Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (5 page)
Eleanor was never happier than when sitting in the Great Hall, but of course the verses were not always intelligible to her. One of her grandfather’s most popular poems, a ribald tale that later formed the basis for one of Boccaccio’s
Decameron
stories, told of a young man’s amorous adventures while walking through the Auvergne disguised as a pilgrim. The narrator, whom one can imagine to have been William himself, stops at a castle where he meets Dame Ann and Lady Eleanor, two sisters whose husbands happen to be away. Slyly pretending to be mute, he speaks gibberish to the sisters, who decide to offer him a meal while they carefully look him over and decide if he might be shamming. After they have fed him, they further test the young man’s dumbness, for if he is truly mute, “what we do will ne’er be told by him.” Stripping their guest naked, they bring out a ferocious red cat with long whiskers and cruel claws, which they drag along his back. “With the anguish I turn pale,” moans the narrator, but despite the dozens of wounds on his back he manages to remain silent.
Decameron
stories, told of a young man’s amorous adventures while walking through the Auvergne disguised as a pilgrim. The narrator, whom one can imagine to have been William himself, stops at a castle where he meets Dame Ann and Lady Eleanor, two sisters whose husbands happen to be away. Slyly pretending to be mute, he speaks gibberish to the sisters, who decide to offer him a meal while they carefully look him over and decide if he might be shamming. After they have fed him, they further test the young man’s dumbness, for if he is truly mute, “what we do will ne’er be told by him.” Stripping their guest naked, they bring out a ferocious red cat with long whiskers and cruel claws, which they drag along his back. “With the anguish I turn pale,” moans the narrator, but despite the dozens of wounds on his back he manages to remain silent.
“Sister,” says the delighted Dame Ann, “he’s mute indeed. I think we may prepare ourselves for sport and play.” After preparing a hot bath for their guest, Ann and Eleanor are ready for serious business. Describing a typical male fantasy, the narrator tells us that he and the randy sisters go to bed for eight days, an experience that leaves him somewhat the worse for wear:
How much I tupped them you shall hear:
A hundred eighty-eight times or near,
So that I almost stripped my gear
And broke my equipment;
I could never list the ills I got—
Too big a shipment.
Presiding over the merriment at the ducal palace was the old troubadour himself, who no longer roamed the countryside acting out his erotic fantasies, or if he did, the chroniclers did not consider his wenching scandalous enough to record. Then in his fifties, he was forced by old age to settle down and worry about the state of his soul. After Philippa’s death, his estrangement from the Church had begun, evidently, to weigh heavily enough that he made concessions in order to have the ban of excommunication lifted. In 1119, he had joined King Alfonso I of Aragon in a Crusade against the Almoravide Moors, but whether he undertook this campaign out of religious zeal or for more mundane reasons is debatable. A likely explanation is that his long-discarded first wife, Ermengarde, seemed determined to make trouble for him. At Fontevrault she had grown intimate with Philippa, and it is safe to assume that the conversations between the two cast-off ex-wives frequently focused, in the most uncomplimentary way, on the man they had in common and on his new mistress. Full of sympathy for Philippa’s situation, Ermengarde took upon herself the task of avenging her unhappy friend. Philippa’s death brought her storming down from the north of Poitou with the remarkable demand that she be reinstated as duchess of Aquitaine. After twenty-eight years of separation, it seems unlikely that Ermengarde actually wished to resume living with William. Clearly, however, she wished to harass the duke, as well as the viscountess of Châtellerault. In October 1119, she made an unannounced appearance at a council being held by Pope Calixtus II at Reims, petitioning the pope to personally excommunicate William and oust Dangereuse so that she, Ermengarde, might resume her rightful place. Although the pope declined to accommodate her, the reappearance of this alarming specter must have made William nervous, and at that juncture Moorish Spain must have seemed an infinitely more desirable place than Aquitaine, where there was always the possibility of an encounter with the rampaging Ermengarde.
In those last years William determined to change his ways. Convinced that he must submit to God’s will, he regretfully vowed to abandon his love of debauchery. “My friends were Joy and Chivalry,” he wrote, “but I from both must parted be.” His flame burning at medium-low, he seemed indifferent to currents of political unrest trickling throughout his domains. The year of Eleanor’s birth, he lost Toulouse to twenty-year-old Alphonse-Jourdain, the youngest son of the Crusader Raymond of Saint-Gilles. This time he felt too weary to further pursue his dead wife’s bothersome inheritance. As the year 1126 began, William’s vitality began to ebb, and after an illness, he died on February 10.
