Life in a Medieval City

by Frances Gies

  The science of the thirteenth century, in fact, resides mainly outside the schools. Furriers, trappers, hunters, and poachers could correct much of the natural history in the encyclopedias. The craftsmen who are building the cathedral know geology, engineering, geometry, arithmetic, and mineralogy, and have an intimate acquaintance with nature. The capitals of their piers are decorated with leaves of plantain, ivy and oak, arum, ranunculus, fern, clover, coladine, hepatica, columbine, cress, parsley, strawberry, snapdragon, and broom—all observed with care and re-created with precision. The notebook of the great architect-engineer Villard de Honnecourt is filled not only with columns and vaults, but with animal and even insect life—a lobster, parrots, a snail’s shell, a fly, a dragonfly, a grasshopper, not to mention a bear, a lion, a cat, and a swan. Even the gargoyles with which the cathedral workers give an aesthetic justification to their drainspouts reveal a command of animal anatomy.

  Many of the businessmen fathers of the cathedral school-boys are aware of a truly remarkable new piece of learning, a historic advance in the most basic of all sciences, mathematics. Introduced into western Europe from Moslem North Africa, not by a scholar, but by an Italian businessman, it is nothing less than the use of Arabic numbers. Leonard Fibonacci, a Pisan, has written a treatise called Liber Abaci popularizing the new system and summarizing the arithmetical knowledge of the Arabs. The numerals (actually Indian in origin) are spreading through the Italian business community. The key to the Hindu-Arabic system is the zero, which permits the position of the digit to indicate its value as unit, ten, hundred, or thousand. Rapid and accurate computation can be done, something difficult with clumsy Roman numbers. The businessmen of Troyes still prefer their calculating boards, but they are familiar with the new notation through their contacts with Italian businessmen and moneychangers at the fairs.

  The cathedral school offers no French grammar, composition, or literature, no languages except Latin—not even Greek. It teaches no history, except a bit incidentally in the grammar course, and no science, except a little natural science that emerges from a study of the “authors.” Music is taught only as a theoretical science. There are no courses in social science, physical education, or art.

  The use of Latin throughout the schools gives a wide currency to ideas and makes sources of culture accessible to everyone, even though students probably never learn to read it as proficiently as their native French, English, or German. Latin is a cultural catalyst, but it is also an impediment to self-expression and communication.

  There is no university in Troyes, which is not surprising, since there are only five in northwest Europe5—at Paris, Orléans, Angers, Oxford, and Cambridge. There are three more in the south of France, eleven in Italy, three in Spain. Of these twenty-two, the two oldest, at Bologna and Paris, are by far the most important. Their precise origins are lost in the twelfth century, but they are true archetypes, for the Greeks and Romans had no universities.

  A bright alumnus of the cathedral school at Troyes who wishes to continue his education may journey to Paris, only a hundred miles away. If he does, he will join some two or three thousand young men in the Latin Quarter, who every morning grope their way out of their lodgings to join the crowd of clerical gowns and tonsured heads hurrying to the Street of the Straw, so-named from the floor covering on which students sit all morning. At noon the scholars break for dinner, meeting again in the afternoon for another lecture or a disputation. When the day is over they may turn to studying or copying by candlelight, or, since all forms of athletics, and even chess, are prohibited, to gaming, drinking, and whoring. Although scholars usually enter the university at fourteen or fifteen, their private lives are almost entirely unsupervised. There are no university buildings.6 Classes are held in the masters’ houses. Student lodgings, schools, and brothels are cheek by jowl, and sometimes masters and students conduct disputations on the second floor, whores and pimps on the first.

  The favorite sport of university students is fighting—with each other, with the townspeople, with the provost’s guard. Some of their riots make history, for the University of Paris is by 1250 an institution of formidable stature. A democratic anomaly in the heart of a feudal monarchy, it enjoys remarkable power and prestige and extraordinary privileges. Though it has a charter from the king of France, it is thoroughly international, with some of its most celebrated scholars from Italy, Germany, and England. Pope Innocent III was a master at Paris; Thomas Aquinas is studying there in 1250.

  Though the University of Paris is famous for its faculty of theology,7 the learning it transmits to most of its students is more secular than that of the cathedral schools. Aristotle is the supreme text and master. After six years’ study a student may face the examiners, and if he passes receive a license to teach. Ultimately he may take orders and become a church official, or a scholarly luminary at this or another university. He may go on to study medicine or law, both lucrative and prestigious professions. He may become a copyist. Or he may enter the service of some prince or baron. For a young burgher of Troyes, the count of Champagne’s service is most attractive. He can rise to become bailiff, or keeper of the Fair, with splendid emoluments, not to mention opportunities for graft. Education pays, in the thirteenth as in other centuries.

  12.

  Books and Authors

  Sire cuens, j’ai vielé

  Devant vous en vostre ostel,

  Si ne m’avez rien doné

  Ne mes gages aquité:

  C’est vilanie!

  [Sir count, I have played the

  viol before you in your house, and

  you have given me nought, nor paid my

  expenses: ’Tis villainy!]

