Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  Seeing them weep, the gallant Yvain asked them the cause of their sorrow…

  We shall remain poor and naked forever and shall always be hungry and thirsty; no matter how hard we try, we’ll never have anything better to eat. Our bread supply is very meagre: little in the morning and less at night, for by the work of our hands we’ll never have more to live on than fourpence in the pound; and with this we cannot buy sufficient food and clothing… Here we are in poverty, while he for whom we labour grows rich from our work.6

  Only in the verses of the medieval romantic poets are these women liberated by a chivalric knight. In reality, many of the chambres des dames must have been sweatshops. The women’s plea to Yvain might, seven hundred years later, have been made by one of Charles Dickens’s Coketown mill workers in Hard Times.

  Héloïse and Abélard

  At the other end of the social scale, two Parisian intellectuals, as scandalous in their tragic love as those denizens of the twentieth-century Left Bank, de Beauvoir and Sartre, have intrigued historians and poets since the beginning of the twelfth century. Peter Abélard: brilliant dialectician and teacher, tortured seducer and philosophical adventurer, a founder of the University of Paris, who might also be seen as a cynical abuser; and Héloïse: younger, a highly educated scholar – she knew Greek, Hebrew and Latin – and brilliant of mind, a gifted musician and distinguished abbess; sexually passionate and guilt-ridden lover, abandoned but steadfast wife and mother. The unfolding melodrama of their relationship is told in eight very long surviving letters, written in the 1130s when they had long been estranged.

  Abélard, seemingly writing more than fifteen years after what he called ‘the calamity’, when fable had long since replaced truth, delivers the bare facts of an unfolding disaster in a letter to a friend. Héloïse had been raised in a convent at Argenteuil and nothing is known of her parents. It rather matters when she was born, but opinions differ. When she met Abélard she was either in her late teens or early twenties. In any case, by about 1115 she was nominatissima, most renowned, in learning, while he was master of the cathedral school at Notre-Dame and a man whose dazzling contemporary reputation at the inception of the twelfth-century Renaissance might be compared to that of Humphry Davy when he was first installed at the Royal Institution in 1801.

  Abélard’s response to the prevailing philosophy, epitomised by the intellectual might of Anselm of Canterbury who said ‘I believe, so that I might understand’ (credo ut intelligam), was an insistence that he must understand in order to believe. In the early twelfth century, that was a revolutionary thought: a scientific thought.

  Héloïse lived as a ward of her uncle, a wealthy canon named Fulbert who encouraged her studies. She was physically attractive and, for men of intellect, her accomplishments and self-confidence made her more so. Abélard cannot have been the only man determined to seduce her; but he was the only one bold enough to insinuate himself with her uncle, to arrange lodgings with the family, and to offer his services to her as a private tutor, with predictable results. For months, the pair abandoned themselves to physical and intellectual passion, careless of rumour and of his neglect of work. At times the relationship became violent: Abélard’s claim that he struck his lover merely in order to convince her uncle that their relationship was exclusively pedagogic is still shocking.

  Eventually Fulbert guessed, or was told, that the pair were lovers and Abélard was thrown out. Héloïse and Peter, devastated by their separation, abandoned all caution and, now lacking the discretion of domestic privacy and the pretence of a formal tutorial relationship, were caught in flagrante. Shortly afterwards, Héloïse told Peter that she was pregnant. Fearing Fulbert’s wrath and seizing the opportunity while her uncle was absent from home, Peter arranged for Héloïse to be taken secretly to stay with his sister in Brittany, in whose house she bore a boy whom they named Astralabe: a ‘star catcher’.