The main lines of Eleanor’s character were established in those early years when her grandfather’s court was the center of western European culture. With his death, both the domain and the literary salon that he had created passed to Eleanor’s twenty-seven-year-old father, who, lacking literary gifts of his own, had nonetheless studied music and possessed sufficient appreciation of the arts to continue drawing talented poets to the Poitevin court. If William IX had considered women—writing about them, courting and seducing them—to be his main vocation in life, he still took seriously his executive duties as duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou. In comparison, his son William X was a weak man with a complex character that prevented him from paying strict attention to matters of importance. Like other sons of famous men, William lived all his life with memories of a brilliantly gifted father against whom he had never been able to compete. He himself was a giant in physical stature, which in the twelfth century meant that he was over six feet tall, and all accounts indicate that he possessed the grace and charm characteristic of the family. But he had failed to inherit the Troubadour’s intelligence, his political acumen, and sound judgment, an unfortunate deficiency because during his reign Aquitaine no longer enjoyed the unchallenged political supremacy of previous years. The main characteristics known about William are his quick temper, his penchant for picking quarrels, and his stubbornness; he tended to make snap decisions and, once having made up his mind, adhered to his chosen course regardless of the consequences. In any case it was, ironically, this very ineffectualness in dealing with ordinary stresses of life that was to have such fateful consequences in shaping his eldest daughter’s destiny.
Before Eleanor was seven, she had attained a degree of sophistication appropriate to her rank. Unlike most of her contemporaries, male and especially female, she was carefully educated. In this, her family can be counted as unusual, because generally speaking, it was thought better that women remain unlettered. Rather they should know how to spin and sew, embroider and sing, look straight ahead with unaffected quietness, and behave with neither prudery nor overfamiliarity. In these particular areas Eleanor showed little aptitude. On the other hand, she was an excellent student who had a quick intelligence and the type of mind that delighted in acquiring knowledge. At an early age she was taught to read and write, probably by the resident chaplain, who would have shown her how to hold a wax tablet on her right knee and copy with an ivory stylus the alphabet from the
Disticha Catonis,
the common beginner’s reader. She would also have received instruction in the rudiments of counting, first using her fingers as an abacus and then, for higher sums, seedpods strung along a stick. She must have studied Latin literature and perhaps a little astronomy, at least enough to name the constellations.
Disticha Catonis,
the common beginner’s reader. She would also have received instruction in the rudiments of counting, first using her fingers as an abacus and then, for higher sums, seedpods strung along a stick. She must have studied Latin literature and perhaps a little astronomy, at least enough to name the constellations.
Eleanor’s mother, and undoubtedly her grandmother as well, played a significant role in her general upbringing. Following the educational system of the nobility, Aenor would have been responsible for not only Eleanor and Petronilla but also the daughters of other noble families sent to her for instruction in manners and housewifery, just as their brothers came to William for education in knighthood. The palace on the Clain undoubtedly swarmed with maidens who, under Aenor’s tutelage, received instruction in embroidery and weaving, in the management of a baronial household, in singing, playing simple accompaniments on the harp, and speaking politely to their elders. Girls of the twelfth century learned to ride well and to become adept at falconry. Other skills including games of chess, checkers, and back-gammon were considered important too.
As a child, Eleanor grew especially fond of her Uncle Raymond, although the big handsome boy, only eight years her senior, seemed more like a brother than an uncle. Philippa’s last-born, brought forth in Toulouse that very same year that William had left her for Dangereuse, was tall, blond, and powerfully built. Landless from birth, now motherless and fatherless, he appeared indifferent to his dismal heritage. As a portionless younger son, he rightfully should have been destined for the Church, a vocation he dismissed as lacking in the proper splendor. Accomplishments such as reading and writing he disdained to learn, but he knew all the troubadours’ songs and made himself respected at the palace for his immense strength. Because he could bend an iron bar, the awed children called him Hercules. Then Eleanor saw her special uncle no more. He had gone away, she learned, across a mist-shrouded channel to seek his fortune in a chilly land where the untamed natives clad themselves in wolfskins, although the king of the English had taken a liking to the boy and treated him as kindly as if he had been his own dead son. But she would never forget the laughing boy with his sensitive spirit and mighty body.
While the ancestral palace at Poitiers was home, Eleanor gradually became acquainted with the rest of her father’s sunlit realm, where life was by turns impetuous and languid. Weeks and sometimes months of each year were spent on ducal progresses throughout the land, and on these migrations the family, leading a life appropriate to its exalted rank, would be surrounded by a suite large enough to people a small town: minstrels, notaries and scribes, chaplains and clerks, cooks, falconers, and scores of humbler servants. While still a small child, Eleanor had seen the grape harvest in Cognac and she had breathed the fishy breezes at Talmont, where the tiny village crowned a rocky headland and the church, teetering on the edge of the Gironde cliff, had a nave that fell into the sea. She knew a place near Poitiers on the far bank of the Clain where there was a hermit’s cell carved with snakes; she knew that on a certain road near Maillezais her Aunt Agnes presided over an abbey and that at Blaye there was a forge where the armorers repaired her father’s traveling gear. She came to recognize castles and keeps, knowing which castellans gave lavish banquets and patronized the finest jongleurs and which chatelaines had been immortalized in the troubadours’
cansos.
From the uplands of the Limousin to the port of Niort in the marshy, mosquito-ridden west, from the forests of Poitou to the foothills of the Pyrenees, she was beginning to put down a taproot in her homeland.
cansos.
