The Once and Future King

Chapter III

Lancelot and Guenever were sitting at the solar window. An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime. We, who have learned to base our interpretation of love on the conventional boy-and-girl romance of Romeo and Juliet, would be amazed if we could step back into the Middle Ages – when the poet of chivalry could write about Man that he had ‘en ciel un dieu, par terre une déesse.’ Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth – and, since people who devote themselves to goddesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail.

Lancelot and Guenever were sitting by the window in the high keep, and Arthur’s England stretched below them, under the level rays of sunset.

It was the Gramarye of the Middle Ages, which some people are accustomed to think of as the Dark Ages, and Arthur had made it what it was. When the old King came to his throne it had been an England of armoured barons, and of famine, and of war. It had been the country of trial by ordeal with red-hot irons, of the Law of Englishry, and of the sad, wordless song of Morfa-Rhuddlan. Then, on the sea-coast, within a foreign vessel’s reach, not an animal, not a fruit tree, had been left. Then, in the fens and the vast forests, the last of the Saxons had defended themselves against the bitter rule of Uther the Conqueror; then the words ‘Norman’ and ‘Baron’ had been equivalent to the modern word of ‘Sahib’; then Llewellyn ap Griffith’s head, in its crown of ivy, had mouldered on the clustered spikes of the Tower; then you would have met the mendicants by the roadside, mutilated men who carried their right hands in their left, and the forest dogs would have trotted beside them, also mutilated by the removal of one toe – so that they could not hunt in the woodlands of the lord. When Arthur first came, the country people had been accustomed to bar themselves in their cottages every night as if for siege, and had prayed to God for peace during darkness, the goodman of the house repeating the prayers used at sea on the approach of storm and ending with the plea ‘the Lord bless and help us,’ to which all present had replied, ‘Amen.’ In the baron’s castle, in the early days, you would have found the poor men being disembowelled – and their living bowels burned before them – men being slit open to see if they had swallowed their gold, men gagged with notched iron bits, men hanging upside down with their heads in smoke, others in snake pits or with leather tourniquets round their heads, or crammed into stone-filled boxes which would break their bones. You have only to turn to the literature of the period, with its stories of the mythological families such as Plantagenets, Capets and so forth, to see how the land lay. Legendary kings like John had been accustomed to hang twenty-eight hostages before dinner; or, like Philip, had been defended by ‘sergeants-at-mace,’ a kind of storm troopers who guarded their lord with maces; or, like Louis, had decapitated their enemies on scaffolds under the blood of which the children of the enemy had been forced to stand. This, at all events, is what Ingulf of Croyland used to tell us, until he was discovered to be a forgery. Then there had been Archbishops nicknamed ‘Skin-villain,’ and churches used as forts – with trenches in the graveyards among the bones – and price-lists for fining murderers, and bodies of the excommunicated lying unburied, and famishing peasants eating grass or tree-bark or one another. (One of them ate forty-eight.) There had been roasting heretics on the one hand – forty-five Templars had been burned in one day – and the heads of captives being thrown into besieged castles from catapults on the other. Here a leader of the Jacquerie had been writhing in his chains, as he was crowned with a red-hot tripod. There a Pope had been complaining, as he was held to ransom, or another one had been wriggling as he was poisoned. Treasure had been cemented into castle walls, in the form of gold bars, and the builders had been executed afterwards. Children playing in the streets of Paris had frolicked with the dead body of a Constable, and others, with the women and old men, had starved outside the walls of beleaguered towns, yet inside the ring of the besiegers. Hus and Jerome, with the mitres of apostasy upon their heads, had flamed and fizzled at the stake. The hamstrung imbeciles of Jumièges had floated down the Seine. Giles de Retz had been found to have no less than a ton of children’s bones, calcined, in his castle, after having murdered them at the rate of twelve score a year for nine years. The Duke of Berry had lost a kingdom through the unpopularity which he earned by feeling sorry for eight hundred foot soldiers who had been killed in a battle. The youthful count of St Pol had been taught the arts of war by being given twenty-four living prisoners to slaughter in various ways, for practice. Louis the Eleventh, another of the fictional kings, had kept obnoxious bishops in rather expensive cages. The Duke Robert had been surnamed ‘the Magnificent’ by his nobles – but ‘the Devil’ by his parishioners. And all the while, before Arthur came, the common people – of whom fourteen were eaten by wolves out of one town in a single week, of whom one third were to die in the Black Death, of whom the corpses had been packed in pits ‘like bacon,’ for whom the refuges at evening had often been forests and marshes and caves, for whom, in seventy years, there had been known to be forty-eight of famine – these people had looked up at the feudal nobility who were termed the ‘lords of sky and earth,’ and – themselves battered by bishops who, because they were not allowed to shed blood, went for them with iron clubs – had cried aloud that Christ and his saints were sleeping.

