The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  Drinking played a major role in cementing the bonds of this association. As Tacitus points out, drunken banquets were the accepted venue for any serious negotiation, including "the mutual reconciliation of enemies, the forming of family alliances, the appointment of chiefs, the question even of war or peace." When Beowulf arrives in Denmark, he finds Hrothgar and his Danes greatly demoralized by Grendel's gruesome predations. Night after night, the monster raids Heorot and carries off up to thirty hapless warriors to his lair; and yet, night after night, the king entertains his company, slips away with his queen to a secluded bower in the royal compound, and leaves his men to settle in the mead hall for the night, "a company of the best asleep from their feasting, insensible to pain and human sorrow." Why? Hasn't anyone ever asked themselves why these valiant defenders of the realm sleep night after night in the one place in all Scandinavia where they can be sure their invincible foe - a "God-cursed brute," a "shadow-stalker," a "captain of evil" - will seek them out in their most vulnerable condition? Even if we allow that there were few Solomons among these sixth-century pagan thugs, how are we to understand the Danes' obdurate self-destructive compulsion?

  In a word, Hrothgar keeps the boys in line by keeping them drunk. "Time and again, when the goblets passed and seasoned fighters got flushed with beer they would pledge themselves to protect Heorot and wait for Grendel with whetted swords." But they didn't wait; they passed out every time, and "When dawn broke and day crept in over each empty, blood-spattered bench, the floor of the mead-hall where they had feasted would be slick with slaughter." Hrothgar is described as humiliated, bewildered, and numb with grief, but this is a little hard to swallow, since the bower in which he sleeps is explicitly described as enjoying divine protection. In other words, every night this brave king fills the bellies of these simple boys - under the circumstances, "simple" must be taken as a charitable characterization - with free beer and boiled game and their ears with cheap flattery, then slinks off to his guaranteed safe haven, but not before ensuring that they have pledged their lives to defeating a creature they will be too drunk to rise and challenge.

  A number of early historians related as fact that the Germans first arrived in Britain in the mid-fifth century at the invitation of the British - softened by centuries of Roman occupation and unable to defend themselves since the withdrawal of the legions in 410 - to fight as mercenaries against the wild Scots and Picts. Nennius relates how the British King Vortigern, unable to feed and pay them, asks the Germans to leave. Instead, their leader Hengist imports more soldiers, along with his beautiful teenage daughter. Hengist holds a celebration banquet for Vortigern, who gets drunk and falls in love with the girl, just as Hengist had planned. Hengist demands Kent in return for the girl, and thus the Germans establish their first foothold in Britain. It doesn't really matter that this is almost certainly a tall tale everyone of Nennius' time knew that this was the way the Germans did things.

  In varying degrees of sincerity, the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks received Christianity in the sixth and seventh centuries, which allowed them to look down upon their pagan kinsmen in the old country but otherwise seems to have had little effect on their Weltanschauung. The truth is, they probably did not know what they were getting themselves into and imagined that they were merely trading in a bunch of minor woodland gods for one essentially similar but more powerful. It's likely that many converts didn't even bother abandoning the old gods but merely added the new one to their pantheon. Many of the earliest churches were simply consecrated pagan temples with the idols removed. Very little Christian teaching was offered to the early converts. All that was required of a pagan wishing to convert was to swear a simple oath:

  Q: Forsachistu diobolae? (Do you forsake the Devil?)

  A: Ec forsacho diobolae. (I forsake the Devil.)

  Q: End alum diobolgeldae? (And all devil-worship?)

  A: End ec forsacho alum diobolgeldae (. . .)

  Q: Gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer? (Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?)

  A: Ec gelobo etc. (I believe, etc.)

  Q: Gelobistu in crist godes suno? (Do you believe in Christ, God's son?)

  A: Ec gelobo etc.

  Q: Gelobistu in halogan gast? (Do you believe in the holy ghost?)

  A: Ec gelobo etc.

