The Magnificent Century

by Thomas B. Costain

  Boys, always eager to ape their elders, had bows of their own and would cover up their lack of skill by capering and singing:

  “All in a row, a bendy bow:

  Shoot at a pigeon and kill a crow,

  Shoot at another and kill his brother.”

  Younger children amused themselves on teeter-totters, although the name used then was merrytotter. They often played a game called Nine Men’s Morris, which required a whole field.

  The English, in fact, were great lovers of sport. In winter they fastened the bones of animals to their feet and skated on frozen ponds and streams. Those who could afford such luxuries had a kind of skate with a metal edge, but they did not call them skates; they were termed scrick-shoes. A very popular game was known as bandy-ball, in which a crooked stick was used to clout a ball about a field. This form of amusement sired two quite different types of game, goff and shinny. Men bowled on the green and also played kayles or closh, a form of ninepins. They differed from most people in preferring games in which they could participate. Whole villages would turn to kick a ball or frisk around a Maypole.

  At the same time they were avid followers of less healthy forms of sport in which they played the part of spectators—bear-baiting, bull-running, badger-baiting, and cockfighting.

  The recreations of the nobility were somewhat more dignified. The tournament was the great amusement of the age and it drew all classes of people. Between joustings the brave knights kept the eye in for the next splintering of lances by practicing at the quintain, a special type of target Sometimes live quintains were used, men who covered themselves with a shield and defied the champions to bowl them over.

  Hunting and hawking engaged most of the waking time of the nobility. Ladies of gentle blood took an active interest in both. Their participation sometimes took the form of sitting in an enclosure and shooting arrows at game driven past them. This, needless to state, did not suffice for the bolder ones who preferred to go into the field with their own harehounds. Ladies became expert hawkers and were seldom seen in the saddle without a hooded marlyon on wrist. The love of hawking, in fact, was universal. The poor man with his tercel and the yeoman with his goshawk (a certain type of hawk was designated for each class) were seen as often as the earl with his falcon and the knight with his sacret.

  The indoor amusements of the nobility included chess and an early form of backgammon. After supper in the great hall the minstrels would fill the hours with their ballades while the well-stuffed guests drank their wine. Minstrels were often well paid for their efforts, it being a not uncommon thing for the host to reward a particularly good performance with a gift of the cloak he was wearing or a drinking cup from the table.

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  When people are happy they turn to music, and so it is not surprising that during the years of this remarkable century there was a great revival of minstrelsy. The bardy-coats (so called because of the shortened garments they wore) went up and down the land, singing the songs of Assanduan and Hastings, the ballades of Richard the Lion-Heart and Henry and the Fair Rosamonde. They were a race apart, these itinerant musicians, capable of playing on harp or vielle (which the common people called a fydel, or fiddle), with the use of an arched bow which produced a long-drawn-out accompaniment called a “drone bass.” Sometimes the vielle was operated by the turning of a handle, which made it the distant ancestor of the modern hurdy-gurdy. Sometimes the bardy-coats would lay their instruments aside and tell losel tales instead; and then the villagers would roar with laughter and slap their muscular thighs over anecdotes of scolds and cuckolds and fustian adventure. Sometimes a party of entertainers would roam up and down the land, consisting of jugglers and tumblers as well as minstrels, and even girls who danced on the shoulders of the gleemen.

  The better class of minstrel found employment in the household of a nobleman. He then wore a distinctive dress, a red jacket over a parti-colored tunic and a yellow hood, the costume later used by court jesters. Even these musicians of a relatively lordly stature were under the ban of the Church, however, being forbidden the sacraments; which placed them in the company of excommunicates, sorcerers, prostitutes, and epileptics.

  Music up to this time had been largely liturgical, the one-voiced Gregorian plain song which had the sanction of the Church. Now folk music, which went back some centuries and was polyphonic, began to come into its own at last In England folk singing in the form of the motet can be traced back centuries before the Conquest. The first records of actual music for more than one voice are found, therefore, in the island kingdom. The motet sounds very confusing to the modern ear. It has three parts, each with a different number of syllables to the measure and each with different words. There can be no doubt that dramatic intensity was achieved by this method, and by the end of the thirteenth century it had come into steady use, even in the secular church. The center had shifted from England to France, where in the cathedral later known as Notre Dame there was a quite fabulous musical school under the direction of the great Magister Perotinus Magnus.

  The Church did not accept these innovations with any gladness. In fact, there was much opposition and much thundering of threats against those who composed these disorganizing songs and those who sang them. The refusal to admit minstrels to the sacraments was part of the effort to maintain plain song as the one form of musical expression. This had no effect: let churchmen inveigh as much as they liked, the love for polyphonic music grew. Wherever men and women gathered and the opportunity arose for song, on communal green, on the roads where groups plodded along together, the new music would be heard, voices blending in motet and hocket.