‘Pourquoi,’ the poor wretches had sung in their misery:

                     Pourquoi nous laisser faire dommage?

                     Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont.

Such had been the surprisingly modern civilization which Arthur had inherited. But it was not the civilization over which the lovers looked out. Now, safe in the apple-green sunset before them, there stretched the fabled Merry England of the Middle Ages, when they were not so dark. Lancelot and Guenever were gazing on the Age of Individuals.

What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himself – was riotously busy fulfilling the vagaries of human nature. There was such a gusto about the landscape which stretched before their window, such a riot of unexpected people and things, that you hardly knew how to begin describing it.

The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur’s Gramarye, the sun’s rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light-giving passion of the heart that men gave love-names to their fortresses. Lancelot’s Joyous Gard was not a singularity in an age which has left us Beauté, Plaisance, or Malvoisin – the bad neighbour to its enemies – an age in which even an oaf like the imaginary Richard Coeur de Lion, who suffered from boils, could call his castle ‘Gaillard’, and speak of it as ‘my beautiful one-year-old daughter’. Even that legendary scoundrel William the Conqueror had a second nickname: ‘the Great Builder.’ Think of the glass itself, with its five grand colours stained right through. It was rougher than ours, thicker, fitted in smaller pieces. They loved it with the same fury as they gave to their castles, and Villars de Honnecourt, struck by a particularly beautiful specimen, stopped to draw it on his journeys, with the explanation that ‘I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all windows.’ Picture the insides of those ancient churches – not the grey and gutted interiors to which we are accustomed – but insides blazing with colour, plastered with frescoes in which all the figures stood on tip-toe, fluttering with tapestry or with brocades from Baghdad. Picture also the interiors of such castles as were visible from Guenever’s window. These were no longer the grim keeps of Arthur’s accession. Now they were filling with furniture made by the joiner, instead of the carpenter; now their walls rippled doorless with the flexible gaieties of Arras, tapestries like that of the Jousts of St Denis which, although covering more than four hundred square yards, had been woven in less than three years, such was the ardour of its creation. If you look closely in a ruined castle even nowadays, you can sometimes find the hooks from which these flashing tapestries were hung. Remember, too, the goldsmiths of Lorraine, who made shrines in the shape of little churches, with aisles, statues, transepts and all, like dolls’ houses: remember the enamellers of Limoges, and the champlevé work, and the German ivory carvers, and the garnets set in Irish metal. Finally, if you are willing to picture the ferment of creative art which existed in our famous ages of darkness, you must get rid of the idea that written culture came to Europe with the fall of Constantinople. Every clerk in every country was a man of culture in those days – it was his profession to be so. ‘Every letter written,’ said a medieval abbot,’ is a wound inflicted on the devil.’ The library of St Piquier, as early as the ninth century, had 256 volumes, including Virgil, Cicero, Terence and Macrobius. Charles the Fifth had no less than nine hundred and ten volumes, so that his personal collection was about as big as the Everyman Library is today.