From the uplands of the Limousin to the port of Niort in the marshy, mosquito-ridden west, from the forests of Poitou to the foothills of the Pyrenees, she was beginning to put down a taproot in her homeland.
Very often one of these leisurely
chevauchées
ended at the tiled fountains and semitropical gardens of the Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux. This powerful fortress squatted at the southeast corner of the old Roman wall that girdled the city, and from its buttressed walls and stout rectangular keep Eleanor could gaze down at the silken sails rocking gently on the waters of the Garonne. Here at the Ombrière, William received his vassals, great and small, signed petitions, and heard the feuds and disputes that largely accounted for much of his administrative business. On these trips, and at the court in Poitiers, Eleanor learned a great deal about politics, although this certainly was not William’s intention, nor did he take any special pains to rear her for a position of authority. Rather, she absorbed politics by a process of osmosis, just as she soaked up the literature created by Cercamon. Marcabru, and other troubadours at her father’s court, and she grew up believing that affairs of state were a province not necessarily restricted to men. Scarcely a day passed that she did not hear her father inveighing against turbulent vassals who resisted his authority at the slightest opportunity. At that time, William’s grand duchy was quickly being transformed into a shaky house of cards, and even though culturally it stood as the foremost land in Europe, politically and economically it was falling behind the north. Such omens of danger did not concern Eleanor, who saw only the importance of her father’s position and, reflected, her own. Aware, of course, that her brother, William Aigret, took precedence, she still had, as the eldest child, a part to play in the day-to-day affairs of government. Her name first appeared in the records in July 1129, when she, along with her brother and parents, witnessed a charter deeding certain privileges to the Abbey of Montierneuf, her grandfather’s burial place. A quill pen was used to make crosses after each name, except that of William Aigret whose tiny baby fingers were dipped lightly in ink and the imprint pressed upon the parchment. In March of the following year, the signatures of parents and two children appeared on another charter granting the brothers of the Church of Saint-Hilaire the right to cut firewood from the forest of Mouliere.
chevauchées
ended at the tiled fountains and semitropical gardens of the Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux. This powerful fortress squatted at the southeast corner of the old Roman wall that girdled the city, and from its buttressed walls and stout rectangular keep Eleanor could gaze down at the silken sails rocking gently on the waters of the Garonne. Here at the Ombrière, William received his vassals, great and small, signed petitions, and heard the feuds and disputes that largely accounted for much of his administrative business. On these trips, and at the court in Poitiers, Eleanor learned a great deal about politics, although this certainly was not William’s intention, nor did he take any special pains to rear her for a position of authority. Rather, she absorbed politics by a process of osmosis, just as she soaked up the literature created by Cercamon. Marcabru, and other troubadours at her father’s court, and she grew up believing that affairs of state were a province not necessarily restricted to men. Scarcely a day passed that she did not hear her father inveighing against turbulent vassals who resisted his authority at the slightest opportunity. At that time, William’s grand duchy was quickly being transformed into a shaky house of cards, and even though culturally it stood as the foremost land in Europe, politically and economically it was falling behind the north. Such omens of danger did not concern Eleanor, who saw only the importance of her father’s position and, reflected, her own. Aware, of course, that her brother, William Aigret, took precedence, she still had, as the eldest child, a part to play in the day-to-day affairs of government. Her name first appeared in the records in July 1129, when she, along with her brother and parents, witnessed a charter deeding certain privileges to the Abbey of Montierneuf, her grandfather’s burial place. A quill pen was used to make crosses after each name, except that of William Aigret whose tiny baby fingers were dipped lightly in ink and the imprint pressed upon the parchment. In March of the following year, the signatures of parents and two children appeared on another charter granting the brothers of the Church of Saint-Hilaire the right to cut firewood from the forest of Mouliere.
When Eleanor was eight, however, the quartet of signatures abruptly ceased. Tragedy swept the ducal family; within a span of a few months, both Aenor and William Aigret were dead in Talmont, leaving Eleanor the prospective heir of her father’s domains. The death of Aenor did more than remove the warmth of a mother’s affection; it also took away a stabilizing influence in Eleanor’s life. She had always been defiant and independent, a child who took direction reluctantly. Her restless temperament, her vanities and self-centeredness, her bold flirtatious manner combined with a certain tomboyishness, kept her grandmother and ladies-in-waiting in a state of apprehension. One can imagine that there were those who said she needed a good whipping and others who ascribed, but not in Dangereuse’s hearing, Eleanor’s willfulness to bad blood, but the fact remained that more and more the girl was left to her own devices. That she began to develop into a strong-minded young woman thoroughly determined to behave as she pleased is not surprising, because the women she most admired had been cast from similar molds. Innumerable times she had listened to the history of her family: the story of her paternal grandmother riding into Toulouse to mount the throne that an accident of sex had denied her; from her maternal grandmother’s lips she had repeatedly heard the now-inflated romantic tale of how Dangereuse had fled the castle of Châtellerault, riding into the forest of Mouliere with arms clasped around her lover’s waist, defying Church, lawful spouses, and public opinion to remain proudly at her lord’s side.
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