  The Church was particularly opposed to a class of singers who became known as goliards. These wandering minstrels were sometimes renegades from clerical life, sometimes students who had failed to achieve anything at the university and had taken to a vagrant life, wining, wenching, dicing, singing. They seldom attempted to do more than entertain peasants at village inns, knowing how darkly the eye of authority turned on them. They lived and died, therefore, in obscurity, and this is unfortunate because many of them were brilliant fellows, capable of composing music of a delightfully melodious turn and of writing words to match. Collections have been made of such of their songs as have survived, and these make it clear that they produced love lyrics and nature songs of rare artistry. For the most part, of course, they specialized on different fare, knowing the tastes of the people on whom they depended for a living. Their drinking and gambling songs were bawdy in the extreme. They even indulged in obscene and sacrilegious parodies of the church litanies.

  England produced her full share of goliards. They went from tavern to tavern, cutting their capers, singing their rowdy songs with much drollery, getting an occasional penny and free meal, couching a hogshead (sleeping in a barrel) when in town, curling up under a hedge when in the country. It was a short life and a merry one for the goliard. He died in a brawl or at the end of an official rope for thievery, his François Villon type of life seldom bringing him a moment of peace in life or an orderly departing therefrom. He helped considerably in making life more bearable for the common man, so peace to his memory.

  The people of the century had many instruments on which to express their love of music. There were organs in the churches, of course, and a portable variety which had as many as seven or eight notes. The keyboard had not yet been invented, and so the music was produced by striking the strings with clenched fist or elbow. Then there was the guitar, which was called a gittern in England; the fydel, already mentioned; small portable harps with a limited number of strings, which were much favored for the singing of ballades; the psaltery, a wooden box with strings stretched across it; flutes, double-whistles, bagpipes; the shawm, a kind of oboe with a double reed which the watchmen in London began to use on their rounds at some stage of the long reign of Henry III; finally, the trumpets, cornets, and bugles used in battle and for the announcements of the heralds.

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  The p
eople of the thirteenth century danced long and feasted heartily at weddings. They went regularly to fairs and spent their few farthings on ribbons for their wives and sweethearts, and often enough were hauled up before the Pie Powder Courts for infractions of the peace. They danced around the Maypole with an abandon which told of a complete lack of concern for the morrow. They worked hard but they laughed loud.

  They seem to have had an instinctive good taste and a well-developed sense of order. The tillers of the soil kept their hedges well trimmed and their furrows as straight as the flight of an arrow. The artisans in the towns produced the finest of cloth, neat-fitting garments, and the cockiest of hats.

  Norman castles still frowned down on them from hillsides and strategic fords, and the distinction between the two races in the land had not yet been obliterated. The nobleman still spoke Norman French; the workman kept alive the more virile tongue called English. The tillers of the soil still whispered of the days of Edward the Confessor and great King Alfred, but the memory was growing dim. A national solidarity was forming which would be completed in the following reign.

  In the meantime England was merrie enough, much more carefree in mood than France, where the iron bonds of feudalism still weighed heavily on the common people. Men remembered the Great Charter, and there was a feeling in slum and toft that the calling of commoners to Parliament would lead to real emancipation. On the whole, the artisan and the yeoman had reason to be merrie.

  Roger Bacon

  AT FOLLY BRIDGE near Oxford there stood a small stone tower with a ponderous gateway, and over the gateway there was a long, dark room. It was a mysterious room, with a furnace at one end and tables covered with the retorts, alembics, and crucibles of science, with books and manuscripts in great quantity; a dusty, gloomy room, filled with the odors of acids and old leather and dead fires. But give scholars a choice: to have for study today all the royal castles of England in the thirteenth century, and the chancery offices at Westminster, including the cubicle where Henry fretted and sulked, and the chapter house at Canterbury where the frustrated monks would meet in secret midnight sessions in an effort to impose their puny wills on the Crown in the matter of new archbishops—in fact, almost all of England of that period—or that one long room, complete to the last scrap of manuscript and sooty fingerprints on cucurbit and bellows. The choice would certainly be for Folly Bridge and its tower; for there Roger Bacon lived during his years of study and experiment at Oxford, great Roger Bacon, the man of mystery of the Middle Ages, the Doctor Mirabilis, the scholar so far in advance of his time, that tragic and compelling figure.

  Although this Franciscan friar has become a figure of the first historical importance, very little is known about the man. It is generally conceded, on the strength of occasional hints about himself in his writings, that he was born in 1214 or thereabouts, either at Ilchester in Somerset or Bisley in Gloucestershire. It is certain he went to Oxford and became a student under the incomparable Grosseteste and the kindly Adam Marsh, absorbing gratefully the enlightened scientific theories of the one and the gentle philosophy of the other. About the year 1240 he left Oxford for Paris and remained in the French capital for ten years, teaching, studying, experimenting, his mind filled with visions of a different world and burning to correct the methods and beliefs of a complacent, wrong-headed age. It was almost certainly during his first Paris period that he joined the Franciscans, feeling, no doubt, that the work he planned required the background and secure retirement of the Minorite order.