Lastly there were under the windows the people themselves – the coruscating mixture of oddities who reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most surprising ways. In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was notorious for having invented the pendulum clock. A fabled King of France called Robert, who had suffered the misfortune to be excommunicated, ran into dreadful troubles about his domestic arrangements, because the only two servants who could be persuaded to cook for him insisted on burning the saucepans after meals. An archbishop of Canterbury, having excommunicated all the prebendaries of St Paul’s in a pet, rushed into the Priory of St Bartholomew and knocked out the sub-prior in the middle of the chapel – which created such an uproar that his own vestments were torn off, revealing a suit of armour underneath, and he had to flee to Lambeth in a boat. The Countess of Anjou always used to vanish out of the window at the secreta of the mass. Madame Trote de Salerno used her ears as a handkerchief and let her eyebrows hang down behind her shoulders, like silver chains. A bishop of Bath, under the imaginary Edward the First, was considered after due reflection to be an unsuitable man for the Archbishopric, because he had too many illegitimate children – not some, but too many. And the bishop himself could hardly hold a candle to the Countess of Henneberge, who suddenly gave birth to 365 children at one confinement.

It was the age of fullness, the age of wading into everything up to the neck. Perhaps Arthur imposed this ideal on Christendom, because of the richness of his own schooling under Merlyn.

For the King, or at least this is how Malory interprets him, was the patron saint of chivalry. He was not a distressed Briton hopping about in a suit of woad in the fifth century – nor yet one of those nouveaux riches de la Poles, who must have afflicted the last years of Malory himself. Arthur was the heart’s king of a chivalry which had reached its flower perhaps two hundred years before our antiquarian author began to work. He was the badge of everything that was good in the Middle Ages, and he had made these things himself.

As Malory pictures him, Arthur of England was the champion of a civilization which is misrepresented in the history books. The serf of chivalry was not a slave for whom there was no hope. On the contrary, he had at least three legitimate ways of rising, the greatest of which was the Catholic Church. With the assistance of Arthur’s policies this church – still the greatest of all corporations free to learned men on earth – had become a highway open to the lowest slave. A Saxon peasant was Pope in Adrian IV, the son of a carpenter in Gregory VII. In those despised Middle Ages of theirs you could become the greatest man in the world, by simply having learning. And it is a mistake to believe that Arthur’s civilization was weak in this famous science of ours. The scientists, although they happened to call them magicians at the time, invented almost as terrible things as we have invented – except that we have become accustomed to theirs by use. The greatest magicians, like Albertus Magnus, Friar Bacon, and Raymond Lully, knew several secrets which we have lost today, and discovered as a side issue what still appears to be the chief commodity of civilization, namely gunpowder. They were honoured for their learning, and Albert the Great was made a bishop. One of them who was called Baptista Porta seems to have invented the cinema – though he sensibly decided not to develop it.

As for aircraft, in the tenth century a monk called Aethelmaer was experimenting with them, and might have succeeded but for an accident in adjusting of his tail unit. He crashed ‘quod’ – says William of Malmesbury – ‘caudam in posteriori parte oblitus fuerat adaptare.’

Even in modernity, the ages of darkness were not so far behind us. At least they had some sparkling names for their fiercer cocktails: which they called Huffe Cap, Mad Dog, Father Whoresonne, Angel’s Food, Dragon’s Milke, Go to the Wall, Stride Wide, and Lift Leg.