  The sacrament of baptism was just as unlikely to inculcate an understanding of God's infinite mercy, the mysteries of the Trinity, or any other abstraction that was held to distinguish the new religion from the old. Consider the perfectly reasonable irritation of the pagan Viking marauder on being required to wear a baptismal robe:

  I have gone through this washing business here twenty times already, and I have been dressed in excellent clothes of perfect whiteness; but a sack like this is more fit for clodhoppers than for soldiers. If I were not afraid of my nakedness, for you have taken away my own clothes and have given me no new ones, I would soon leave your wrap and your Christ as well.

  Nor did the behavior of the clergy offer the Germans any reason to think that converting to Christianity required some sort of conversion to civility, sobriety, or mercy. Contemporary accounts positively stagger under the weight of drunken, violent clerics. Gregory of Tours offers us a few saintly lives, but virtually every page of his history shows clergymen behaving badly. A newly appointed bishop, "loaded with food, drenched with liquor and buried in wine,. . . failed to go to the evening service." "Once he had taken possession of his bishopric, Cautinus began to behave so badly that he was soon loathed by everybody. He began to drink heavily. He was so often so completely fuddled with wine that it would take four men to carry him from the table." In battle, Bishops Salonius and Sagittarius "armed themselves like laymen and killed many men with their own hands. They engaged in a quarrel with their own congregations and beat quite a few of them with wooden clubs." "There lived in the town of Le Mans a certain priest, who was fond of fine living and who was always having affairs." "After his consecration as Bishop he took to drink." The priest Eufrasius "would ply the Franks with drink, but he very rarely gave refreshment to the poor."

  So intimately is drinking associated with religion that it appears at times as if the right to tipple is divinely sanctioned, upheld if need be by miracles recalling the wedding at Cana. Wulfstan of Winchester, in his Life of St. Æthelwold, describes King Eadred's visit to the monastery of Abingdon:

  Now it chanced that he had with him not a few of his Northumbrian thegns, and they all accompanied him to the party. The king was delighted, and ordered the guests to be served with lavish draughts of mead. The doors were carefully secured to make sure that no one should get out and be seen to be leaving the royal carousal. Well, the servants drew off drink all day to the hearts' content of the diners, but the level in the container could not be reduced below a palm's measure. The Northumbrians became drunk, as they tend to, and very cheerful they were when they left that evening.

  When the lady ALthelflaed finds her supply of mead inadequate for an imminent visit from King Athelstan, she prays to the Virgin, "with the result that the mead never failed, although the butlers served the guests all day with drinking-horns, goblets, and other vessels." When the seventh-century Irish saint Kilian is refused a drink of water by a Frankish noblewoman, he can think of no harsher punishment than to have her beer barrels drained empty by miracle. When she and her husband pursue him with abject apologies and give him land and a new church, the barrels are miraculously refilled. Thirsty Germans throughout western Europe flocked to conversion ceremonies; the real miracle was that, with such a powerful and benevolent new god on tap, it still took Charlemagne thirty years to subdue and Christianize the Old Saxons.

  Is it any wonder, then, that the Germans failed to be chastened by their new religion or to respect the sanctity of the holy places? Gregory's own church of St. Martin's was the scene of many a violent encounter. "This Martin of yours, whom you keep quoting in such a fatuous way, means absolutely nothing to us," Frankish soldiers tell a steward se
eking to prevent bloodshed in the sanctuary. Eberulf, treasurer to King Chilperic, seeks refuge in St. Martin's from Claudius, his would-be assassin, sent by Chilperic's brother Guntram. Unable to lure Eberulf out into the open, Claudius enters the holy precinct. The two men stab each other before Claudius's servants dash out Eberulf s brains on the paving stones. Eberulf s servants pursue Claudius into the abbot's cell, where they kill him by hurling spears through the window. The abbot himself is dragged from his cell, rioters attack the church, everyone who had sought refuge with Eberulf is killed, the abbot's cell is awash in blood, and the killers loot the church.

