by Joseph Gies
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.”
Notwithstanding feudal law, a woman occasionally even arranged her own marriage. Isabelle of Angoulême, widow of King John, found an opportunity to make an advantageous (or at any rate congenial) second marriage, and seized it, in the process displacing her own ten-year-old daughter Joan, who had been betrothed to the man in question for six years. Isabelle wrote home to her “dearest son,” King Henry III, from Angoulême, whither she had gone to take up the reins of government of the county:
We hereby notify you that, the Count of La Marche [the bridegroom’s father, who had died on Crusade]…having departed this life, the lord Hugh de Lusignan is left, as it were, alone and without heir…and his friends would not allow our daughter to be united with him in lawful marriage because of her tender age, but advise him to seek an heir speedily, and it is proposed that he should take a wife in France. If that were to happen, all your lands in Poitou and Gascony and ours too would be lost. Seeing the great danger that might result if such a union took place, and getting no advice from your councillors…we have therefore taken the said Hugh, Count of La Marche, as our lord and husband; and let God be our witness that we have done this more for your welfare than our own. Wherefore we ask you, as our dear son…since this may yield greatest benefit to you and yours, that you restore to us what is ours by right, namely Niort, Exeter, and Rockingham, and the 3,500 marks which your father, our late husband, bequeathed us.
Isabelle’s dowry and inheritance were not forthcoming, however, Henry refusing to relinquish them until Joan, in custody in La Marche, was back in England, and Isabelle refusing to give up Joan until she had the lands and money. Under pressure from the Pope, Isabelle and Hugh at last yielded up Joan, who then married King Alexander of Scotland. But Henry, Isabelle, and Hugh continued to bicker over the dowry for many years.
Another spirited lady was described by the chronicler Ordericus Vitalis.
The faculties of [William] count of Évreux [d. 1118] were naturally somewhat feeble as well as being reduced by old age, and trusting perhaps more than was proper to his wife’s abilities, he left the administration of his county [of Evreux] completely in her hands. The Countess [Helvise] was notable for her wit and beauty. She was one of the tallest women in all Évreux and of very high birth…Ignoring the counsels of her husband’s barons, she chose instead to follow her own ideas and ambition. Often inspiring audacious measures in political affairs, she readily engaged in rash enterprises.
Many medieval ladies showed political capacity of a high order. Countess Matilda of Tuscany presided over one of the most important feudal states in eleventh-century Italy, decisively intervened on the side of the Pope against Emperor Henry IV in the greatest political struggle of her day, and made her castle of Canossa a byword in Western languages. Blanche of Castile ruled France for a quarter of the thirteenth century. In England the wives of William the Conqueror, Henry I, and Henry II all served as regents during their husbands’ absences.
Although at a disadvantage in a military society, women not only defended their castles in sieges but actually led armies in battles. Long before Joan of Arc, women put on armor and rode to war. William the Conqueror’s granddaughter Matilda, called the Empress Matilda because of her earlier marriage to the German emperor Henry V, led her army in person against her cousin Stephen of Blois in England’s twelfth-century civil war. Momentarily victorious, Matilda, according to the hostile chronicler of the Gesta Stephani (“Deeds of Stephen”), “at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanor, instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to a gentle woman, and began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont,…began to be arbitrary, or rather headstrong, in all that she did.” The Gesta Stephani went on to describe Matilda’s behavior at Winchester when the king of Scotland, the bishop of Winchester, and her brother, the earl of Gloucester, “the chief men of the whole kingdom” and part of her permanent retinue, came before her with bended knee to make a request. Instead of rising respectfully to greet them and agreeing to what they asked, she brusquely dismissed them and refused to listen to their advice. Later she advanced upon London with a large army, and when the citizens welcomed her, according to the chronicler, replied by sending for the richest men and demanding “a huge sum of money, not with unassuming gentleness, but with a voice of authority.” Upon their protesting, she lost her temper.
