69 Militi, W. serviens suus salutem et fidele servicium.2 Mirari non vero3 sufficio, cauti tamque prudentis viri prudenciam, facta subieccione, circumveniri4 posse, et quod de facili[tate]5 fidem adibetis pro suasionibus adul[a]torum,6 qui discordia inter vos et fideles vestros homines seminare nituntur. Bonorum et leg[al]ium7 virorum testimoniis iudicari desidero, et uti secundum quod oculum videtis, sive bonum sive malum; scilicet, quod merui michi redderetis. Exitus acta approbat,8 et semper in fine patebit qualiter vobis servi[v]erim.9 Vero quod secus egesserim10 mea; me non remordet consciencia. Restat tamen [verum],11 quod uxoris vestre domine mee preceptis et voluntati non adquievi, sed ad honorem vestrum conservandum. Me totum exibui quod, quicquid sum et quicquid possum, in fidelitate et bono servicio vestro totum expendetur. Valete.
To a knight, W. his serjeant [sends] greetings and faithful service. I cannot indeed be surprised that, when a deceit has been perpetrated, the foresight of a careful and prudent man can be circumvented, and that you rest your faith in good nature on the blandishments of flatterers who endeavor to sow discord between you and your faithful men. I wish to be judged by the evidence of upright and reliable men, and to be used according to what you see with your own eyes, be it good or bad; in other words, you should give me what I have deserved. The proof is in the pudding,12 and it will always be apparent in the end how well I have served you. Indeed, were it otherwise I would have packed my bags; my conscience does not gnaw at me. Neverthless, it is true that, in order to maintain your honor, I did not obey the commands and will of my lady your wife. I have fully demonstrated that whatever I am and whatever I can do will be entirely spent in good faith and good service to you. Farewell.
Figure 11. Potiphar’s wife fails to seduce Joseph, then shows his cloak to her husband as evidence that Joseph tried to rape her. From the Joseph window in Bourges Cathedral (c. 1210–15).
In the thirteenth century, the word “serjeant” (serviens) was used to refer to someone who “served”—for example, as an officer, servant, assistant, or manorial bailiff (see DOCUMENT 50). The serjeant in this letter serves in an unnamed knight’s household, and he has gotten into trouble in the knight’s absence for refusing to obey the orders of the knight’s wife. Someone—either the lady herself, or another senior member of the household—evidently has complained about him to the knight, and now the serjeant sends the knight a very formal letter to defend his actions and to proclaim his entire loyalty to the knight’s interests and service.
The exact circumstances of the dispute are not given, and the serjeant’s claim that he refused to obey the lady’s commands so as “to maintain your honor” is ambiguous. Did he thwart the lady’s intentions, which would have brought the knight into disrepute if she had carried them out? Or did he in some manner challenge her to her face about her commands? Or, more scandalously, is the serjeant hinting that the lady, in the manner of Potiphar’s wife toward Joseph (see DOCUMENT 70), made improper advances to him, which he, like Joseph, rejected? (Fig. 11). In this letter, the serjeant seems to imply that, like Joseph, he has been falsely charged with some sort of impropriety in retaliation for his refusal to obey the commands of his lord’s wife. The appearance in a formulary of a model letter such as this suggests that situations of this kind were not uncommon, and that household officers and other senior servants, if accused of misbehavior, might well feel the need to justify their actions in writing to absent employers.
The indignant and self-righteous tone of this letter is very pronounced, but the serjeant is careful to avoid outright rudeness by seeming to excuse the knight’s trust in the lies of flatterers on the grounds that he has been deceived by them. Note, however, the careful ambiguity of the sentence in question, which leaves it unclear whether the “careful and prudent man” who has been the victim of deception here is the knight or the writer himself.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 129r.
2 For other examples of this salutation, see Documents 60 and 99.
3 In the MS, this word is given as an “n” with a bar over it, usually an abbreviation for “non,” but here probably a scribal error for the abbreviation for “vero.” The same error occurs in DOCUMENT 40.
4 circumventiri in MS.
5 facili in MS.
6 adultorum in MS.
7 legium in MS.
8 This phrase occurs in Ovid’s Heroides (2:85) as “exitus acta probat.” Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1914, rpt. 1958), 2:85 (pp. 26–27).
9 servierim in MS.
10 egerim in MS.
11 vir’ in MS.
12 Literally, “a result reveals the acts that produced it,” or, in effect, “the product provides proof of the process.”
70 F. mandat G. quod vidit alienum cum uxore sua in talamo suo1
Dilecto amico suo A., B. salutem. Nisi credere[m]2 te offendere, ego quoddam revelarem quod nuper vidi. Set quia scelus est scelus celare,3 malo ostendere quam celestis regni odium4 habere. Vidi enim uxorem tuam in thalamo R., solam cum solo, nudam cum nudo; et ut hec negare non possit, cepi zonam eius in sign[o]5 quam tibi transmitto, et per visum factum connoscas. Tantum facias ut illa castigetur, et ille insimul. Valete.