  The bad example was set from the very height of society and trickled down. It was the royal Frankish custom to divide the realm equally among all male heirs, with the result that brothers and uncles were constantly at each other's throats. King Lothar orders his own son Chramn to be strangled then burnt alive with his entire family in a poor man's hut. King Guntram orders decaying horse dung, wood chips, straw, moldy hay, and stinking mud from the gutters to be flung at his nephew's envoys. King Theuderic sets a trap for his half-brother Lothar, stretching a canvas across the courtyard to conceal the assassins but neglecting to ensure that it reach the floor, with the result that Lothar can see their feet. Overcome with confusion, Theuderic calls off the murder and offers his brother a silver salver, but, regretting his generosity, later sends his son Theudebert to plead for its return. Lothar, magnanimous to a degree that might have surprised the unfortunate Chramn, is happy to comply.

  In the midst of such lawlessness and brutality, it is hardly surprising that the ancient practices of hospitality should have been lost and forgotten, especially when recurrent famines often reduced the poor to grinding grape seeds, hazel catkins, or dessicated fern roots for their bread or to selling themselves into slavery in return for food. One story about a civil dispute in Tours, told by Gregory in installments, reads like a particularly nasty soap opera and gives us a fairly good idea of the state of civil society and legal protections among the lower Germanic orders in Gaul in the late sixth century.

  It all begins at Christmas time, when a village priest sends his messenger to the home of Austregesil with an invitation to come have a drink. One of Austregesil's men, apparently in his cups already, kills the messenger, provoking the priest's friend Sichar to seek vengeance. Austregesil strikes first, sending a raiding party that kills four of Sichar's servants in his home and makes off with his treasure. Austregesil is found guilty by a tribunal, but Sichar learns that the money is being hidden in the home of the thief s kinsman Auno. With a raiding party of his own, Sichar breaks into Auno's house, kills him, his son, and his brother, and steals his cattle. Bishop Gregory offers Sichar church money to drop the feud, but Auno's son Chramnesind rejects the offer. Sichar heads off to Poitier to seek justice from the king, but en route is wounded by his own slave, whom he had been abusing. Sichar's friends seize the slave, cut off his hands and feet and hang him.

  In the meanwhile, Chramnesind, thinking Sichar dead, loots his home, kills his servants, burns down the house, and steals his cattle. For good measure, he also torches the neighbors' homes. He and Sichar are each ordered to pay compensation.

  Somehow, Sichar and Chramnesind become great drinking buddies after that, but one sodden night a dispute arises between them and old rancors reemerge. Chramnesind extinguishes the candles, hacks Sichar's skull in half, strips his body, and hangs it naked from a post of the garden fence. Unable to obtain an amnesty from King Childebert because Queen Brunhild had been Sichar's protector, Chramnesind flees briefly to Bourges. But when he makes a second appeal, proving that "he had taken a life in order to avenge an affront" - a perfectly legitimate defense - he is exculpated and all his property is restored.

  Ultimately, hard living always takes its toll, and even the restless Germans began to settle down, in a manner of speaking. Not that the ceaseless warfare came to an end; nor that officers of the peace were hired to patrol the streets of Tours; nor even, as far as I know, that the Catholic clergy swore off the bottle and the sword. However, with the exception of the Vikings in the North Sea and the Arabs in Spain, the major national migrations that had precipitated the fall of Rome came to an end. The immediate forebears of the peoples of Western Europe were more or less where they remain to this day. Most of the continent was at least partially evangelized. In Britain, the historian Bede reported in awe that the monasteries were bursting at the seams with retired warriors and that no one stole the brass bowls which King Edwin of Northumbria provided at roadside springs for travelers. And when King Alfred, fleeing the invading Danes, took anonymous shelter in a peasant hut, only to burn the baking loaves that he had been entrusted to watch, the genuine English culinary tradition was born. It can be no coincidence that his countrymen began calling their island Englaland shortly thereafter.