Later, her fortune changing, Matilda was besieged in Oxford Castle. She again showed mettle,
[leaving] the castle by night, with three knights of ripe ju
dgment to accompany her, and went about six miles on foot, by very great exertions on the part of herself and her companions, through the snow and ice (for all the ground was white with an extremely heavy fall of snow, and there was a very thick crust of ice on the water). What was the evident sign of a miracle, she crossed dry-footed, without wetting her clothes at all, the very waters that had risen above the heads of the king [Stephen] and his men when they were going over to storm the town, and through the king’s pickets, which everywhere were breaking the silence of the night with the blaring of trumpeters or the cries of men shouting loudly, without anyone at all knowing except her companions.
At one point in the struggle, the Empress Matilda found herself pitted against another Matilda, Stephen’s wife, “a woman of subtlety and a man’s resolution,” who led troops in an attack on London, ordering them to “rage most furiously around the city with plunder and arson, violence and the sword.”
A thirteenth-century lady who played a military role was Dame Nicolaa de la Haye, widow of the sheriff of Lincoln, a “vigorous old lady,” in the words of a chronicler, who commanded the royalist stronghold of Lincoln Castle against the forces of Prince Louis of France and the rebel English barons at the time of King John’s death, holding out against every assault until William Marshal arrived with relief forces.
One of the greatest of all examples of hardihood and independence was the Empress Matilda’s daughter-in-law, Eleanor, heiress to the vast province of Aquitaine in southwestern France. Eleanor’s first marriage, to Louis VII of France, was terminated by her affair with Raymond of Antioch in the Holy Land, but far from retiring to a convent after the scandal, Eleanor married Matilda’s son, who two years later gained the English throne as Henry II. Eleanor meddled actively in politics, encouraging her sons in rebellions against their father until exasperated Henry imprisoned her in Salisbury Castle. (Chepstow’s William Marshal was sent in 1183 to tell her that Henry had released her.) After Henry’s death she traveled from city to city and castle to castle in England and France, holding court, and at the age of eighty she played a decisive role in the struggle for the English throne between her grandson Arthur and her son John.
Eleanor’s native French province, Aquitaine, was the birthplace of the poetry of the troubadours, founders of the Western poetic tradition. Eleanor’s grandfather, Count William IX of Aquitaine, was the earliest troubadour whose work has survived, and Eleanor is sometimes credited with the introduction of troubadour verse into northern France and England. Eleanor’s daughter by her first marriage, Marie de Champagne, was also a patroness of poets, notably the celebrated Chrétien de Troyes, creator of the Lancelot-Guinevere romance. At Marie’s court in Troyes (or at the court of France) a work was formulated that had immense influence in aristocratic circles: De Amore (“On Love”), written by Andreas Capellanus (“André the Chaplain”), borrowing freely from Ovid. The treatise supplies an insight into the manners, morals, conversation, and thought of the noble ladies of the High Middle Ages, revealing a sophistication and wit at variance both with the image of pampered sex object of the romances and with the disfranchised pawn of the legal system.
The thesis of De Amore is summed up in a letter purported to be written by Countess Marie to Andreas in response to the question of whether true love could have any place in marriage:
We declare and we hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion or necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other’s desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.
Besides, how does it increase a husband’s honor if after the manner of lovers he enjoys the embraces of his wife, since the worth of character of neither can be increased thereby, and they seem to have nothing more than they already had a right to?
And we say the same thing for still another reason, which is that a precept of love tells us that no woman, even if she is married, can be crowned with the reward of the King of Love unless she is seen to be enlisted in the service of Love himself outside the bonds of wedlock. But another rule of Love teaches that no one can be in love with two men. Rightly, therefore. Love cannot acknowledge any rights of his between husband and wife.
Lovers kneel before Eros, who aims an arrow at one of them. (Trinity College, Cambridge. MS. B.11.22)
But there is still another argument that seems to stand in the way of this, which is that between them there can be no true jealousy, and without it true love may not exist, according to the rule of Love himself, which says, “He who is not jealous cannot love.”
