianity. A Knight Templar wore a distinctive white-mantled uniform and swore to live by a Rule drawn from the Augustinian and Benedictine monks.

Thus the knight was a member of the noble class socially through the profession of arms, economically through the possession of horse and armor, and officially through a ceremony imbued with a religious sanction.

The origin of the knight’s horse (destrier, charger) remains something of a mystery. Apparently bred from partly Arab stock, he was huge and strong, capable of sustaining the shock combat that had revolutionized warfare. Through no coincidence, northwest France, the cradle of feudalism, was noted for its horse breeding. The later Percheron and Belgian draft horses (as well as the Suffolk in England) were descended from the medieval destriers.

As clashes between armed and mounted knights multiplied and as the Italian-introduced crossbow was adopted, improvements in armor became necessary, made possible by the growing affluence of the twelfth century. The conical, open-faced helmet of the First Crusade was replaced by a massive pot helmet that covered head, face, and neck, while the old-fashioned hauberk (shirt of mail), made of small metal discs sewn on linen, turned into chain mail, composed of interlocking iron rings and weighing forty pounds or more. (Plate armor still lay far in the future.)

Through the twelfth century the tendency toward exclusivity grew in the knightly class. Frederick Barbarossa and probably other sovereigns forbade peasants to become knights or to carry sword or lance, and by the thirteenth century the knightly aristocracy was in theory a closed caste, set apart from the rest of society. “Ah, God! how badly is the good warrior rewarded who makes the son of a villein a knight!” warns the romance
Girart de Roussillon.
But the poet’s admonition is itself evidence that villeins did indeed become knights in the twelfth century, and in the thirteenth the process was almost commonplace. The chief reason was the growing wealth of the merchant class. A grandfather might found a business, a father expand it, a son inherit a fortune. Such a son might purchase estates in the country from which he could draw an aristocratic name; he could afford expensive entertainment and bribes to great lords, and be knighted if he chose. Thenceforward his descendants were knights. Rather than seeking to suppress the custom, the great lords, in defiance of such edicts as Barbarossa’s, took the sensible course of regularizing it by charging a fixed fee for knighthood.

At the other end of the economic scale, again despite all prohibitions to the contrary, many a poor soldier won knighthood through valor in the service of a lord. Despite this double-ended openness of the knightly class, it nevertheless retained a distinct caste rigidity. Its newest members,

like parvenus of every age, copied or even excelled the hauteur of their older brothers in aristocracy.

Whatever his father’s origin, the son of a knight normally grew up to be knighted. As a squire, or knight-aspirant, he began his apprenticeship, often in the household of his father’s lord, cleaning out stables, currying horses, cleaning armor, serving at table, while he learned to ride a horse and wield sword and lance, with plenty of practice at the quintain. William Marshal underwent this training for eight years in the household of William of Tancarville.

The youthful aspirant was thoroughly imbued with the code of chivalry. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the chivalric ideal was fostered by the legends that had grown up around Charlemagne and Roland, and in England by the newer King Arthur stories. Arthur, a barely discernible real-life figure in sixth-century Britain (as was Roland in ninth-century France) was first given prominence in the

twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his highly imaginative
History of the Kings of Britain.
Robert Wace, a Norman poet from the island of Jersey, read Geoffrey’s book and made Arthur the hero of a romance he composed for Eleanor of Aquitaine. Wace embellished Arthur’s court with a Round Table, and Chrétien de Troyes, a poet at the court of Eleanor’s daughter Marie of Champagne, moved Arthur’s court from Caerleon, Monmouthshire, to fictitious (or undetermined) Camelot. Chrétien’s romances completed an important transition by shifting emphasis from Arthur himself to the knights, especially Lancelot and Percival. Chrétien and other poets, English, French, and German, glorified the code by which knights were supposed to live, stressing honor, generosity, loyalty, and dedication to God and Church.