Eleanor of Aquitaine (18 page)

Much of England was then covered by forests. During the Middle Ages, the continual clearance of forest areas was so commonplace as to merit little mention in the records, yet in this period the forest was regarded chiefly as "the sanctuary and special delight of kings, where, laying aside their care, they withdraw to refresh themselves with a little hunting. There, away from the turmoils inherent in a court, they breathe the pleasure of natural freedom."3 So seriously did the early mediaeval kings take the sport of hunting that they set aside vast acres of land for their own use, built numerous hunting lodges in the royal forests (of which the most notable was the spacious palace of Clarendon, near Salisbury, recently excavated), and introduced a series of savage forest laws designed to prevent the King's subjects from poaching his game, a hazardous business at the best of times since predatory wolves still roamed the forests of England in the twelfth century. The Norman kings had executed or mutilated those who transgressed these laws, but Henry II and his successors preferred to punish them with imprisonment or a fine.

In England, as elsewhere, the feasts of the Church, her holy days and saints' days, governed the Christian's year, and the parish church was the focal point of social life in every village. Shrines to the Virgin Mary and the saints, many containing holy relics, were to be found everywhere and were the objects of special veneration and pilgrimages. In every city and town, and throughout the countryside, men raised the most beautiful churches to the glory of God.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were rivals for the primacy of England until the fourteenth century. The ultimate ecclesiastical authority was the Pope, who was regarded as the successor to St. Peter, but the Church was mainly run by bishops, and bishops in the twelfth century were chiefly politicians, businessmen, and administrators. Some, such as Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, had a genuine aura of sanctity, but they were the exception rather than the rule, most preferring to seek high office and influence in the service of the King. Most of the great offices of state were filled by bishops, some of whom were even appointed sheriffs. Thus did the Church spread its influence over secular affairs. Indeed, many bishops were very worldly men, who lived like princes and spent more time indulging themselves with hunting, entertaining, building projects, and the acquisition of wealth than they did on their spiritual and pastoral duties.

At the other end of the scale, a village priest, living on his glebe-land and caring for the souls of his flock, often earned a mere pittance, for he was required to rely on tithes imposed on the parish, which were usually paid in kind, and he often had a family to support. William I had forbidden English priests to marry, on penalty of a heavy fine, but even as late as the reign of Henry II it was common for a priest to keep "a hearth girl in his house who kindled his fire but extinguished his virtue. His miserable house [was] often cluttered with small infants, cradles, midwives and nurses."4 It was not until 1181 that this practice was forbidden by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

There were nine thousand parishes in England. Many parish priests were sincere men who carried out their duties with simple faith and humanity, but there were many more who were often drunk, lax, or so illiterate that they could not properly read or fully interpret for their flock the offices and services of the Church, which were all in Latin, its universal language. Many priests, and even some of the higher clergy, preferred to preach in English.

The twelfth century witnessed a great monastic revival, with the founding of several new orders with stricter rules: the Cistercians, who built their abbeys in the northern wildernesses laid waste by William I, reclaimed the land for sheep farming, and became England's foremost wool producers; the Augustinian canons, whose double houses admitted both men and women in holy orders; the Carthusians, who lived under an austere rule requiring them to embrace a life of solitude and silence; and the Order of Fontevrault, especially dear to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her family.

In England, a programme of monastic reform had been imposed by William I. Most of the Norman kings founded abbeys in England, such as those at Reading and Faversham, whose respective founders Henry I and King Stephen were buried in the churches they had endowed. William I and his queen, Matilda of Flanders, founded or endowed several abbeys in Normandy, notably at Caen, where they were entombed.

The religious houses were not just the refuge of those who wished to retreat from the world and live lives dedicated to God. They fed and cared for the poor, healed the sick, dispensed alms, and gave shelter to travellers. Many were cradles of learning, preserving in their libraries ancient books, documents, and manuscripts, and training their monks in the arts of illumination and calligraphy so that they could produce Bibles and devotional works glorifying God-- most books were about religious subjects-- or new chronicles and annals recording the history of their house or of England itself. The Church therefore enjoyed a monopoly over the written word.