A chapter of De Amore cited “love cases” which were supposed to have been tried in “courts of love” before ladies of Eleanor’s and Marie’s courts and those of other noble ladies—assemblages now believed to be no more than an elegant fiction:
A certain lady had a proper enough lover, but was afterward, through no fault of her own, married to an honorable man, and she avoided her lover and denied him his usual solaces. But Lady Ermengarde of Narbonne demonstrated the lady’s bad character in these words: “The later contracting of a marital union does not properly exclude an early love except in cases where the woman gives up love entirely and is determined by no means to love any more…”
A certain woman had been married, but was now separated from her husband by a divorce, and her former husband sought eagerly for her love. In this case the lady replied: “If any two people have been married and afterward separate in any way, we consider love between them wholly wicked…”
A certain knight was in love with a woman who had given her love to another man, but he got from her this much hope of her love—that if it should ever happen that she lost the love of her beloved, then without a doubt her love would go to this man. A little while after this the woman married her lover. The other knight then demanded that she give him the fruit of the hope she had granted him, but this she absolutely refused to do, saying that she had not lost the love of her lover. In this affair the Queen gave her decision as follows: “We dare not oppose the opinion of the Countess of Champagne, who ruled that love can exert no power between husband and wife. Therefore we recommend that the lady should grant the love she has promised…”
The Countess of Champagne was also asked what gifts it was proper for ladies to accept from their lovers. To the man who asked this the Countess replied, “A woman who loves may freely accept from her lover the following: a handkerchief, a fillet for the hair, a wreath of gold or silver, a breastpin, a mirror, a girdle, a purse, a tassel, a comb, sleeves, gloves, a ring, a compact, a picture, a wash basin, little dishes, trays, a flag as a souvenir…any little gift which may be useful for the care of the person or pleasing to look at or which may call the lover to her mind, if it is clear that in accepting the gift she is free from all avarice.
“But…if a woman receives a ring from her lover as a pledge of love, she ought to put it on her left hand and on her little finger, and she should always keep the stone hidden on the inside of her hand; this is because the left hand is usually kept freer from dishonesty and shameful contacts, and a man’s life and death are said to reside more in his little finger than in the others, and because all lovers are bound to keep their lover secret. Likewise, if they correspond with each other by letter they should refrain from signing their own names. Furthermore, if the lovers should for any reason come before a court of ladies, the identity of the lovers should never be revealed to the judges, but the case should be presented anonymously. And they ought not to seal their letters to each other with their own seals unless they happen to have secret seals known only to themselves and their confidants. In this way their love will always be retained unimpaired.”
If “courtly love” (a phrase coined in much later times) was the medieval literary ideal, in practice a firmly masculine double standard prevailed toward adultery. The Church condemned it in both sexes, but commonly kings, earls, barons, an
d knights had mistresses, and illegitimate children abounded (Henry I had twenty-odd, John five known bastards). Adultery in women was a different matter, and an erring wife was often disgraced and repudiated, her lover mutilated or killed. The issue was not morality but masculine honor. Adultery with the lord’s wife was regarded as treason. In the reign of Philip the Fair of France two nobles accused of adultery with the wives of the king’s sons were castrated, dragged behind horses to the gallows, and hanged as “not only adulterers, but the vilest traitors to their lords.”
The fine points of matters of honor (as well as the fact that the honor in question was exclusively masculine) are illustrated by two cases recorded by Matthew Paris. A knight named Godfrey de Millers entered the house of another knight “for the purpose of lying with his daughter” but was seized, with the connivance of the girl herself, “who was afraid of being thought a married man’s mistress,” and was beaten and castrated. The perpetrators of this deed, including the girl’s father, were punished by exile and the seizure of their property. Ambiguous though the evidence was—the girl may well have simply been defending herself against attack—Matthew Paris unhesitatingly pronounced her a “harlot” and “adultress” and the punishment of the knight “a deed of enormous cruelty…an inhuman and merciless crime.” At about the same time “a certain handsome clerk, the rector of a rich church,” who distinguished himself by surpassing all the neighboring knights by the lavishness of his hospitality and entertainment—a universally admired trait in aristocratic circles—was similarly treated for a similar malfeasance. The king, like Matthew Paris, deeply grieved at the cleric’s misfortune, ordered it to be proclaimed as law that no one should be castrated for adultery except by a cuckolded husband, whose honor, unlike that of the lady’s father, her family, or the lady herself, was sacred.