  —COLIN MUSET

  A number of students in the twelfth century followed none of the conventional paths. Instead they undertook the footloose and precarious existence of wandering scholars, drifting from one school or one patron to another, passing their days in taverns, living by their wits. Some of them, the so-called “Goliards,” contributed to the world’s literature a stock of Latin verse of a new kind—lyric, frankly pagan, satirical, and irreverent.

  But many of the poets who have created a literary revival in the past century and a half write in the vernacular, especially in one of two varieties of French—Provençal or northern. An important center for the latter is Troyes. Count Henry the Generous and his bluestocking countess, Marie, daughter of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine, patronized a number of poets, of whom the most famous was Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien’s verse tales of the Round Table not only are of high literary merit, but serve as the chief source of all Arthurian romances.

  Another sort of Champenois literary production came out of the Fourth Crusade. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne and native of the neighborhood of Troyes, helped sack Constantinople and afterwards wrote an account of his adventures whose naive vigor and honesty won him a niche in literature as well as history. Neither a clerk nor a poet, but a plain soldier, Geoffroi wrote in vernacular prose, and so won the distinction of creating the very first masterpiece in French prose.

  The present count of Champagne, Thibaut IV, is a poet. Guarded through his minority by his capable mother, Blanche of Navarre, Thibaut grew up to marry, one after the other, a Hapsburg, a Beaujeu, and a Bourbon princess, by whom he had eight children. To these children he added four more, products of his numerous love affairs. But the enduring passion of his life was a chaste one, owing to the inaccessibility of its object, the queen of France. This lady, Blanche of Castile, wife and widow of Louis VIII and mother of Louis IX (St.-Louis), was a dozen years Thibaut’s senior. Nevertheless Thibaut’s penchant for Blanche was such that he was suspected of poisoning her husband when the king died suddenly. The injustice of the accusation provoked Thibaut to join a couple of baronial troublemakers, Hugo of La Marche and Peter of Brittany, in a sort of antiroyal civil war. When on sober second thought Thibaut changed his mind, Hugo and Peter turned their spite agai
nst him and invaded Champagne, setting haystacks and hovels ablaze. Stopped by the walls of Troyes, they were forced to turn around and go home when a relieving force arrived, sent by Queen Blanche.

  Partly as a result of the war, Thibaut was constrained to sell three of his cities—Blois, Chartres and Sancerre—to the king of France. At the last moment he felt a reluctance to hand over Blois, cradle of his dynasty, and carried stubbornness to the point of courting a royal invasion. But forty-six-year-old Blanche of Castile dissuaded thirty-three-year-old Thibaut in an interview of which the dialogue was recorded, or at least reported, by a chronicler:

  Blanche: Pardieu, Count Thibaut, you ought to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.

  Thibaut (overcome by the queen’s beauty and virtue): By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.

  Thibaut’s fancy for Blanche needed sublimation. Sage counselors recommended a study of canzonets for the viol, as a result of which Thibaut soon began turning out “the most beautiful canzonets anyone had ever heard” (a judgment in which a later day concurs). The verses of Thibaut the Songwriter were sung by trouvères and jongleurs throughout Europe. A favorite:

  Las! Si j’avois pouvoir d’oublier

  Sa beauté, a beauté, son bien dire,

  Et son très-doux, très-doux regarder,

  Finirois mon martyre.

  Mais las! mon coeur je n’en puis ôter,

  Et grand affolage

  M’est d’espérer:

  Mais tel servage

  Donne courage

  A tout endurer.

  Et puis, comment, comment oublier

  Sa beauté, sa beauté, son bien dire,

  Et son très-doux, très-doux regarder?

  Mieux aime mon martyre.

  [Could I forget her gentle grace,

  Her glance, her beauty’s sum,

  Her voice from memory efface,

  I’d end my martyrdom.

  Her image from my heart I cannot tear;

  To hope is vain;

  I would despair,

  But such a strain

  Gives strength the pain

  Of servitude to bear.

  Then how forget her gentle grace,

  Her glance, her beauty’s sum,

  Her voice from memory efface?

  I’ll love my martyrdom.]

  Thibaut is a prince; Chrétien de Troyes was (probably) a clerk; Geoffroi de Villehardouin was a noble. But there is another native Troyen writer, in 1250 just embarking on his career, who is a plain burgher. “Rutebeuf” (Rough-ox) he calls himself, and his verses have little in common with the polished elegance of Chrétien or the tender passion of Thibaut. Rutebeuf describes real life—mostly his own.

  Dieus m’a fait compagnon à Job,

  Qu’il m’a tolu à un seul cop

  Quanques j’a voie.

  De l’ueil destre, dont mieus veoie,

  Ne voi je pas aler la voie

  Ne moi conduire…

  Car je n’i voi pas mon gaain.

  Or n’ai je pas quanques je ain,

  C’est mes domages.

  Ne sai se ç’a fait mes outrages;

  Or devendrai sobres et sages

  Après le fait,

  Et me garderai de forfait.

  Mais ce que vaut? Ce est ja fait;

  Tart sui meüs,

  A tart me sui aperceüs

  Quant je sui en mes las cheüs.

