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CHAPTER VII.

LIFE AND LAW IN ANGLO-NORMAN ENGLAND.

Feudal divisions-The Norman keep-Homage-The tournament--Dubbed a knight-Dress in war and peace-Meals and food-Amusements--The monastery-Norman schools-Curia Regis-Duel and assize-Roots of law-Royal revenue.

THE

HE Norman land-owners were for the most part tenants-inchief, who held their lands directly from the crown, and formed the aristocracy of the land. The English thanes who were allowed to retain their lands became free-tenants or franklins, but they also were required to swear fealty to the king. The mass of the conquered English, both the ceorls and the serfs, were reduced to villenage. The villein (from ville, a farm), of whom there were two classes-the villein regardant, attached to the soil, and the villein in gross, attached to the person of his lord-could, in theory at least, own neither money nor goods. Yet he often bought his freedom. To become a priest and to escape to a town were also methods of obtaining this boon. In both instances the villein was considered as having exchanged one service for another; for priests served the Church, and corporate towns ranked as barons. The line between the villein and the freeman was not always sharply drawn, for freemen sometimes did villeins' service.

The great stone castle in which a Norman baron lived, with its solid walls and its tall frowning keep, betokened an age of violence and distrust. Beauty gave way to strength and the

needs of safety.

The massive building often covered several acres, and was girdled with a green and slimy ditch, around the inner edge of which ran a parapeted wall pierced with shot-holes, If an enemy managed to cross the moat and force the gateway, in spite of a portcullis crashing from above, and of melted lead pouring in streams from the top of the rounded arch, a small part of his work was yet done. The keep lifted its huge block of masonry within the inner bailey or court-yard, and from the narrow chinks in its ten-foot wall there rained an incessant shower of arrows, sweeping all approaches to the narrow stair, by which alone access could be had to it. These loopholes were the windows whence the chieftain, like a vulture in his rocky nest, watched all the surrounding country.

Thus a baron in his keep could defy, and often did defy, the king himself. Under his roof, eating daily at his board, lived a throng of armed retainers, and around his castle lay farms tilled by martial yeomen, who at his call laid aside their implements of husbandry, took up the sword and spear, and marched beneath his banner to the war. Each of them, with robe ungirt and head uncovered, had done homage and sworn an oath of fealty, placing his joined hands between those of the sitting baron and humbly saying as he knelt: "I become your man from this day forward, of life and limb and of earthly worship, and unto you shall be true and faithful, and bear to you faith for the tenements that I claim to hold of you, saving the faith that I owe unto our sovereign lord the king."

It

The author of Ivanhoe, and kindred pens, have made the tournament a picture familiar to all readers of romance. therefore needs no long description here. It was held in honour of some great event- —a coronation, a wedding, or a victory. Having practised well during squirehood at the quintain,* the

* The quintain was a revolving wooden figure-often representing a Saracen- which, if not struck right in the centre with the blunted lance, whirled rapidly on its pivot, and dealt the awkward marksman a smart stroke with its outstretched wooden sword.

knight, clad in full armour, with visor barred and the colours of his lady on crest and scarf, rode into the lists, for which some level field or meadow was chosen. The simple joust was the shock of two knights, who galloped against each other with levelled spears, aimed at breast or head. The object of each rider was to unhorse his antagonist. The mellay (mêlée) hurled together, at the dropping of the prince's baton, two parties of knights, who hacked away at each other with axe and mace and sword, often gashing limbs and breaking bones in the wild excitement of the fray. Bright eyes glanced from the surrounding galleries on the brutal sport; and when the victor, with broken plume and dusty armour, dragged his limbs to the footstool of the beauty who presided over the festival as Queen, her white hands decorated him with the meed of his achievements.*

The little page, well trained in manners, music, chess, and the missal, left the society of the ladies at about fourteen, to enter on the duties of a squire. Having received a sword and belt at the altar, he was entitled to carve at table, to rivet his master's armour in camp and tilt-yard, and to follow the knight in the charge with spare lances and a led horse. At twenty-one, or on the performance of some valorous deed, he kept vigil in a church, received his golden spurs, bent for the accolade,† and rose from his knees a dubbed knight.