The expensive art of illumination had been imported from Byzantium, thanks to the expansion of trade with the Eastern Empire, and there are some exquisite English examples from this period, notably the Byzantine-influenced Winchester Bible. Manuscripts were written mainly in the rounded Carolingian minuscule script, which had not yet given way to Gothic lettering. Most books were bound with leather-covered oak boards, but some were lavishly adorned with gold or metal filigree work, ivory reliefs, or precious stones.

Monks were not universally popular. Enclosed in their communities, and undertaking no pastoral works outside those walls, they were often perceived as idle troublemakers who led promiscuous lives and were overcritical of those who remained in the world. "From the malice of monks, O Lord deliver us!" wrote Giraldus Cambrensis with feeling. By the end of the twelfth century, religious rules were being subverted by softer living conditions, and the decline of monasticism had set in. Education was then dominated by the Church, which used it as a means of training those who were destined for holy orders. All schools had to be licensed by bishops: many were grammar schools, attached to cathedrals and monasteries. Only boys were admitted. They studied the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the quadrivium (mathematics, music, geography, and astronomy). All lessons were in Latin and discipline was strict. There was no prejudice against a bright boy from a poor background gaining acceptance in these schools and by benefit of his education rising through the ranks of the Church to high office. In fact, it was the peasant classes who seemed to care most about education, for they "vied with each other in bringing up their ignoble and degenerate offspring to the liberal arts."5 The nobility, on the other hand, were often "too proud or too lazy to put their children to learning."6 Upper-class boys were more likely to be taught the manly arts of warfare, preferably in another noble household, where they would be sent initially as pages, in the hope that their hosts would secure future honours and advantages for them. It would appear therefore that it was mainly the peasant, merchant, and artisan classes who sent their sons to the schools and universities. Relatively few laypeople, however, learned to read and write: literacy was chiefly the preserve of those in holy orders.

Music, sacred or otherwise, pervaded every walk of twelfth-century life, although very little survives, and that which does is so poorly annotated that we can only guess at how it should be played. Nevertheless, we have examples of the hymns that were sung in churches, the songs that were sung by soldiers, and the part-songs that originated in Wales and were sung for pleasure in castles and manor houses. Carols had not yet become associated purely with Christmas, but were sung and danced in a ring to celebrate a variety of holy days and even the coming of spring.
Sirventes
were songs of a satirical nature, often only of topical interest, which is why they were rarely written down, but they were highly popular.

Life in mediaeval castles was lived communally, and during the evenings everyone would gather in the great hall of the keep to eat supper and take their leisure by the light of torches and candles in the wall sconces. If they were lucky they might be entertained by minstrels, clowns, acrobats, Morris dancers, mummers, mime-artists, and jesters. Kings and lords would keep their own jesters; Rahere, founder of St. Bartholemew's Church and Hospital, was Henry I's jester, and had a special talent for mimicry. The repertoire performed by these artistes, who were usually of lowly birth and disreputable reputation,was often coarse and bawdy, punctuated by swearing and obscenities. Satirical humour was popular, then as now, and slapstick drew much merriment.

Christmas was marked by twelve days of religious offices and revelry, and every English king held a special court in honour of the occasion. The Church itself entered into the spirit of frivolity, appointing boy bishops for the duration and holding a Feast of Fools, to the hilarity of beholders, but it was stern in condemning jollifications at any rite that had obvious pagan origins. Thus May Day rituals and observation of the summer and winter solstices were either prohibited or somehow incorporated into the Christian calendar.

In order to spread the Word of God, the Church sanctioned the performance of miracle plays or tableaux of scenes from the Bible. These had become very popular by the end of the twelfth century. They were at first performed in churches, and later on colourful stages set up in marketplaces. Many of these early plays were in the vernacular, so that the common folk could understand them.