  C’est premier an

  Me gart cil Dieus en mon droit san

  Qui pour nous ot paine et ahan,

  Et me gart l’ame.

  Or a d’enfant geü ma fame;

  Mes chevaus a brisié la jame

  A une lice;

  Or veut de l’argent ma norrice

  Qui me destraint et me pelice

  Pour l’enfant paistre,

  Ou il revendra braire en l’estre…

  [God has made me a companion for Job,

  Taking away at a single blow,

  All that I had.

  With my right eye, once my best,

  I can’t see the street ahead,

  Or find my way…

  I can’t earn a living,

  I enjoy no pleasures,

  That’s my trouble.

  I don’t know if my vices are to blame;

  Now I’m becoming sober and wise,

  After the fact,

  And will keep from doing wrong,

  But what good is that? It’s done now.

  I’m too late.

  I discovered too late

  That I was falling into a trap.

  It’s the first of the year.

  May God who suffered pain for us

  Keep me healthy.

  Now my wife has had a child;

  My horse has broken his leg

  On a fence,

  Now my nurse is asking for money,

  She’s taking everything I’ve got

  For the child’s keep,

  Otherwise he’ll come back home to yell…]

  Thibaut and Rutebeuf are not only widely sung and recited, but published. By 1250 books are multiplying spectacularly, even though every single book must be copied by hand. During the Dark Ages book copying took refuge in the monasteries, but now it is back in town. Schools and universities supply a market for textbooks, and copyists are therefore often located in the neighborhood of the cathedral or university, but they do more than copy texts. They also serve as secretaries, both for the illiterate and for those who want a particularly fine handwriting in their correspondence.

  A copyist sits in a chair with extended arms across which his writing board is placed, with the sheets of parchment held in place by a deerskin thong. His implements include a razor or sharp knife for scraping, a pumice, an awl, a long narrow parchment ruler, and a boar’s tooth for polishing. He works near the fire, or keeps a basin of coals handy to dry the ink, which is held in an oxhorn into which he dips a well-seasoned quill. The oxhorn fits into a round hole in the writing board, with a cover.

  The copyist begins by scraping the parchment clean of scales and incrustations, smoothing it with the pumice, and marking out lines and columns with ruler and awl. Then he sets to work. Some of his productions may be ornate works of art—Latin psalters or French romances, in gold, silver, and purple ink, with initials overlaid with gold leaf. Bound in ivory and metal covers mounted on wood, these elaborate volumes are fabulously expensive. By far the greater number of books consist of plain, legibly written sheets bound in plain wooden boards, perhaps with untooled leather glued over for extra protection. Students often bind several books together under the same covers. Even these cheaper books are expensive, owing not only to the cost of parchment but to the enormous labor involved in their production. It takes about fifteen months to copy the Bible. Books are valuable pieces of property, often pawned, and rented out as well as sold. Students are the chief renters. When a student rents a book he usually does so in order to copy it. He pays rent by the pecia—sixteen columns of sixty-two lines, each with thirty-two letters, renting for a penny or halfpenny. An industrious student can create his own library, but it is a work of long night watches. Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written Explicit, Deo Gratias (“Finished, thank God”). Some students end with a more jocular flourish: “May the writer continue to copy, and drink good wine” “The book finished, may the master be given a fat goose” “May the writer be given a good cow and a horse” “For his pen’s labor, may the copyist be given a beautiful girl” “Let the writer be given a cow and a beautiful girl.”

  Books are kept not on open shelves but in locked chests. Students who borrow are cautioned not to scratch grooves in the margin with their fingernails or to use straws from the
lecture floor as placemards. A Jewish ethical treatise warns that a man must not express his anger by pounding on a book or by hitting people with it. The angry teacher must not hit the bad student with a book, nor should the student use a book to ward off blows.

  Book cover, thirteenth century. The more elaborate productions of medieval copyists were usually bound in ivory and metal covers mounted on wood; sometimes, as in this example, they were decorated with champlevé enamel. But most books were bound in utilitarian wooden boards, sometimes covered with leather. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917)

  Despite the cost, books enjoy a wide circulation. An opponent of Abélard noted that “his books cross the sea, pass the Alps…are carried through kingdom and province.” Normal, or legitimate, book circulation is reinforced by a black market. Many scholars borrow books and surreptitiously copy them. John of Salisbury lent a book to a friend at Canterbury, and later referred to him as “that thief at Canterbury who got hold of the Policraticus and would not let it go until he had made a copy.” St.-Bernard wrote a would-be borrower, “As regards the book you ask for…there is a certain friend of ours who has kept it a long time now, with the same eagerness you show. You shall have it as soon as possible, but although you may read it, I do not allow you to copy it. I did not give you leave to copy the other one I lent you, although you did so.”

  Copyists are not always accurate. Authors sometimes conclude their books with the injunction: “I adjure you who shall transcribe this book, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by His Glorious coming, Who will come to judge the quick and the dead, that you compare what you transcribe and diligently correct it by the copy from which you transcribe it, and this adjuration also, and insert it in your copy.”