F. tells G.6 that he has seen another man in bed with G.’s wife
To his beloved friend A., B. sends greetings. Except that I believed it would offend you, I would reveal something that I lately saw. But because it is wicked to conceal wickedness, I prefer to disclose [it]7 rather than to have the odium of the heavenly realm. For I saw your wife in R.’s bed,8 the two of them alone and naked together. And so that she cannot deny it, I took her girdle [i.e., belt] as a token, which I send to you, and the sight of it should serve you as evidence of this misdeed.9 You should see to it that she is punished, together with him.10 Farewell.
At first sight, this would seem to be an odd candidate for inclusion in a collection of model letters, since the compiler is unlikely to have assumed that there was a need for a form letter in which one friend notified another of the adultery of the latter’s wife. It seems likely that this letter was included in the collection for somewhat different reasons. First, it may have been intended, at least in part, for the amusement of the business students and other male readers for whom the formulary was primarily designed. In a similar fashion John of Garlande included some smutty material in his Dictionarius, a contemporary treatise designed to teach Latin vocabulary but written primarily in the form of a walking tour of Paris.11 Second, and more seriously, this letter may have been included to remind readers that, if they ever made a serious accusation against another person in writing, they had better have solid evidence— such as the wife’s girdle, in this case—to support their allegation. A similar case can be found in DOCUMENT 50, in which a tenant writes to his lord to accuse the bailiff of the manor of corruption, and names three local men as witnesses. Adultery was a very serious charge; for its legal and social implications, see Documents 71–73.
Figure 12. A girdler’s shop or stall, from the Life of St. Nicholas (III) window in the nave of Chartres Cathedral (c. 1210).
This letter, like DOCUMENT 69, may have been inspired in part by the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39:6–20). Joseph was a Hebrew slave owned by the Egyptian Potiphar. Potiphar’s wife attempted to seduce Joseph, but he rejected her advances and broke away, leaving his garment in her clutch. She then showed the garment to her husband as evidence that Joseph had tried to rape her, and Joseph was imprisoned. Articles of dress and accessories such as girdles were often distinctive personal items that would have been readily identifiable by the owner’s intimate circle.
Girdles were long belts made of leather, linen, or silk, sometimes studded with silver or garnished with other decorations (Fig. 12). They were used by both women and men to cinch in their gowns at the waist and, in an age without pockets, to support a hanging purse, a knife, a small set of writing tablets, or similar items. Some girdles were so closely identified with their owners that they became heirlooms, prized for their personal associations as well as their intrinsic value. In 1399, for example, the widowed duchess of Gloucester bequeathed to her daughter Isabel, a Minoress nun, as a special keepsake (“with my blessing”), a black leather girdle with gold trappings that had belonged to Isabel’s father, Thomas of Woodstock.12
1 Add. 8167, fol. 101v. This letter also occurs, with some variations, in Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287, which in several places provides better readings than the text in Add. 8167: “Dilecto amico suo A. B. salutem. Nisi crederem te offendere; ego quedam tibi revelarem quod nuper vidi. set quia scelus est scelus celare malo te offendere; quam celestis regni odium habere. Scias enim quod uxorem tuam vidi in talamo .R. solam cum solo. nudam cum nudo. Et ut negare non possit; cepi zonam eius in intersigno quam tibi transmitto; ut videas et per visum facinus cognoscas. Et tantum inde facias ut illa castigetur; et ille longius amoveatur. Valete.”
2 credere in MS; crederem in Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287.
3 scelare in MS; celare in Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287.
4 hodium in MS; odium in Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287.
5 signe in MS; intersigno in Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287.
6 In the body of the letter, however, the sender and recipient are called “B.” and “A.,” suggesting that, as in Documents 10, 16, 33, 50, and 90, the compiler of the formulary copied this letter from another collection and neglected to revise the initials in the heading.
7 Gonville and Caius College, MS 205/111, p. 287, has a seemingly better reading here: “malo te offendere” (“I prefer to offend you”), in place of Add. 8167’s “malo ostendere” (“I prefer to disclose”). However, the latter may have used ostendere here so as to avoid repetition of the phrase te offendere.
8 The Latin phrase “in thalamo .R.” can also mean “in the chamber of R.” However, since the sender of this letter was able to spy on the lovers and furtively remove the lady’s girdle without their being aware of him, it seems much more likely that the lovers were in a curtained bed rather than simply in a chamber together.
9 Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287, uses the stronger word “facinus” (deed, misdeed, outrage, or crime) here instead of “factum” (deed or misdeed).
10 Here Gonville & Caius 205/111, p. 287, suggests a different fate for the wife’s lover: he should be banished or exiled far away (“longius amoveatur”).
11 John of Garlande, an Englishman who taught Latin grammar in Paris, wrote the Dictionarius around 1218 and revised it c. 1230. See Martha Carlin, “Shops and Shopping in the Early Thirteenth Century: Three Texts,” in Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of John H. A. Munro, ed. Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, and Martin M. Elbl (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 491–92, 494–98, 508–17 (especially caps. 51 and 69, pp. 515 and 516).
