Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

by Alan Ereira

  William Maw Egley’s 1858 painting of the Lady of Shalott and her distant hero, Sir Lancelot, seems to convey, in its antiquarian detail, an authentic medieval vision (at least if one overlooks the very nineteenth-century appearance of Mrs Egley): the helpless lady sealed in her chamber, the armoured man emblematic of freedom and courage. But the picture evokes a world that would have been incomprehensible in the age it is meant to represent.

  Not that noble ladies didn’t need rescuing on occasion. But when they did, they infuriatingly failed to live up to our stereotype.

  DAMSELS-AT-WAR

  Take Nicola de la Haye: she was certainly trapped in a tall tower and in need of rescue. But it was all a bit different from the fairy tale.

  For a start, the tower in which she was trapped didn’t belong to a wicked uncle, stepfather or some other malign relative – it belonged to her. It was part of Lincoln Castle, and Nicola was the hereditary constable – governor – of the castle. What’s more, she wasn’t at all a helpless damsel; she was a military commander in her own right. As well as governing the castle she was also co-sheriff of Lincolnshire. She was obliged to provide knights’ service at the castle and exercised jurisdiction over the royal portion of the city of Lincoln.

  She was trapped because an invading French army had occupied Lincoln and was laying siege to the castle.

  Mind you, Nicola was a bit mature for a damsel – she was pushing 70. But then again, her knight in shining armour was also an old-age pensioner. He was none other than William Marshal, and although he was now well into his seventies he was the regent of England and was still generally regarded as the epitome of chivalry. William drove the French off, saving Nicola, Lincoln and the whole of England for the young Henry III. Ever the perfect knight, he then celebrated his and Nicola’s joint victory by taking her castle away from her and handing it over to the Earl of Salisbury.

  Nicola, however, wasn’t going to put up with that sort of behaviour from a geriatric like William. She stormed down to London, had the castle restored to her control and kept going as constable until she was well into her eighties. ‘What, then, is chivalry? Such a difficult, tough, and very costly thing to learn that no coward ventures to take it on.’*1

  On the down side, Nicola did not get the job of sheriff back. It is one of the oddities of social change that there are times when women are just not considered the right people to be sheriffs. England had to wait nearly 400 years for the next one – when Lady Ann Clifford was appointed sheriff of Westmoreland on the basis that not only was she one of the wealthiest women in the country, but she was also a recognized expert with a crossbow. Both James I and Cromwell found her hard to deal with, and that was the end of the story for woman sheriffs until the Victorian era.

  WOMEN AS PROPERTY

  The roles of men and women in society, and the relationship between the sexes, were forever changing throughout the period that we conveniently (if mistakenly) refer to as the ‘Middle Ages’. There was no one set of attitudes. It was a constantly varying dynamic – just as it is today.

  It would probably be wrong to talk of any steady advance in women’s rights and privileges through the 500 years after the Norman Conquest, but it is possible to say that towards the end of the period women were enjoying a more equal role in society, and more respect than they had previously been given – and then things were reversed.

  Of course, they lived in a man’s world – particularly at the start of the Middle Ages. The Conquest meant that William ‘owned’ the country. It became his personal property, and he had no intention of giving it away. Instead he allowed his followers the use of lands in return for their military service. This link between property and the profession of arms meant landholding became a male preserve. Men ruled the roost, and wives and daughters were supposed to do what they were told by their husbands and fathers.

  Many of the new Norman overlords expected to find wives among the widows and daughters of the Englishmen they had supplanted, and the new king encouraged this as a way of consolidating the Conquest. Not surprisingly, many of these women resisted. Some retreated to nunneries for self-protection. However others, like Christina of Markyate, resisted in other ways.

  CHRISTINA DE MARKYATE

  The Conquest meant a property windfall for the Normans, but this was naturally at the expense of the former owner-occupiers. Anglo-Saxons found themselves both dispossessed and unable to enter the power structure. Many an unhappy couple fell back on the time-honoured tradition of trading in their daughter’s flesh: marriage to a wealthy member of the new establishment could put an entire family back on the social ladder.

  This is the fate that Autti and Beatrix de Markyate resolved on for their young daughter, Christina, some 30 years after the Battle of Hastings.

  Autti was an ambitious Anglo-Saxon merchant in the village of Markyate in Hertfordshire who seems to have decided to achieve Norman respectability by offering his family’s sexual favours to the conquerors. His sister Alveva became the mistress of the notorious Ranulf Flambard – a man who was universally feared and infamous for his greed and ambition. The liaison was potentially attractive as Ranulf had been William Rufus’s chief minister, and became bishop of Durham. However, Rufus was killed and the hated Ranulf was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He escaped to Normandy with the help of his mother (apparently a one-eyed witch).

  When Christina was about ten years old Ranulf returned to England and his bishopric was restored. The bishop dropped in on his way to London, Alveva laid on a family feast and Ranulf saw Christina. He liked what he saw.

  Christina’s parents were only too happy to oblige the bishop with their daughter’s . . . well ‘hand’ wasn’t perhaps what Ranulf had in mind.