  Abélard’s folly now was to underestimate both his lover and his enemy. He went to Fulbert and offered to marry Héloïse, on condition that the marriage be kept secret to avoid further damage to his (Abélard’s) reputation. The uncle agreed. Neither thought to consult Héloïse, who refused. In her opposition to marriage her own voice is heard, loud and clear. First, she argued that her uncle’s apparent new equanimity was superficial – he would have his revenge on them both; second, that the damage to Abélard’s reputation when the truth came out would ruin him – he had been famously chaste until he met Héloïse. Worse, ‘the world would justly exact punishment from her if she removed such a light from its midst’. And then, she argued

  What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindles? Who can concentrate on thoughts of scriptures or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses soothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home?7

  This is the selfless sacrifice of a woman for her lover. At least, that is how it is meant to be read – these, after all, are Peter Abélard’s recollections of that time, and they are turned towards himself. It seems to me that these words might also be read in quite another way: as a sentiment that would be shared by many later women intellectuals – Mary Astell∫ and Mary Wollstonecraft spring to mind – who spurned the bonds of conventional marriage as much for their own sake as for their lovers’. Many years later, Héloïse told Peter that much of her own opposition to marriage was her disgust with the idea that she might be thought venal or possessive; that to be cast as his whore was a sweeter thought than to be seen to be offering herself for sale as a wife, which would be true prostitution.

  Against her own judgement and intellectual objections, Héloïse gave in to Peter’s senses of rectitude, self-interest and guilt. They married in secret; but the news spread and now Peter sent Héloïse to Argenteuil, the convent of her childhood, as much to salvage his own position as to protect her from the outpouring of her uncle’s vitriol. Fulbert’s response was savage: his kinsmen broke into Abélard’s lodgings and mutilated him by castration.

  The rest of Peter’s autobiographical letter records the many disputes, false accusations and other reverses of fortune that he had suffered since. Fifteen years later, after the two former lovers had both spent the intervening years in holy orders, meeting very rarely and only in formal circumstances, they undertook a correspondence whose tragic ironies and reflections have ensured their lasting fame. It began after Héloïse read a copy of her husband’s autobiographical letter. Contact in the intervening years had been desultory, between the leaders of two respectable monastic establishments; even in private, each had maintained their dignity. But in 1129 Héloïse and her nuns – she was by now prioress – were evicted from Argentueil, and Peter arranged for them to take over his own former hermitage of Paraclete, near Troyes. Now, in her first letter to him subsequent to these events, Héloïse expressed her desire to share Peter’s physical and mental pain and, finally allowing herself an outpouring of personal grief and loss and of passion sustained, confronted him with his own betrayal…

  Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can – or I will tell you what I think and indeed everyone suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love. So when the end came to what you desired, any show of feeling you used to make went with it.8

  Héloïse’s anger is understandable; on the other hand, one feels empathy for the emotional remoteness of her castrated lover. Her letter ends with this:

  When in the past you sought me out for sinful pleasures your letters came to me thick and fast, and your many songs put your Héloïse on everyone’s lips, so that every
street and house resounded with my name… I beg you, think what you owe me, give ear to my pleas, and I will finish a long letter with a brief ending: farewell, my only love.9

  The subsequent exchanges between spurned lover and maimed philosopher are read today with as much emotional engagement as they were when collected and copied, over 700 years ago; and if, in life, they were condemned to such extreme emotional punishment and estrangement, in death they were, it seems, eventually reunited: Héloïse and Peter Abélard are said to share a tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  Trials and tribulations

  Medieval women were busy: working, bearing children, winning and losing daily battles for health, wealth and happiness. The mundanity of lives and deaths in medieval communities is never so starkly recorded as in the Coroners’ Rolls that survive from those distant centuries. Their unadorned accounts of accident, malice aforethought and petty larceny are all the more touching for their baldness and for the fragmentary glimpses they offer of lives otherwise unrecorded; and they largely speak for themselves. First, a shockingly violent murder:

  1271. It happened in the vill of Ravensden [Bedfordshire] on the night of Sunday next before Easter Day in the fifty-fifth year [of the reign of Henry III: reigned 1216–72] that Walter Bedell of Renhold came to the house of his wife Isabel, Reginald’s daughter, in Ravensden, and asked her to come with him to the grange of Renhold to get a bushel of wheat which he wished to give her, and she went with him. And when they reached the meadow called Longmead, he at once struck her over the left ear, evidently with a knife, giving her a wound three inches in length and to the brain in depth; afterwards he threw her into the water of a brook called Ravensbrook. And on the following Monday Matilda, her mother, Reginald’s wife, first found her dead; she raised the hue, and the hue was pursued…10

