Life in a Medieval Castle (8 page)

Before a visit to York in 1251 for the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Alexander III of Scotland, the king specified a privy chamber twenty feet long “with a deep pit” to be constructed next to his room in the archbishop’s palace.

Hay often served as toilet paper; Jocelin of Brakelond tells how Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds one night dreamed he heard a voice telling him to rise, and woke to find a candle carelessly left by another monk in the privy about to fall into the hay.

By the later thirteenth century, the castle had achieved a considerable degree of comfort, convenience, and privacy. The lord and lady, who had begun by eating and sleeping in the great hall with their household, had gradually withdrawn to their own apartments. Bishop Robert Grosseteste thought the tendency toward privacy had gone too far and advised the countess of Lincoln: “When not prevented by sickness or fatigue, constrain yourself to eat in the hall before your people, for this shall bring great benefit and honour to you…Forbid dinners and suppers out of the hall and in private rooms, for from this arises waste and no honour to the lord and lady.”

A century later, in
Piers Plowman
, William Langland echoed the bishop’s warning. Langland blamed the change on technology: the wall fireplace, with its draft chimney, which freed the household from huddling around the central hearth of the old days:

Woe is in the hall each day in the week.

There the lord and lady like not to sit.

Now every rich man eats by himself

In a private parlor to be rid of poor men,

Or in a chamber with a chimney

And leaves the great hall.

[The lady of Faiel] entered, a golden circlet on her blonde hair. The castellan saluted her, sighing: “Lady, God give you health, honor and joy.” She replied: “And God give you pleasure, peace and health.” Then he took her hand and made her sit down near him…He looked at her without saying anything, too moved to speak, and grew pale. The lady saw this and apologized for the absence of her husband. The castellan replied that he loved her and that if she did not have mercy on him, nothing mattered to him. The lady reminded him that she was married and that he must ask her for nothing which would soil the honor of herself or her lord. He replied that nothing would keep him from serving her all his life.

—The Castellan of Coucy

Her hair was golden, with little love-locks; her eyes blue and laughing; her face most dainty to see, with lips more vermeil than ever was rose or cherry in the time of summer heat; her teeth white and small; her breasts so firm that they showed beneath her vesture like two
rounded nuts; so frail was she about the girdle that your hands could have spanned her, and the daisies that she broke with her feet in passing showed altogether black against her instep and her flesh, so white was the fair young maiden.

—Aucassin and Nicolette

The lady of Faiel and Nicolette were heroines of two popular thirteenth-century romances. Renaut de Coucy’s lady, “best, noblest and most intelligent of the land,” was worshipped by her lover, who wore her sleeve as a token in battle, composed songs to her, and endured a series of painful trials before at last winning her favor. Beautiful, accomplished, adored, she devoted her life to love—outside the marriage bond. Nicolette, for her part, physically exemplified the medieval feminine ideal—blonde, delicate, fair-skinned, boyish of figure.

Scores of similar ladies dazzled lovers in the outpouring of fiction of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but how much they reflect the flesh-and-blood lady of the castle is difficult to say. Little information is available on the personalities and private lives of the women who presided over Chepstow and other castles. One fact, however, is well substantiated: The castle lady customarily was a pawn in the game of politics and economics as played by men.

Although a woman could hold land, inherit it, sell it, or give it away, and plead for it in the law courts, most of a woman’s life was spent under the guardianship of a man—of her father until she married, of her husband until she was widowed. If her father died before she married, she was placed under the wardship of her father’s lord, who was felt to be legitimately concerned in her marriage because her husband would be his vassal. In the case of an heiress, marriage was a highly profitable transaction—a suitor might pay a large sum for the privilege. But wardship itself was a sought-after prize, because the guardian pocketed the
income from the estate until the ward’s marriage. Many medieval legal battles were fought over rich wards, and even those not so rich attracted greedy notice. In 1185 Henry II ordered an inventory of all the widows and heirs in the realm with a view to possible royal claims. The age, children, lands, livestock, rents, tools, and other possessions of widows were painstakingly enumerated. A typical entry read:

Alice de Beaufow, widow of Thomas de Beaufow, is in the gift of the lord king [i.e., in his wardship]. She is twenty and has one son as heir, who is two. Her land in Seaton is worth £5 6s. 8d. with this stock, namely two plows, a hundred sheep, two draught animals, five sows, one boar, and four cows. In the first year in which the land has been in her hand she has received in rent 36s. and 10d. and two pounds of pepper, and apart from the rent her tenants have given her 4s. and three loads of oats.