During the twelfth century, English towns flourished and grew, thanks to the development of trade and commerce. Several new towns were founded by kings and noblemen, and some villages received charters conferring township status. Conscious attempts at town planning were made in new urban developments, such as Leeds and Liverpool, which were constructed on a grid system.

Towns were known as boroughs, from the Saxon word
hurh,
and were centres of trade; the merchants who lived in a borough were known as burgesses. Towns would have walls built around them for protection, which often meant that, with the expansion of their trade and population, too many people were crowded together in houses crammed into narrow streets. As the century progressed and society became less militaristic in its outlook, suburbs grew up outside town walls.

Some towns and cities were communes, which meant that they had secured the right to self-government by elected aldermen, often in the face of opposition from kings like Henry II, who disapproved of towns being independent from the crown. Kings and lords would also grant charters licensing the holding of fairs and markets, invariably a lucrative source of profit for themselves.

London, with an estimated population of 35,000, was by far the biggest and most important city. Its chief citizens were known as barons. They were a politically acute clique who wielded considerable influence, and by the end of the century they had wrested their independence from the crown, declared themselves a commune, and in 1191 elected their first mayor, Henry FitzAilwin. Many citizens were bilingual, speaking both Norman-French and English, or a curious combination of the two. Intermarriage between those of Norman and Saxon origin was common.

We are fortunate that, around 1180, the chronicler William FitzStephen wrote a description of London as a preface to his biography of Thomas Becket, who was born in the city. Thus we have at first hand a picture of the London Eleanor knew.

London had occupied its 326-acre site on the banks of the Thames since Roman times, and its landward boundaries were protected by a high stone wall with towers and seven double gates: Bishopsgate, Cripple-gate, Moorgate, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Ludgate, and Billingsgate. The city was dominated by three fortresses: the White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, and Baynard's Castle and Montfichet Castle, where the city garrisons were housed. Between 1176 and 1209, a strong stone bridge was built to replace the old wooden structure that connected the city to the Surrey shore. Within the city walls, the ordinary houses were built of wood and gaily painted red, blue, and black. Because there were so many timber buildings, there were frequent fires; one in 113 5 destroyed St. Paul's Cathedral and a wide area around it.

By 1180, the city was bustling and prosperous, boasting a fine stone cathedral, thirteen religious houses, 126 parish churches, lordly residences, guildhalls, and schools. London was a great centre for trade, and had streets of shops displaying a variety of luxury goods, including silks from Damascus and enamels from Limoges. There were also markets where merchants would come from all over Europe to sell their goods, and numerous stalls and booths. There was even a cook shop by the river serving ready-made meals to take away.

The city's population was growing and suburbs such as Smithfield, where there was a horse fair every Saturday, were by now springing up beyond the walls. In these suburbs, the richer citizens had fine timber-framed houses set in beautiful gardens planted with trees. Nearby were "excellent suburban wells with sweet, wholesome, clear water," such as Clerkenwell, Holy Well, and St. Clement's Well. Beyond these suburbs lay pleasant meadows and millstreams, and forests where the Londoners would go with their merlins, falcons, and dogs to hunt stags, deer, boar, and even bulls. They also had the right to hunt farther afield in the Chiltern Hills.

There was much to do in London. Annual carnivals took place, and the people regularly participated in bull- or bearbaiting, cockfighting, horseracing, archery, and wrestling. Boys and youths enjoyed football (soccer)-- then a much more violent game than it is now-- and their fathers and the city elders often came on horseback to watch. During Lent there were tournaments every Sunday, and at Easter, "naval tourneys" on the Thames. In winter, people made skates out of animal bones and whizzed across the frozen marshes north of the city. For refreshment there were many inns and taverns, identified by the bunches of greenery hanging above their doors.