  Intermarriage may have been encouraged by the Conqueror as a way of embedding his men in their new country, but Christina had no intention of getting embedded with anyone. She had made a pilgrimage to St Albans Abbey when she was younger, and it had made a big impression on her. It must have been by far the largest building she had ever seen, and here she had made a secret vow of virginity, scratching a cross on the wall of the abbey to signify her commitment to Christ.

  After the feast Christina was left in Ranulf’s room with him, and he began to introduce her to his wicked ways. Knowing perfectly well what all this was about, Christina suggested that she should lock the door – and promptly did so from the outside.

  The enraged bishop determined to have the girl broken, and arranged for a young nobleman, Burthred, to ask for her hand in marriage. Her parents were delighted. Christina was going to achieve more for the family than Aunt Alveva ever had: their grandchildren would be legitimate members of the nobility.

  The problem was that Christina refused to be married, pleading that she was promised to Christ. Her parents spent a year trying to get her to see sense, buying her presents, making promises. Eventually she was browbeaten into agreeing to a betrothal – but betrothal was one thing, consummating the marriage was another. And a marriage did not count until it was consummated.

  Her parents embarked on a desperate series of stratagems, surrounding the girl with entertainers, taking her to banquets, trying to get her to loosen up. When these failed they shoved the hapless Burthred into her bedroom to do what he could. Christina sat the lad down and lectured him on the attractions of chastity for both sexes. He left somewhat confused, but was hectored into making a more robust effort.

  Christina’s parents pushed him into her room again and told him to stiffen up, be a man and take their daughter by force. This had her climbing up the wall – literally. She ‘hastily sprang out of bed and clinging with both hands to a nail which was fixed in the wall, she hung trembling between the wall and the hangings.’ Burthred could not find her and gave up his attempt at rape-within-marriage.

  Eventually Autti carted his daughter off to the Augustinian canons of St Mary’s Priory in Huntingdon: ‘Why must she depart from tradition? Why should she bring this dishonour on
her father? Her life of poverty will bring the whole of the nobility into disrepute!’ The prior was more impressed by the daughter than he was by her father, and so was the bishop until Autti bribed him to order her to marry. Christina, though, was unmoved.

  Beatrix decided that the problem was that her daughter was frigid. She hired crones to slip Christina love potions and sent men into her room at night, and ‘in the end swore that she would not care who deflowered her daughter, provided that some way of deflowering her could be found’.

  The only thing Christina could do was escape. She went first to the cell of Alfwen, an old anchoress in the nearby village of Flamstead, where she hid in a small dark chamber. Burthred, doing the full knightly quest thing, showed up at the cell and asked if Christina was hiding there. Alfwen replied: ‘Stop, my son, stop imagining that she is here with us. It is not our custom to give shelter to wives who are running away from their husbands.’ The biographer adds: ‘The man, deluded in this way, departed, resolved never again to go on such an errand.’

  Christina eventually moved to a hut belonging to Roger, a monk of St Albans who was living as a hermit in the village of Markyate. There she continued to hide, silently concealed in the corner of the hut behind a wooden plank and a log that was too heavy for her to lift. Burthred finally had the betrothal annulled, and she was able to leave her confinement. To make her happiness complete, Roger died and bequeathed his hut to her.

  Eventually she became a celebrated holy woman at St Albans Abbey, making slippers for the pope and embroidering the abbot’s underwear. That’s what really happened to damsels in distress. They had to be tough-minded and look out for themselves.

  THE DANGERS (AND ADVANTAGES) OF ABDUCTION

  There are, of course, stories of damsels being abducted and forcibly married by fortune-hunters, but these are not necessarily what they appear to be.

  The inheritance of a wealthy widow or an unwed noblewoman would become the property of whoever married her, but in neither case was the woman a free agent. She was a ward of the king. He regarded her estate as entirely within his gift to give away to whomsoever he wished.

  But the king had a problem. It was a legal principle that if an unmarried couple spent the night under the same roof they were taken to have slept together and were therefore married – marriage, after all, was simply a social compact. It did not require the involvement of a priest. However, such an unauthorized marriage was – in the king’s view – virtually stealing from him, and the marriage was legally regarded as abduction. The married couple could expect to have to pay a considerable fine.

  Obviously, these ‘abductions’ were quite often carried out with the full participation of the heiress in question as it was one way of getting to choose her own husband. Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, even went to the extreme of doing the abducting herself. She had held her title since her father died in 1255, when she was three. As the holder of a major Scottish fortune, her marriage was controlled by the King of Scotland, Alexander III, and before the age of 15 she was married to a suitable lord 20 years her senior: Adam de Kilconcath.

  Part of Adam’s suitability lay in his closeness to the future Edward I of England, and when Edward set off on his long-awaited crusade to the Holy Land in 1270 Adam went with him. The crusader kingdom of Jerusalem had been reduced to just an urban rump at the port of Acre, filled with internecine squabbles and killings, and the crusade was a hopeless gesture that cost Adam his life.