The wardship of a wealthy three-month-old orphan provoked a spirited resistance by Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds against Henry’s son Richard the Lionhearted. In the end the king surrendered to the prelate in return for the gift of some hunting dogs and horses. But the abbot was foiled by the infant’s grandfather, who successfully kidnapped her, and Samson finally sold his claim to the wardship to the archbishop of Canterbury for 100 pounds. The little girl survived and appreciated in value, the archbishop in his turn selling the wardship to Thomas de Burgh, brother of the king’s chamberlain and future justiciar, for 500 marks (333 pounds).

The daughter of a great lord was typically brought up away from home, in the castle of another noble family, or in a convent, where she might spend her life if she did not marry. Education of girls evidently compared favorably with that of their brothers. The differences in the training of the two sexes were given a jocular exaggeration by the writers of romances, who pictured boys as learning “to feed
a bird, to hawk, to know hunting dogs, to shoot bow and arrow, to play chess and backgammon,” or “fencing, horsemanship and jousting,” whereas girls learned “to work with needle and shuttle…read, write and speak Latin,” or to “sing songs, tell stories and embroider.” Ladies of rank were patrons of poets and wrote poetry themselves, and some devoted themselves to learning. Yet, like their husbands, ladies enjoyed hunting and hawking (on their seals they were often portrayed holding a falcon) and chess.

Girlhood was brief. Women were marriageable at twelve and usually married by fourteen. Heiresses might be married in form as young as five and betrothed even younger, though such unions could be annulled before consummation. By twenty a woman had a number of children, and by thirty, if she survived the hazards of childbirth, she might be widowed and remarried, or a grandmother.

Whereas personal choice and attraction played a part in the marriages of peasant girls on the manors (where marriage commonly followed pregnancy), the marriages of ladies were too important to be left to predilection. There were exceptions. King Henry III’s sister Eleanor, married to Chepstow’s Earl William Marshal II at the age of nine and widowed at sixteen, married Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, in 1238 in the king’s private chapel at Westminster, with the king giving the bride away. The following year the king quarreled with De Montfort, who, he revealed, had “basely and clandestinely defiled” Eleanor during courtship. “You seduced my sister before marriage, and when I found it out I gave her to you in marriage, though against my will, in order to avoid scandal,” were the king’s words, reported by Matthew Paris.

There is evidence that many marriages were happy. The fourteenth-century noble author Geoffrey de la Tour touchingly described his late wife as

both fair and good, who had knowledge of all honor…and of fair behavior, and of all good she was the bell and flower; and I delighted so much in her that I made for her love songs, ballads, roundels, virelays, and diverse things in the best wise I could. But death, that on all makes war, took her from me, which has made me many a sorrowful thought and great heaviness. And so it is more than twenty years that I have been for her full of great sorrow. For a true lover’s heart never forgets the woman he has truly loved.

Although there was no legal divorce, the taboo against consanguineous unions provided general grounds for annulment suits, especially since it extended to distant cousins, and even relationship by marriage could be invoked. The Church did not always admit such claims. When in 1253 Earl Roger Bigod, lord of Chepstow and grandson of the first William Marshal, repudiated his wife, the daughter of the king of Scotland, because he was allegedly related to her, the Church ruled that he should take her back, and Roger gave in: “Since such is the judgment of the Church, I safely and willingly accede to the marriage, of which I was formerly doubtful and suspicious.”

The bride brought a marriage portion and received in return a dower amounting to a third part of her husband’s estate, sometimes specific lands named at the church door on her wedding day, which became hers on her husband’s

death. Even without this formal assignment, a third of his lands was legally hers, and if the heir was slow to turn it over to her, she could bring an action in the royal courts to secure it. The dower was accepted as a fixed charge throughout the feudal age, but was gradually replaced by a settlement made at the time of the marriage.

Once married, a woman was “under the rod” or “under the power” of her husband. She could not “gainsay” him even if he sold land which she had inherited, could not plead in court without him, or make a will without his consent.