  In the thirteenth century, I have no doubt, just as in the twenty-first, young men were told by their elders and betters not to point dangerous weapons at people. But now, as then, accidents will happen, sometimes with the most unfortunate outcomes…

  It happened in the vill of Goldington [Bedfordshire] on Tuesday in Whitsun week in the fifty-sixth year [of Henry III’s reign] that a woman was accidentally shot in the right eye with an arrow; fifteen days afterwards she died from illness due to pregnancy…11

  The Coroners’ Rolls, by their nature, highlight unusual deaths; but the ever-present risk of open fires and the necessity for working parents to leave young children alone and unattended must have made the sort of domestic tragedy reported here all too common:

  It happened in the vill of Barford on Friday next before the Assumption of the Blessed Mary in the fifty-first year of King Henry at the house of William Blanche – that Muriel, his daughter, who was almost six years old, and Beatrice, her sister, who was almost three years old [were in the house] while the said William and Muriel, his wife, were in the fields, and a fire broke out in the said house and burned it, together with Beatrice, William’s infant daughter…12

  And, in an age characterised by violence, warfare and epidemic, it is easy to forget all the other dangers of everyday life – in this case, an industrial accident in a brewery:

  October 1270. Amice Belamy, Robert Belamy’s daughter, and [Sibyl] Bonchevaler were carrying between them a tub full of grout [a mix of herbs for flavouring beer], intending to empty the grout into a boiling leaden vessel; and Amice Belamy’s feet slipped, and she fell into the said vessel, and the tub fell upon her. Sibyl Bonchevaler at once sprang to her and lifted her from the vessel and shouted [for help]; the servants of the household came and found her almost scalded to death. Amice had the rites of the church, and died on the following Friday about the hour of prime… The vessel is appraised at twelve pence, the tub at two pence, the cowl-staff at a halfpenny; and they are delivered to the township of Eaton…13

  Among all the other crimes, petty and capital, that dogged medieval society, are notices of familiar misdemeanours in the line of commercial fraud. Medieval weights and measures laws, the forerunners of our own consumer protections, were designed to protect merchants and, perhaps, consumers from those competitors who would try to pass off poor-quality or under-weight goods, as the following record from the City of London shows:

  1310. On the Monday next before the Feast of St Hilary the bread of Sarra Foting, Christina Terrice, Godieyva Foting, Matilda de Bolingtone, Christina Prochet, Isabella Sperling, Alice Pegges, Johanna de Caunterbrigge and Isabella Pouveste, bakeresses of Stratford, was taken by Roger le Paumer, Sheriff of London, and weighed before the Mayor and Aldermen; and it was found that the halfpenny loaf weighed less than it ought by eight shillings. But seeing that the bread was cold, and ought not to have been weighed in such a state, by the custom of the City, it was agreed that it should not be forfeited this time. But in order that such an offence as this should not pass unpunished, it was [decided] as to bread so taken, that three halfpenny loaves should always be sold for a penny; but that the bakeresses aforesaid should this time have such penny…14

  It seems that these baxters got off lightly. For the most part, women got on with their daily lives unnoticed by the historical record and it is left to archaeology and anthropology to offer illumination.

  At the centre of rural life lay the hearth; and women’s dominion over social space, reflected in the keys and strike-a-lights that hung from their belts, is expressed in the internal organisation of the home. An eighteenth-century observer in northern Germany, admiring the design of the long house that had been so characteristic of medieval settlements there and which was then undergoing its last evolutions, saw that the central position of the hearth was designed so that its mistress

  …can overlook three doors, greet people entering the house, offer them a seat, while keeping an eye on her children, servants, horses and cows, tending cellars and bedrooms, and get on with her spinning and cooking… Each task is linked in a chain with the others.15