The view from the window was delightful, though in some cases it was odd. Where we have hedged fields and parklands, they had village communities, moorlands, fens and forests of enormous size. Sherwood stretched for hundreds of miles, from Nottingham to the middle of York. The busyness that went on in the island, the bee-keeping and the rook-scaring and the ploughing with oxen: for these you must look in the Luttrell Psalter, where they are beautifully drawn. In those days, if you had been interested by peculiar things, perhaps you would have had the luck to notice a knight-in-armour riding past the window. You would have noticed his head, which was shaved round the ears and at the back: but on the top his hair rose up like a Japanese doll’s, so that the skull looked like a cottage loaf. This top-knot made an excellent shock-absorber, under his helm. The next man to pass might have been a clerk, perhaps on an ambler, and the hair of this one would have been exactly the opposite of the knight’s – for he would have been completely bald on top, because of his tonsure. When he had gone to the bishop to be made a clerk in the first place, he had taken a pair of scissors with him. Next, if you wanted some peculiar person to ride by, there might have come a crusader who had promised to deliver the grace of God. You would have expected the cross on his surcoat, no doubt, but you might not have realized that he was so delighted with the whole affair that he put the same symbol almost everywhere that it could be made to go. Like a new Boy Scout, transported with enthusiasm, he would have stuck the cross on his escutcheon, on his coat, on his helm, on his saddle, and on the horse’s curb. The next man to pass the window might have been one sort of Cistercian lay-brother, whom you would have expected to be a learned man because of his cloth. But no, he was ex officio an illiterate. It was his business to stick the leaden seals on papal bulls, and, so as to preserve the Secrecy of the Pope, they used to make sure that he could not read a word. Now might come a Saxon wearing the beard and a sort of Phrygian cap, as a sign of defiance – now a knight from the Marches of the Northern border. The latter, because he lived by raiding during the night-time, would have borne a moon and stars on azure in his coat. Here might be some smoke in the landscape, rising from the bellows of an alchemist who was, most sensibly, trying to turn lead to gold – an art which has remained beyond us to the present day, though we are getting nearer to it with atomic fusion. There, far away in the environs of a monastery, you might have seen a procession of angry monks making a barefoot march round their foundation – but they might have been walking against the sun, in malediction, because they had fallen out with the abbot. Perhaps, if you looked in this direction, you would see a vineyard fenced with bones – it had been discovered, during the early years of Arthur, that bones made an excellent fence for vineyards, graveyards, or even for forts – and perhaps, if you looked in the other, you would see a castle door that looked like a keeper’s gallows. It would have been completely covered with the nailed heads of wolves, bears, stags, and so forth. Far away, over there to the left, perhaps there would be a tournament going on according to the laws laid down by Geoffrey de Preully, and the Kings-at-arms would be carefully examining the combatants, like referees before a boxing match, to see that they were not stuck to their saddles. The referees at a judicial duel between a certain Earl of Salisbury and a Bishop of Salisbury, under the supposed king Edward III, found that the bishop’s champion had prayers and incantations sewn all over him, under his armour – which was almost as bad as a boxer hiding a horse-shoe in his glove. Below the window-ledge a pair of constipated papal nuncios might have been riding gloomily back to Rome. Such a pair were once sent with bulls to excommunicate Barnabas Visconti, but Barnabas only made them eat their bulls – parchment, ribbons, leaden seals and all. Following closely behind them perhaps there would have strode a professional pilgrim, supporting himself on a stout knobbed staff shod like an alpenstock and weighed down with blessed medals, relics, shells, vernicles and so forth. He would have called himself a palmer and, if he were a well-travelled one, his relics might have included a feather from the Angel Gabriel, some of the coals on which St Lawrence was grilled, a finger of the Holy Ghost ‘whole and sound as ever it was,’ ‘a vial of the sweat of St Michael whereas he fought with the devil,’ a little of ‘the bush in which the Lord spake to Moses,’ a vest of St Peter’s, or some of the Blessed Virgin’s milk preserved at Walsingham. After the palmer perhaps there would have prowled a rather more sinister figure: one of those who ‘sleep by day and watch by night, eat well and drink well, but possess nothing.’ He would be an outlaw, of whom they wrote:

     For an outlawe this is the lawe, that men hym take and binde

     Wythout pytee, hanged to bee, and waver with the wynde.

But before he came to his last wavering in the wind, he would have lived a free life. His mate would be marching sturdily beside him, also with a price on her head – her hair shaven off before she took to the woods, and known as a weyve. She would glance back occasionally, alert for the hue and cry with which they might be hunted.

