The Magnificent Century (30 page)

The marriage of Simon and Eleanor, in spite of temperamental disagreements, may be termed one of the great romances of the century. There can be no doubt that the princess was deeply in love with her commoner husband. She clung to him through thick and
thin, through poverty and exile, a passionately devoted wife. Simon could not have failed of a corresponding devotion. Eleanor was hard to resist, a beauty even in this day of great pulchritude among the daughters of ruling families, coquettish, willful, capricious, in all her moods charming. She came to her second marriage with the faults still of a childhood during which she had been a general favorite. Love of fine clothes was a passion with her, and she spent much of her time in the adornment of her person and the dressing of her fine hair. She seems to have been subject to gusts of anger which were soon over. Adam Marsh, who wrote to her as freely as he did to her husband, took her to task sometimes for this tendency to fly into tempers as well as for the extravagant taste she showed in matters of dress. In one note he urged her to “display all your industry and tact in putting an end to these irritating disputes.” The troubles which had evoked this piece of advice were not entirely of Eleanor’s making, for their mentor proceeded to explain that by her sweetness and good advice she should be able to bring Simon to more prudent conduct. The quarrels of the lovers whose marriage had set all England by the ears were never serious and may be considered to have been no more than the salt of a happily wedded life.

Simon and his princess bride had, nevertheless, plenty to disturb them. Eleanor brought an intricately involved mass of assets and debts instead of a proper dower, largely because the Marshal family had not yet been sufficiently pressed to return the estates with which she had been endowed at the time of her first marriage. She had an annual income of four hundred pounds for which she had bartered her share of the Irish holdings of the acquisitive Marshals; a most one-sided arrangement which Henry should never have approved. Simon’s position remained one of intense pecuniary difficulty. Naturally the extravagant habits of Eleanor made things worse.

It was a regal life they lived at Kenilworth. The castle was an immense clutter of buildings around Caesar’s Tower, which was counted impregnable with its double ramparts and moat. The manors and hunting lands extended over twenty miles of wooded land. Here they lived and ruled in feudal state. They had a mill for the grinding of the tenants’ grain and a market each Tuesday for the exchange of commodities. They had their own courts of justice, where prices were regulated, disputes settled and crimes tried; they had their own prisons and gallows. The earl and his bride began to collect a library,
to act as patrons of literature, to entertain the most intelligent men in the kingdom. Their household was enormous and, although little was given the retainers in the way of pay, the drain on their combined purse was little short of ruinous.

Eleanor continued to be extravagant, but at the same time she became a good chatelaine and managed her end of this gigantic establishment with some shrewdness. This is attested by a curious document which has, by the greatest good luck, survived down the centuries. It is called
The Household Roll of Eleanor, Countess of Leicester.
The countess took it with her to France when she had to flee England near the end of her life. As she spent the rest of her days at the nunnery of Montargis, it is probable that the manuscript was kept in the archives there. Five hundred years later it was discovered and taken back to England, to provide an authentic picture of the life of a great castle in the thirteenth century.

It does more than that, however: it offers to the imagination an enticing picture of the daughter of the royal house playing the part of wife and domestic manager. Back of the precise items about food and drink and the prices thereof one sees the figure of Eleanor proceeding about her tasks, her assistants following at her heels with much jingling of keys and swishing of baskets, and no doubt much suppressed chatter and an occasional giggle. A preoccupied frown is on her face, her voice is often raised in sudden exasperation but dissolves quickly into laughter, her sense of justice is brought to any disputes with (or so we trust) the precepts taught by gentle Adam Marsh. This is not entirely fanciful, for it is recorded that, during the long periods when the warrior head of the family was away at the Crusades or fighting in Gascony, the princess he had married in the secrecy of the King’s chapel spent her time quietly in the management of affairs at their chief castles of Kenilworth and Odiham and in raising their brood of children, seven in all, who accumulated rapidly about them.

The Roll deals with the humble details of everyday life and most particularly with costs. Take, for instance, the item of beer. It is possible to get from the prosaic notes entered in a clerkly hand a rather complete picture with reference to beer. Consumption was, of course, enormous, despite the fact that it was flat and insipid stuff. It was made without hops, and those who could afford to do so added spices and other ingredients to give it more taste. The brown-cheeked men
in russet or green, bow at shoulder and quiver at belt, who gathered at Kenilworth for the assizes of beer and bread or the court-leet where offenders against the peace were put on trial, drank a great deal of the castle brew and more still at the taverns thereabouts, where they were prone to contribute a farthing for the addition of fennel, the licorice-flavored spice.

It may have been that Eleanor possessed a latent tendency to feminist doctrine, because she used a breweress in Banbury for the making of much of the beer consumed at Kenilworth. Although the idea of feminine equality was never voiced, women assumed a managing role throughout the Middle Ages. Men were so continuously away at war and, it must be confessed, so lacking in practical sense that their wives controlled the households and superintended the planting and harvesting of crops. In the cities they were partners in the shops, and it was as often as not a feminine hand which fell heavily on a careless apprentice, a feminine voice which drove the shrewdest bargains. It is on record in the Roll that on one day in April the countess purchased 188 gallons of beer from the stout breweress at a price which ran a little in excess of a halfpenny a gallon.

Wines were relatively expensive because the homemade varieties were not good, and cultivated palates demanded the finer kinds imported from Guienne and Gascony. The word bastard has always been much on the tongues of Englishmen, perhaps because it has such a good rough roundness to it, and it was applied to many things, to ships and sails and paper and to cloth of inferior quality as well as to the unfortunate and innocent victims of illicit love. It occurs frequently in the Roll, but there it is used to denote a sweet Spanish wine which resembled muscatel and which, apparently, was mixed with native wines to redeem their somewhat metallic flavor.