  Above all, women were constantly occupied. Management of children, domestic animals, the dairy, the loom and the washtub, with or without the help of domestic labour, filled their days. At harvest time they could be found in the fields with sickles, cutting corn stalks; in the dark months, after the slaughtering of beasts, they dried and cured meat and fish, eking out stores of autumn produce, making and mending. That is not to say that men were not also fully occupied: they appear overwhelmingly in medieval pictorial images either fighting or, for the most part, cutting wood, ploughing, carting manure, mending nets or threshing. If men’s and women’s labours lay in distinct activities, those must at times have been shared by all; and there seems little doubt that children of both sexes were worked hard too. St Alpaix (died 1211), one of the few well-known holy women who came from a demonstrably poor rural background, in Burgundy, was her father’s eldest daughter and principal helper, goading the oxen as he guided the plough, carrying baskets of manure or tending the family’s sheep, before the work broke her physically. Her younger brothers left her to starve before she was rescued by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, after which her visions – intensified, I imagine, by malnutrition – brought her to the attention of religious professionals.

  If the lives of rural women were unremittingly hard, the expanding towns and cities of medieval Europe offered some of them independence, a professional career and even wealth. David Herlihy’s analysis of tax records in Paris from around 1300, when it was substantially the largest city anywhere, shows that although women were recorded as the heads of only around one-tenth of the city’s households, they were to be found in a wide variety of occupations, not just as household servants. They were pedlars, dressmakers, laundresses, beguines;Ω silk, linen and wool workers, barbers, nurses, fishmongers, wax-workers, baxters, innkeepers and cooks. Increasingly, professionalisation and the rise of guilds would exclude women from some of these trades – especially the textile business – as they already were from practising the law; even so, widows were allowed by law to continue to practise t
heir husbands’ professions.

  Women in virtual landscapes

  The women who appear in the Coroners’ Rolls are absolutely real; but in medieval art women featured in overt and covert visual and pictorial narratives that tell us something about both the real and imaginative landscapes that they inhabited. In religious paintings and in the marginalia of books, they are busy fulfilling objectified roles. Peasant women are depicted in an idealised countryside, toiling at work that authors and illustrators thought it fitting for them to carry out; nuns are seen praying or reading; Madonnas cradle infants. The more genteel ladies of the court make music, pick flowers, play at lovemaking and backgammon and indulge in other suitably noble pursuits, while mermaids, hags and grotesques provoke, punish or suffer for all manner of sins. All medieval pictures carry complex suites of symbolic, non-literal meanings and for women a range of messages is carried in their dress, their attitude, their gestures, occupations and companions.

  In the brilliant manuscript known as the Très riches heures, commissioned by John, Duc de Berry≈ (1340–1416), a calendar of the months, whose backdrops are the duke’s own magnificent castles and palaces, begins with a New Year’s feast to which no women seem to have been invited. In February they appear, warming themselves by a roaring fire while their menfolk toil with axes in snowy woods or tend sheep huddled in their pens. In March’s countryside they are again absent while men plough, sow seed and plant vines. In April, noble ladies of the duke’s court are out in his gardens in all their finery, soaking up the springtime sunshine and the flattery of their menfolk. In May they mount their horses and, garlanded with spring flowers, attend their lords’ progress through their estates. At last, in June, women are shown working in the fields, their skirts hitched into their belts, raking hay while men mow grass in the background. In July we see the back of a blue-dressed – and therefore virtuous∂ – woman shearing a sheep in company with her husband, while reapers cut corn behind them. August sees the noble ladies out hawking with the gentlemen of the court, one of them doubling up on her beau’s horse. Naked peasants swim in a lake in the discreet distance – the gap is understood to be as great socially as it is physically. September’s women are gathering grapes with men, while another carries a basket of goods on her head towards the duke’s Château de Saumur in the Loire Valley. In October, a plough horse is exhorted by its master while another man sows corn in the shadow of the Louvre palace. November is unmistakeably autumn; men drive pigs into the woods to fatten on acorns and beechnuts while the women have, perhaps, retreated indoors; who can say? In the last month of the year, it is the men who are out hunting with dogs. For the nobles of the court, then, working women played bit parts in their lives; they might notice them while they were riding through their lands but the labours of the dairy, hearth and weaving shed are literally and figuratively beneath their gaze. Gentlewomen have their restricted place, too: as decorations, as prospective marriage partners or lovers.