Here might come a baron with a hot pie carried carefully before him, because he had to bring such a pie to the King once a year, so as to let King Arthur sniff it in payment of his feudal dues. There might go another baron at full tilt after some dragon or other, and bump! down he might come, while the horse cantered away. But if he did so, one of his attendants would immediately mount him again on his own horse – just as we would do to a master-of-hounds today – because that was the feudal law. In the distance of the north, under the fading sunset, there might spring up the cottage light of some busy witch who was not only making a wax image of somebody she disapproved of, but also getting the image baptized – this was the operative factor – before she stuck some pins into it. One of her priestly friends, by the way, who had gone to the Little Master, might be willing to say a Requiem Mass against anybody you wanted to dispose of – and, when he came to the ‘Requiem aeternum dona ei, Domine,’ he would mean it, although the man was alive. Equally distant in the west, under the same sunset, you might have seen Enguerrand de Marigny, who built the enormous gallows at Mountfalcon, himself rotting and clanking on the same gallows, because he had been found guilty of Black Magic. The Dukes of Berry and Brittany, two decent men, might have been trotting along the road, in satin cuirasses which imitated steel. These two did not like to accept the advantage of armour, and, finding the satin cooler to wear, they were determined to be ordinary and brave. Lancelot might have done the same sort of thing. Above them on the hillside, but unobserved by them, might have sat Joly Joly Wat, with his tar-box beside him. He was the most typical figure of Gramarye, his tar being the antiseptic of his sheep. If you had said to him, ‘Don’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar,’ he would have agreed with you at once – for it was he who invented the adage, which we have translated from sheep into ships.

Towards the remoter distance perhaps a bankrupt might have been getting a vigorous whacking in some muscovite marketplace – not out of ill-feeling towards himself, but in the fervent hope that if only he squealed loud enough some of his friends or relations in the crowd would pay his debts out of commiseration. Further south, towards the Mediterranean basin, you might have seen a seaman being punished for gambling, under a law of Richard Coeur de Lion. The punishment consisted in being thrown into the water three times from the mainmast tree, and his comrades used to acclaim each belly-flopper with a cheer. A third ingenious punishment might possibly have been inflicted in the market-place below you. A wine merchant whose wares were of bad quality would have been stuck in the pillory and there he would have been made to drink an excessive quantity of his own liquor – after which the rest would be poured over his head. What a headache next morning! In this direction, if you happened to be broad-minded, you might have been amused to see the saucy Alisoun who cried, ‘Tee-Hee!’ after she had been given the unusual kiss which Chaucer tells about. In that one, you might notice an exasperated Miller and his family, trying to straighten out the hurrah’s nest which happened last night through the displacement of a cradle as the Reeve tells in his tale. A schoolboy who had had the good luck and the initiative to shoot an Earl of Salisbury dead, with one of the new-fangled cannons, might be being idolized by his fellow scholars in the playground of yonder monastery school. Plum trees, only lately introduced like Merlyn’s mulberry, might be shedding blossom under the light of eve beside the playground. Another little boy, this time a king of four years old in Scotland, might be sadly issuing a royal mandate to his Nannie, which empowered her to spank him without being guilty of High Treason. A disreputable army, who used to live by the sword as a trained band, might be begging its bread from door to door – a good fate for all armies – and a man who had taken sanctuary in that church away to the east there, might have had his leg cut off because he had taken half a step outside the door. In the same sanctuary there would be quite a congeries of forgers, thieves, murderers and debtors, all busy forging away or sharpening their knives for the evening’s outing, in the restful seclusion of the church where they could not be arrested. The worst that could happen to them, once they had got their sanctuary, was banishment. Then they would have had to walk to Dover, always keeping to the middle of the road and clutching a crucifix – if they let go of it for a moment, you were allowed to attack them – and, once there, if they could not get a boat immediately, they would have had to walk into the sea daily up to their necks to prove that they were really trying.

Did you know that in these dark ages which were visible from Guenever’s window, there was so much decency in the world that the Catholic Church could impose a peace to all their fighting – which it called The Truce of God – and which lasted from Wednesday to Monday, as well as during the whole of Advent and Lent? Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription? Even if they were foolish enough to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe, do we not ourselves believe that man is the fine flower of creation? If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?