The information supplied about food has to do largely with meat. The usual varieties were eked out by the flesh of the kid and by venison, the latter being so highly favored that men would risk their lives to bring down a buck in forbidden woods. It was only in the warm seasons, however, that fresh meat was available. During the long winter, which was regarded as the season of the devil, people lived on salted meat and smoked fish. Sometimes, when spring was long in coming, the supply would run short and the contents of the soup pot would be far from satisfying. The consumption of fish at all
seasons was tremendous, and in the Roll the names of a wide variety are to be found: sturgeon, conger, ling, mullet, mackerel, stockfish, sea bream, bar, flounder, salmon, plaice, dories, and sole. There was also much consumption of oysters, crabs, and shrimps, as well as fresh-water varieties, the dart, crayfish, eels, and lampreys.

The word
pullagium
occurs frequently to designate all forms of poultry and game, possibly also the strong-fleshed birds which were greatly liked for the medieval table but have since ceased to be considered edible, the peacock, swan, heron, and bittern.

The price of eggs, according to the Roll, was in the neighborhood of fourpence a hundred. They were used in great quantities for the table and, of course, in the preparation of such dishes as bread, puddings, and pastries. Men were immensely fond of pastry and did not mind if the lard which entered into it was strong. There is mention of one Easter Sunday when twelve hundred eggs were used at Kenilworth. They were no doubt stained the yellow of the anemone or pasqueflower and given to the tenants according to the usual custom.

The range of prices for table commodities was extremely wide, owing to the rarity of the much-prized foods from the East. Rice could be purchased for one and a half pence a pound, but the saffron to be used with it (no self-respecting matron would serve rice unless colored with saffron) was ten to twelve shillings a pound. Almonds cost twopence, but ginger was one hundred times as high. Cloves, the most treasured of all spices, cost from twelve shillings a pound up. There were many spices in more or less regular use which are little heard of today, such as galingale.

Except for items of this kind, Kenilworth seems to have been self-supporting. They raised their own cattle and sheep, and the broad fields between the stretches of green forest produced grain in abundance. The soil was fertile and so the crops were plentiful. The nobility and the people of the cities were hampered and irked by Henry’s nonsense, but the man on the land does not seem to have suffered much by the misgovernment. The peasants in russet tunics who tilled the fields around Kenilworth always had full bellies and would have agreed that England was a merrie country.

Eleanor was temperamental and no doubt a little giddy, but the existence of the Roll is all the proof needed that she endeavored to meet her responsibilities in a thorough way.

F
OLLOWING
the birth of a child it was customary for the mother, after a specified period of purification, to go publicly to church and return thanks. On August 9, 1239, Simon de Montfort and Eleanor, his wife, came to London for the ceremony of the Queen’s churching.

The young countess was in glowing health. Her own son Henry, who had been born eleven months after the secret marriage, thereby setting to rest (or so they thought) certain malicious rumors which had been going about, was now eight months old and a fine, healthy boy. The King seemed to have forgotten completely the chidings he had absorbed as a result of the unorthodox circumstances of their marriage. He could throw off easily all such unpleasant things. The sun of royal favor, in fact, had been shining high in the heavens. Simon had been given possession of the London palace of the Bishop of Winchester for the time of their stay in the city. It may have been one of the bastel houses in the heart of the old city which were always a source of surprise to anyone entering for the first time. They were gloomy and unimpressive from the street, over which they loomed darkly, but, once the copper-studded door had been passed, they startled the eye with the magnificence of a Great Hall, an arching maze of bog-oak timbers and high galleries, a never-ceasing drone of priestly chantings from handsome chapels. It may have been, on the other hand, one of the newer seats out along the river toward Westminster, where ample land was available. Here,
over stone walls, the houses raised their crenelated battlements and flying buttresses and the stone chimneys which were a continual wonder to common people who lacked chimneys of any kind. Whichever it was, the Earl of Leicester and his vivacious Eleanor were lodged in high state.

They were surprised, therefore, and most unpleasantly shocked to be received with angry looks when they put in an appearance at Westminster during the evening before the churching. The King indulged in a tirade of reproach, his high, thin forehead inflamed with anger, the velvet skirts of his super-tunic rustling and swishing as he strode up and down. Simon, he declared, was excommunicate. What effrontery was this, that he dared to come into the royal presence? Did he regard himself as above the laws of the Church or did he count too much on the unrequited favor of his liege lord?

The explanation of this totally unexpected outburst was given bit by bit as the King spluttered and fumed at them. Simon had owed a debt of 2,080 marks to Peter Mauclerc, the Duke of Brittany. When the creditor decided to go on the Crusades the collection of this debt was left to the courts of Rome. The papal officers had first threatened to lay an interdict on the lands of Leicester, then, finding it impossible to get blood from a stone, had transferred the debt to Thomas of Savoy, the Queen’s uncle. This was unpleasant for the Earl of Leicester from two standpoints. In the first place, the King and Queen had been put under immediate pressure to obtain a settlement for the Queen’s uncle, and in the second, it happened that Thomas of Savoy had married Joan, Countess of Flanders, after her betrothal to Simon had been broken, and this gave an edge of malice to his demands for payment. The King was furious that this trouble had risen to plague him and he raved at the debtor. Finally he ordered the astonished couple to leave. They were to betake themselves from his sight and never return.