  The bad news arrived in 1271. It was brought to the 19-year-old Marjorie by an 18-year-old who had also been on the crusade: Robert Bruce, the son of the Lord of Annandale and Cleveland. Robert found Marjorie out hunting. She does not seem to have been devastated by the news; her marriage had hardly been a love match. But she was immediately aware of a very depressing fact – she was back once more on King Alexander’s list of useful assets, to be married off to some, probably rather elderly, supporter who needed her estate.

  What happened next is unclear. According to Robert, Marjorie simply decided that he was the most gorgeous hunk she had ever seen and seized the young crusader. She dragged him kicking and screaming, ‘very loath, to her castle of Turnberry’. After 15 days the poor boy emerged, married.

  Some historians are suspicious of the chronicle account, and suspect Robert of some complicity in all this. But by putting the blame on to Marjorie he avoided offending the king, who had to be content with seizing her castle and lands until she paid a fine. It was not necessarily the dynastic union he would have preferred, because the Bruces were competitors for the throne and Marjorie’s wealth strengthened them. In fact, Marjorie’s son, another Robert Bruce, became King of Scotland.

  The significance of the story, though, lies not in exactly what was going on, but in the fact that it was seen as entirely credible that a young noblewoman would abduct a man, bed him and so force him into marriage. It is not just that women were not seen as weak and helpless. They could also be seen as sexual predators.

  The Victorian idea that women were somehow less sexual than men would have been baffling in the Middle Ages – especially to women.

  CONSTRUCTING THE DAMSEL-IN-DISTRESS

  The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead.

  It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted; full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. This is sentimentally regretted, but tragically unalterable.

  Tennyson was retelling a genuine medieval tale, but he transformed it utterly. In the original story the lady was not weak and helpless at all, and she was not under any curse. Nor was she passive and pathetic. She was a wilful, stubborn woman who boldly declared her passionate love for Lancelot. Her tragedy was that it was not returned. The story was retold in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, and there too the Lady of Shalott was portrayed as a real, flesh and blood woman whose declaration of love was unashamed (‘Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman?’) and who wrote to Lancelot as an equal.

  In fact, pretty well every time we find an apparently helpless woman in medieval literature she turns out to be not quite what we were looking for. Take the distressed damsel in Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Yvain. The heroic knight Yvain is feeling sorry for himself in a woodland chapel, when he becomes aware of ‘a lorn damsel in sorry plight’. She says she is about to be condemned to death, and can only be saved by someone brave enough to fight her three accusers. Yvain, of course, is the necessary hero.

  This seems to be the fairy-tale archetype; the helpless damsel and the knight in shining armour. But this young lady is not some passive shrinking violet. Yvain knows her. A couple of thousand lines earlier she had saved his life, rescuing him from certain death by giving him a magic ring of invisibility at the risk of her own life. The damsel and the knight are equals in courage and daring.

  The fact is, there is little reference to genuinely helpless high-born maidens in medieval literature. Perhaps this is not too surprising as the stories were often commissioned by noblewomen, to be read to their friends and family.

  We do not have enormous knowledge of their lives, but there is enough to show that the lady’s bedchamber was, in many cases, more like a salon, elegantly decorated, where she amused herself entertaining her women friends (generally her retainers, ‘damsels’ married to men of status in her husband’s service) and male visitors, and where they would ‘drink wine, play chess and listen to the harp’.*2 They would also read and be read to – silent reading wa
s regarded as highly suspect, a sign of being antisocial or melancholy, suitable only for scholars.

  By the fourteenth century wills show that the women who could afford expensive books were as interested as men in the derring-do of storybook knights. A recent historian writes: ‘The evidence of women’s wills in Chaucer’s day . . . reveals a network of women readers who bequeathed books from one generation to another. These included, along with devotional books, the works of romance which Chaucer depicted women reading to one another. Such books were frequently passed from mother to daughter, sister to sister, godmother to god-daughter, but it was not considered essential to keep them in the female line; women’s reading tastes were catholic and they shared them with men.’*3

  Thus, in 1380 Elizabeth la Zouche leaves Lancelot and Tristam to her husband. The Count of Devon leaves books to his daughters but not to his sons. His widow, Margaret Courtenay, then leaves her own books, which include Merlin and Arthur of Brittany, to the girls and a woman friend.

  The women in these tales are light years away from the Victorian stereotype. Far from being helpless, they are resourceful and often scheming. And as for being sexually passive – medieval women wouldn’t have known what you meant. The damsels in the stories are all too often sexual predators. Take the Lady of the Castle who takes such a shine to Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  The story so far: Gawain is on a quest. He sleeps the night in a strange castle. He’s woken up very early in the morning, shortly after the Lord of the Castle and his men have ridden off hunting. The door of his chamber opens cautiously and the lady slips into his room. She locks the door, creeps across to his bed and sits down upon it. Gawain lies doggo for some time but eventually shows some sign of life, whereupon the lady speaks to him thus: