Witch of the Middle Ages (eBook)

 CHAPTER XII. THE SEQUEL--LOVE AND DEATH--SATAN DISAPPEARS.

 And now the multitude is made free, is of good cheer. For some hours the serf reigns in short-lived freedom. His time indeed is scant enough. Already the sky is changing, the stars are going down. Another moment, and the cruel dawn remits him to his slavery, brings him back again under hostile eyes, under the shadow of the castle, beneath the shadow of the church; back again to his monotonous toiling, to the old unending weariness of heart, governed as it were by two bells, whereof one keeps saying "Always," the other "Never." Anon they will be seen coming each out of his own house, heavily, humbly, with an air of calm composure.

Let them at least enjoy the one short moment! Let each of these disinherited, for once fulfil his fancy, for once indulge his musings. What soul is there so all unhappy, so lost to all feeling, as never to have one good dream, one fond desire; never to say, "If this would only happen!"

The only detailed accounts we have, as I said before, are modern, belonging to a time of peace and well-doing, when France was blooming afresh, in the latter years of Henry VI., years of thriving luxury, entirely different from that dark age when the Sabbath was first set going.

No thanks to Mr. Lancre and others, if we refrain from pourtraying the Third Act as like the Church-Fair of Rubens, a very miscellaneous orgie, a great burlesque ball, which allowed of every kind of union, especially between near kindred. According to those authors, who would make us groan with horror, the main end of the Sabbath, the explicit doctrine taught by Satan, was incest; and in those great gatherings, sometimes of two thousand souls, the most startling deeds were done before the whole world.

This is hard to believe; and the same writers tell of other things which seem quite opposed to a view so cynical. They say that people went to those meetings only in pairs, that they sat down to the feast by twos, that even if one person came alone, she was assigned a young demon, who took charge of her, and did the honours of the feast. They say, too, that jealous lovers were not afraid to go thither in company with the curious fair.

We also find that the most of them came by families, children and all. The latter were sent off only during the first act, not during the feast, nor the services, nor yet while this third act was going on; a fact which proves that some decency was observed. Moreover, the scene was twofold. The household groups stayed on the moor in a blaze of light. It was only beyond the fantastic curtain of torch-smoke that the darker spaces, where people could roam in all directions, began.

The judges, the inquisitors, for all their enmity, are fain to allow the existence here of a general spirit of peace and mildness. Of the three things that startle us in the feasts of nobles, there is not one here; no swords, no duels, no tables reeking blood. No faithless gallantries here bring dishonour on some intimate friend. Unknown, unneeded here, for all they say, is the unclean brotherhood of the Temple; in the Sabbath, woman is everything.

The question of incest needs explaining. All alliances between kinsfolk, even those most allowable in the present day, were then regarded as a crime. The modern law, which is charity itself, understands the heart of man and the well-being of families.[60] It allows the widower to marry his wife's sister, the best mother his children could have. Above all, it allows a man to wed his cousin, whom he knows and may trust fully, whom he has loved perhaps from childhood, his playfellow of old, regarded by his mother with special favour as already the adopted of her own heart. In the Middle Ages all this was incestuous.

    [60] Of course the allusion here, as shown in the next following sentence, is to French law in particular. As for the marriage of cousins, there is much to say on both sides of the question.--TRANS.

The peasant being fondest of his own family was driven to despair. It was a monstrous thing for him to marry a cousin, even in the sixth degree. It was impossible for him to get married in his own village where the question of kinship stood so much in his way. He had to look for a wife elsewhere, afar off. But in those days there was not much intercourse or acquaintance between different places, and each hated its own neighbours. On feast days one village would fight another without knowing the reason why, as may sometimes still be seen in countries never so thinly peopled. No one durst go seek a wife in the very spot where men had been fighting together, where he himself would have been in great danger.

There was another difficulty. The lord of the young serf forbade his marrying in the next lordship. Becoming the serf of his wife's lord he would have been wholly lost to his own. Thus he was debarred by the priest from his cousin, by the lord from a stranger; and so it happened that many did not marry at all.

The result was just what they pretended to avoid. In the Sabbath the natural sympathies sprang forth again. There the youth found again her whom he had known and loved at first, her whose "little husband" he had been called at ten years old. Preferring her as he certainly did, he paid but little heed to canonical hindrances.

When we come to know the Mediæval Family better, we give up believing the declamatory assumptions of a general mingling together of the people forming so great a crowd. On the contrary, we feel that each small group is so closely joined together, as to be utterly barred to the entrance of a stranger.

The serf was not jealous towards his own kin, but his poverty and wretchedness made him exceedingly afraid of worsening his lot by multiplying children whom he could not support. The priest and the lord on their part wished to increase the number of their serfs--wanted the woman to be always bearing; and the strangest sermons were often delivered on this head,[61] varied sometimes with threats and cruel reproaches. All the more resolute was the prudence of the man. The woman, poor creature, unable to bear children fit to live on such conditions, bearing them only to her sorrow, had a horror of being made big. She never would have ventured to one of these night festivals without being first assured, again and again, that no woman ever came away pregnant.[62]

    [61] The ingenious M. Génin has very recently collected the most curious information on this point.

    [62] Boguet, Lancre, and other authors, are agreed on this question.

They were drawn thither by the banquet, the dancing, the lights, the amusements; in nowise by carnal pleasure. The last thing they cared for was to heighten their poverty, to bring one more wretch into the world, to give another serf to their lord.

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Cruel indeed was the social system of those days. Authority bade men marry, but rendered marriage nearly impossible, at once by the excessive misery of most, and the senseless cruelty of the canonical prohibitions.

The result was quite opposed to the purity thus preached. Under a show of Christianity existed the patriarchate of Asia alone.

Only the firstborn married. The younger brothers and sisters worked under him and for him. In the lonely farms of the mountains of the South, far from all neighbours and every woman, brothers and sisters lived together, the latter serving and in all ways belonging to the former; a way of life analogous to that in Genesis, to the marriages of the Parsees, to the customs still obtaining in certain shepherd tribes of the Himalayas.

The mother's fate was still more revolting. She could not marry her son to a kinswoman, and thus secure to herself a kindly-affected daughter-in-law. Her son married, if he could, a girl from a distant village, an enemy often, whose entrance proved baneful either to the children of a former marriage, or to the poor mother, who was often driven away by the stranger wife. You may not think it, but the fact is certainly so. At the very least she was ill-used; banished from the fireside, from the very table.

There is a Swiss law forbidding the removal of the mother from her place by the chimney-corner.

She was exceedingly afraid of her son's marrying. But her lot was little happier if he did not marry. None the less servant was she of the young master of the house, who succeeded to all his father's rights, even to that of beating her. This impious custom I have seen still followed in the South: a son of five-and-twenty chastising his mother when she got drunk.

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How much greater her suffering in those days of savagery! Then it was rather he who came back from the feast half-drunken, hardly knowing what he was about. But one room, but one bed, was all they had between them. She was by no means free from fear. He had seen his friends married, and felt soured thereat. Thenceforth her way is marked by tears, by utter weakness, by a woful self-surrender. Threatened by her only God, her son, heart-broken at finding herself in a plight so unnatural, she falls desperate. She tries to drown all her memories in sleep. At length comes an issue for which neither of them can...