  After his ten years in Paris he was back again at Oxford, and it was during this second term, lasting from 1250 to 1257, that he occupied the tower at Folly Bridge. While the struggle between the King and his barons mounted in intensity and Oxford was a storm center of politics and war, Roger Bacon’s ideas took final form and he gained his clear conception of an orderly universe with fixed laws, the nature of which could be proven by scientific approach. It was during the turbulent fifties that this intense man in the brown habit of his order, this angry, critical man who lashed out at the stupidities of medieval thinking and did not hesitate to attack the leaders of the day, even the saintly Thomas Aquinas and the learned Alexander of Hales, began to say to the world that its absorption in the subtleties of theological dispute was wrong and that the time had come for a realistic study of life and the universe. He was the one man with feet planted solidly on the earth, the voice of reason and common sense in an age of hairsplitting. The teachers of the day were saying, “Believe that ye may understand.” Roger Bacon countered with, “Understand that ye may believe.”

  He was not, however, a mere theorist in the realm of scientific thought. He knew how to apply the principles in which he believed. If he had conceived it his part to complete some of his visions of the shape of things to come, and if he had not been working with the fewest and poorest of tools, he might have brought some of his discoveries to applied use. In that case the world would have had a telescope and a microscope three hundred years before they were evolved. He knew how to make gunpowder, and undoubtedly did make it, but had no conception of it as a great new force in warfare. In a prophetic attack on the future he saw the airplane and talked of vehicles which would fly through the air, but in this case he does not seem to have had more than the vision. It was an impossibility for him to glean any hint of how a flying machine might be built or of the force which would serve to drive it through the air; too many discoveries would have to be made first as to the nature of materials.

  All this, however, is beside the point. It is unimportant whether Roger Bacon actually discovered gunpowder in the age of the crossbow and arrows or conceived the principles of the telescope while the windows of the world were filled with waxed linen instead of glass. The great and all-important thing is that he contributed new light to the world, that he saw the simple and direct method by which knowledge could be won. He preached the demonstration of fact by experiment, by experiment repeated over and over again until the following of effect after cause could not be doubted. He preached that only from one truth thus established could man go on to more experiments, to more truths. In other words, this far-seeing friar, hampered by the shackles of medieval thought from which he could not entirely free himself, had grasped the principle, nevertheless, which was applied in later centuries to all scientific research and has proven the keystone of knowledge.

  Inevitably it became common belief that this lonely man, poring over his manuscripts and making secret experiments in his dark tower room, was a practitioner of the black arts. His indiscreet talk, his hints of things to come strengthened the fancy. The verbal buffetings he administered to the self-satisfied gods of the medieval classroom made enemies for him who were only too ready to foster belief in his heresies. Stories were told that the devil, forked tail and slavering tongue complete, had been seen going in and out at Folly Bridge. It was believed that Roger Bacon had sold his soul for the secrets the Prince of Darkness could give in exchange, that he could make himself invisible, that he could transport his body through space with the speed and ease of angels, that he could see into the future. Out of these beliefs grew the legends which persisted down the ages and led in time to the not very amusing or original anecdotes about Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, out of which not very amusing or original plays and stories were concocted.

  In this respect the great Franciscan was faring no worse than others who had striven to upraise the torch of reason, The heresy hunt which kept nipping at his bare heels had already involved, to quote one case only, a wise man from Scotland who preceded Bacon in his pryings into scientific truth by relatively few years. A digression seems necessary at this point to speak of Michael Scot and the curious vagaries of popular belief which turned him into a sorcerer of the blackest hue.

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  The manner of the death of great men and the time and the place are always known; their beginnings are almost as certainly shrouded in mystery. The arrival of children was a matter of small importance in
the Middle Ages.

  Michael Scot, supposedly, was born at Balwearie in Scotland, but the evidence is far from conclusive. It has been calculated that he arrived in this world about 1180 and that as a youth he went to the university at Oxford, but again there are no definite facts. The trail becomes definite only when he appeared in Germany, a slight, dark man with a luminous eye and an air which set him apart, and gained recognition at the court of Frederick II. That most courageous supporter of learning saw great possibilities in the young Scot, who had already won for himself some reputation in the mastery of the sciences. Scot remained at the court of the Emperor for a number of years and then went to Spain, where it is supposed he became immersed in the study of black magic. What is certain, however, is that he went to Spain to further his researches in mathematics and astronomy. He occupied himself while there in making a translation of the Latin Averroës, which, when completed, won him a high place in the regard of scholars.

  He returned to the court of Frederick after ten years in Spain, worn out from long and arduous labors and the strain of incessant poring over manuscripts. The Emperor was glad to welcome him back and sought to find papal appointments for him in England and Ireland. A benefice was offered him in Cashel, but as it would have meant exile from all the sources of knowledge and as Scot himself was honest enough to rebel against plural appointments, he refused it. He remained at court, therefore, practicing medicine, poor, rather unhappy, as jealous as ever in his pursuit of knowledge, particularly in the three branches of science which interested him most, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.