Chambers of Death
Page 24
Many of us know something about jongleurs and minstrels but less about theater before the famous York Cycle of a later century. Although the Church frowned on plays as pagan things, they also recognized that enactment of an event is a powerful teaching tool. Thus we have a tenth century nun, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, writing didactic dramas in the manner of Seneca, and liturgical dramas in the thirteenth century that remind one of early opera. As a university student, Huet would have known scholars who put on amateur performances of popular tales. When he visited Arras, in the area called the Artois and on the River Scarpe, he would have discovered the secular dramas of such masters as Adam de la Halle and Jehan Bodel. The tale he tells of the prodigal son is probably based on a popular play, Courtois d’Arras.
Garderobes may have been privies or latrines, but, in some cases, they were also storage places for clothing and furs. According to a pamphlet from Old Soar Manor in Kent, the stench was believed to keep moths away, an early and equally unpleasant form of moth balls. Some might even wonder which method was more toxic—to humans as well as to insects.
And in conclusion (a phrase beloved by any who suffer through interminable speeches, common to business and politics), I must add a mea culpa.
Not long ago, a reader in England pointed out, with graceful kindness, that I had, in my Author’s Notes to Wine of Violence, retired Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor of Provence to Amesbury Priory at the end of their lives. Since both queens were notably strong-willed in life, thus likely to be possessed of equally formidable and incompatible spirits in death, they had the good sense not to die in the same place where I so foolishly put them. Instead, they wisely put the English Channel between them. Although Eleanor of Provence did spend her last years, from1286 to 1291, at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, Eleanor of Aquitaine retired and was buried at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou some eighty-seven years before.
Bibliography
Once again, I would like to list a few books that might be of interest to readers and ones that most certainly gave me many hours of pleasurable reading. Any erroneous use of information is my fault alone and sincerely regretted.
Life on the English Manor by H. S. Bennett, Cambridge University Press, 1937.
A Medieval Book of Seasons by Marie Collins and Virginia Davis, Harper Collins, 1992.
A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras by Carol Symes, Cornell University Press, 2007.
The English Medieval House by Margaret Wood, Studio Editions of Random House UK Ltd, 1965.
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