  In Gaul, Charlemagne, by all accounts a genuinely devout Christian, set an example of moderation in his habits that was seen and admired by the many foreigners whom he welcomed to his court. Most days he wore the unadorned Frankish national dress of linen shirt, linen breeches, and hose, along with a simple blue cloak in winter. He never drank more than three cups of wine at meals and his suppers consisted of a mere four courses, "not counting the roast." Most important, like Alfred the Great in Wessex a few generations later, he was intellectually voracious and curious, a patron of the arts and letters, importing the finest thinkers from abroad, promoting literacy, and codifying law, although he himself never learned to read. Franks continued to distinguish themselves from Gauls, and Francia itself was long to remain but one of several kingdoms between the Channel and the Mediterranean, but a new era was about to begin. When Charlemagne's grandsons dismantled his empire, Frankish supremacy was irreparably compromised and the erstwhile German overlords began to merge with the far more numerous Gauls to produce the first prototypical Frenchmen, for better or for worse. Western civilization was at last ready for the resumption of traditional hospitality.

  Out of the Dark Ages comes the story of one man whose life's arc closely reproduces this maturation process - the emergence of the modern Western European nations from their rough infancy under Germanic tutelage. It is far from certain where, when, or even if this man ever actually lived; even if he did, medieval embellishments of his biography tend to obscure hard facts under layers of romanticizing mythology. The earliest extant accounts of his life date to the early thirteenth century, but tales and legends had been circulating throughout Catholic Europe for centuries prior to that, probably dating back to Frankish Gaul. His story has been told and retold, most recently in Flaubert's Three Tales. His legend is depicted in stained glass in the cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen. Chaucer invokes him several times in The Canterbury Tales-, Gawain prays to him; in England alone, seven ancient churches were dedicated to him. He was Julian, the patron saint of hospitality.

  Julian was the beloved only son of a noble couple of the Anjou - in one account, the duke and duchess of Angers themselves. He was a spoiled, callow youth addicted to hunting and given to capricious cruelty to animals. Out hunting one day, and separated from his companions, Julian maliciously wounds a sleeping stag. Before dying, the stag speaks to him, predicting that he will one day kill his own parents. Hoping to avert the prophecy, Julian flees his native country, leaving his grieving parents to believe that he has died.

  He eventually makes his way to Jerusalem, where he joins the Knights Hospitallers in valiantly defending the city against the Muslims. On being falsely informed that his father has died, thus freeing him from the prophecy, he heads home but somehow ends up in Galicia, where he defeats a host of Moors besieging a castle. The grateful castellan rewards him with an estate of his own and a beautiful wife, with whom he lives happily for several years.

  One day while he is out on the hunt, an old couple arrive at his castle. They are his parents, who have wandered the lands pursuing rumors of his survival. Julian's wife receives them graciously, feeding them and giv
ing them her own bed to rest in. Julian returns from the hunt, sees two figures in the bed and, believing he has caught his wife in adultery, slaughters them as they sleep.

  In abject penance, Julian abandons his home and his fortune, followed by his faithful wife. After years of mendicancy, they settle in a hut by a swift stream on the pilgrimage route to Santiago, where they live in exemplary poverty and humility, providing food and shelter to pilgrims and ferrying them across the dangerous current.

  One stormy night, a voice calls to them from the far side of the stream. At great peril, Julian crosses the water and greets the traveler, a foul-smelling beggar in filthy rags and such an advanced stage of leprosy that he has lost his nose. Julian grasps him by the thighs and lifts him into the boat, holding him so closely that their lips almost meet and greedily inhaling his pestilent breath in an ecstasy of self-abasement. Back in the hut, Julian and his wife feed their guest and build a roaring fire, but nothing can warm the chill in his bones. Julian tries to revive him with the warmth of his own body, but to no avail. The leper asks Julian's wife to strip and join him in bed, claiming that nothing but the warmth of a woman will do the trick. True to his vow of humility, Julian allows her to fulfill the request, but when she pulls the blanket aside the bed is empty. A voice on the storm announces that their visitor had been none other than Christ in disguise and that Julian is now fully absolved of his sin.