Women recovered some of these rights when they became widows. Sometimes a widow even successfully sued to recover land sold by her husband “whom in his lifetime she could not gainsay.” But in England before Magna Carta the king could force the widows of his tenants-in-chief to remarry, and if they wished to remain unmarried or to choose their own husbands they had to pay him large fines. Magna Carta limited the king’s power in this respect while reiterating that a widow must not marry without the consent of her lord, whether he was the king or one of the king’s vassals. Another article of Magna Carta provided that the king’s wards, whether widows or maidens, should not be “disparaged”—married to someone of lower rank.

Consent was one of the legal conditions for marriage, and marriages could be annulled on the grounds that they had been contracted against the will of one of the parties. In 1215 King John gave young Lady Margaret, daughter of his chamberlain and widow of the earl of Devon’s heir, as a reward to the mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté. When Falkes was exiled in 1224, Margaret presented herself before the king and the archbishop and asked for an annulment, declaring that she had never consented to the marriage. On her death in 1252, Matthew Paris, characterizing the marriage as “nobility united to meanness, piety to
impiety, beauty to dishonor,” quoted a Latin verse someone had written about the marriage:

Law joined them, love and concord of the bed.

But what kind of law? What kind of love? What kind of concord?

Law out of law, love that was hate, concord that was discord.

The chronicler did not mention the fact that Margaret, who had been married to Falkes for nine years and had had at least one child by him, had waited for his downfall to seek legal redress. Falkes died in Rome in 1226 while petitioning the Pope to restore his wife and her patrimony to him.

For all her legal disabilities, the lady played a serious, sometimes leading role in the life of the castle. When the lord was away at court, war, Crusade, or pilgrimage, she ran the estate, directing the staff and making the financial and legal decisions. The ease with which castle ladies took over such functions indicates a familiarity implying at least a degree of partnership when the lord was at home. Besides helping to supervise the household staff and the ladies who acted as nurses for her children, the lord’s wife took charge of the reception and entertainment of officials, knights, prelates, and other castle visitors. Bishop Robert Grosseteste advised the countess of Lincoln to deal with her guests “quickly, courteously and with good cheer,” and to see that they were “courteously addressed, lodged and served.”

Inferior legal status did not reduce women to voiceless shadows. Contemporary satirists in fact pictured women as quarrelsome and pugnacious. In one of his sermons, the famous Paris preacher Jacques de Vitry told the story of the man with a wife

so contrary that she always did the reverse of what he commanded, and received in a surly manner the guests whom he often asked to dinner. One day he invited several to dine with him, and had the tables set in the garden near a stream. His wife sat with her back to the water, at some
distance from the table, and regarded the guests with an unfriendly face. Her husband said: “Be cheerful to our guests, and draw nearer the table.” She on the contrary pushed her chair farther from the table and nearer the edge of the stream at her back. Her husband, noticing this, said angrily: “Draw near the table.” She pushed her chair violently back and fell into the river and was drowned. Her husband jumped in a boat and began to seek his wife with a long pole, but up the stream. When his neighbors asked him why he looked for his wife up the stream instead of below as he should, he answered: “Do you not know that my wife always did what was contrary and never walked in the straight way? I verily believe that she has gone up against the current and not down with it like other people.”

An incident of 1252 described by Matthew Paris furnishes a picture of the medieval lady as a person capable of self-assertion even against so daunting an opponent as the king. Isabella, countess of Arundel, visited King Henry III to protest his claim of a wardship of which he owned a small portion, but which belonged mainly to her. The countess, “although a woman” (in Matthew Paris’ aside), demanded, “Why, my lord king, do you avert your face from justice? One cannot now obtain what is right and just at your court. You are appointed a mediator between the Lord and us, but you do not govern well either yourself or us…moreover, without fear or shame, you oppress the nobles of the kingdom in divers ways.” The king replied ironically, “What is this, my lady countess? Have the nobles of England…given you a charter to be their spokeswoman and advocate, as you are so eloquent?” The countess answered, “By no means, my lord, have the nobles of your kingdom given me a charter, but you have given me that charter [Magna Carta], which your father granted to me, and which you agreed and swore to observe faithfully and to keep inviolate…I, although a woman, and all of us, your natural and faithful subjects, appeal against you before the tribunal of the awful judge of all; and heaven
and earth will be our witnesses, since you treat us with injustice, though we are innocent of crime against you—and may the Lord, the God of vengeance, avenge me.” The king, according to Matthew, was silenced by this speech, “and the countess, without obtaining, or even asking for permission, returned home.”