The chain-mail of the first Crusaders was exchanged in the fourteenth century for plate armour, which at last became so heavy that an unhorsed knight had difficulty in rising from the ground. The Norman conquerors were clad in mail formed of steel lozenges sewed on a leathern or woollen suit. The Norman dress in time of peace consisted of a tunic, long tight hose, a short cloak lined or trimmed with expensive fur, and shoes with

* The people imitated this aristocratic sport by tilting against each other from swiftly pulled boats; and boys, skating on the Thames with the shank-bones of sheep tied to their feet, played at tournament with staves. The quarter-staff was a species of long cudgel, greatly used by the peasantry and yeomen of the time.

The accolade was a blow with the flat of a sword, administered to the candidate for knighthood by the prince or noble who conferred the rank.

long peaked toes. Ladies exchanged the Saxon gown for a flowing robe with sleeves so long that they were knotted up to keep them from trailing on the ground. The shaveling soldiers of the Conquest, imitating the English fashion, soon began to grow long beards, and to wear their hair in masses on the neck. Henry the Second, who won his name of Curtmantle by the revival of the little Norman cloak, also set the example of shaving closely. Both beard and moustache, however, broke out into full luxuriance under Coeur de Lion—a result perhaps of camp life in the Crusades.

The Normans probably dined at nine in the morning. When they rose, they took a light meal, and they ate something also after their day's work, immediately before going to bed. Goose and garlic formed a favourite dish. Their cookery was more elaborate and, in comparison, more delicate than the preparations for a Saxon meal. But the character for temperance which they brought with them from the Continent soon vanished, for they learned from the conquered Saxons to eat and drink to excess. The poorer classes hardly ever ate flesh, living principally on bread, butter, and cheese, a social fact which seems to underlie that usage of our tongue by which the living animals in field or stall bore Anglo-Saxon names-ox, sheep, calf, pig, deer; while their flesh, promoted to Norman dishes, rejoiced in names of French origin-beef, mutton, veal, pork, venison.

The jongleur, who under the Normans took the place of the Saxon gleeman, sang songs of love and war; but he soon degenerated into the mechanical juggler, who amused the common people in the court-yard with his tricks and sorry jokes, and with the antics of his trained monkey or bear. The fool, too, clad in coloured patchwork, cracked his jokes and shook his cap and bells at the elbow of roaring barons. Already strolling

* Both jongleur and juggler are forms of joculator, from Lat. jocus, a jest. The M.E. form was jogelour.

players, tramping round the land, had roused the anger of the Church by the licentious doggerel which they recited in marketplaces and court-yards, and had induced zealous priests to get up Mysteries or plays founded on the Bible stories, in order to neutralize the poison they diffused in the public mind. Thus originated the earliest form of the English drama.

While knights hunted in the greenwood or tilted in the lists, and jongleurs sang in the hall, the monk in the quiet Scriptorium compiled chronicles of passing events, copied valuable manuscripts, and painted rich borderings and brilliant initials on every page. These illuminations form a valuable set of materials for our pictures of life in the Middle Ages.* Monasteries served many useful purposes at that time. Besides their manifest value as centres of study and literary work, they gave alms to the poor, a supper and a bed to travellers; their tenants were better off and better treated than the tenants of the nobles; the monks could store grain, grow apples, and cultivate their flowerbeds, with little risk of injury from war, because they had spiritual thunders at their call, which awed the superstitious soldiery into a respect for sacred property. Splendid structures these monasteries generally were. Nor was architectural taste the only reason of their magnificence. Since they were erected as offerings to Heaven, the pious builders spared no cost in decorating the exterior with fretwork and sculpture of Caen stone, and the interior with gilded cornices and windows of painted glass.

As schools, too, the monasteries did no trifling service to society in the Middle Ages. In the Trinity College Psalter we have a picture of a Norman school, where the pupils sit in a circle around the master as he lectures to them from a long roll

* The celebrated Bayeux tapestry affords our best material for vivid sketches of Norman life at the time of the Conquest. This great roll of linen (214 feet by 20 inches) contains a series of views, worked in coloured wool, of the Norman Conquest-from Harold's departure for Normandy to the defeat of the Saxons at Hastings. Wrought, it is said, by Matilda, the Conqueror's queen, and by her presented to the Cathedral of Bayeux, where Odo was bishop, it has come down to our day in good preservation, and is now kept on a roller in the hotel of the prefecture of Bayeux, which is a town of Calvados in France, situated on the little river Aure.

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