12 Martha Carlin, “St Botolph Aldgate Gazetteer. Holy Trinity Minories (Abbey of St Clare, 1293/4–1539),” in Historical Gazetteer of London Before the Great Fire, ed. Derek Keene (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 1987; unpub. typescript; available in the Institute of Historical Research, University of London), 40, citing John Nichols, ed., A Collection of All the Wills, Now Known to Be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and Every Branch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign of William the Conqueror, to That of Henry the Seventh Exclusive (London: J. Nichols, 1780), 183 (Item un seinture de quire noir ove un bocle & pendant & xii roundes & plaines barres d’or quel feust a mon seignour & mari son piere le quele il usa mesmes meint avis & apres q’il feust on son darrein desaise, ove ma beneison).
71 Episcopus mandat archidiacono su[o]2 ut faciat per archidiaconatum inquiri qui sin[t]3 adultores
H. dei gratia episcopus de C., karissimo archidiacono suo salutem. In virtute obediencie vobis iniungamus ut faciatis inquiri per archidiaconatum vestrum diligenter si aliqui possint ibi inveniri quos fama acusat adulterii. Si aliquos tales inveniritis, faciatis eos citari ut sint coram nobis in loco tali [n]obis4 responsuri, et ill[um]5 qui famam sic eos inponit. Et si forte venire nolunt, vigore sentencie compellantur ad veniendum. Perventum enim est ad audienciam nostram quod in iurisdiccione multi sunt persone, quare error6 nisi cicius obvietur tota provincia poterit corrumpi, quia modicum7 fermenti totam massam corumpit.8 Tantum ergo faciatis ne nos et vos per agnicionem similes illis efficiamur quia verum est. pacientes et agentes pari pena puniendi sunt. Valete.
A bishop sends word to his archdeacon to have an inquiry made in his archdeaconry as to who might be adulterers
H[ugh] by the grace of God, bishop of C[arlisle], to his beloved archdeacon, greetings. We order you, by virtue of your obedience, to diligently cause an inquiry to be made throughout your archdeaconry [to see] if anyone may be found there whom common report accuses of adultery. If you do find any such people, have them and the man who accuses them of this cited to appear before us in such-and-such a place to answer to us. And those who refuse to come should be forced to attend by threat of excommunication. For it has come to our attention that there are many such persons in [your] jurisdiction, so that the vice, if it is not quickly stopped, will be able to corrupt the entire diocese, just as a small amount of yeast permeates the whole lump of dough. So take care of it in such a way that we and you do not become like them through inaction, for it is true that those who condone [evil] and those who do it ought to receive the same punishment. Farewell.
This is the first of three ecclesiastical letters that deal with the vexed issue of sexuality. By the early thirteenth century, the Roman Church had been attempting to regulate sexual behavior for more than two hundred years.9 The Church’s original concern had been to impose celibacy on the clergy, but the agenda of reformers had increasingly included the laity as well. Much of the effort of the reform movement was focused on the regulation of sex through monogamous marriage. In England, the Church was well on its way to imposing its view of marriage, and its control over marital litigation, by the second half of the twelfth century (see DOCUMENT 44). Sex outside marriage was condemned as adultery, a sin identified with the mortal sin of “luxury” (sensual self-indulgence). It was also an offense that was actionable in church courts, and it was equated from early times with the serious offense of blasphemy, because it was sin against the body, which was the temple of the Lord. Originally the word “adultery” covered all sorts of sexual misconduct, but in the legalistic world of the twelfth century, adultery came to be defined more narrowly by canon lawyers, and by 1190 it meant sex between a single or married person and someone else’s spouse of the opposite sex. Within this understanding of the offense there were certain qualifications. For instance, a married man who had sex with another male was not considered an adulterer, though he might be considered a sodomite. Also, since women were considered to be sexually voracious, and certain occupations, such as that of barmaid, exposed them to dangerous tempations, a husband who allowed his wife to work in a drinking-house was not permitted to press charges of adultery against her if she succumbed. Canon lawyers also ruled that a wife who had been raped could not be charged with adultery.10
Adultery could be a serious matter in medieval society, but only a deceived husband’s interests were considered. Around 1215, Thomas of Chobham, a canon lawyer and subdean of Salisbury, summarized the legal recourse available to an outraged husband, as he understood it: “It is worth noting that secular law once allowed a man to kill an adulterer found with his wife. This is no longer permitted, but only for him to cut off the man’s genitals so that he will never spawn another who will follow him in his vileness.”11 However, Thomas also noted that in such a case, a secular judge could instead order the offenders to be flogged through the streets. A wife whose husband committed adultery had no redress either in the secular law courts or through social sanction, but the Church’s penalty for adulterers of either sex was a period of up to seven years’ strict penance.12
Although the Church’s positions on marriage and adultery were clear, and enforceable in church courts, medieval society harbored a much wider range of sexual practices and partnerships than the Church approved. This was at its most obvious in the extramarital relationships of kings and princes such as Henry II and John,13 and of great nobles and other wealthy people whose lives were also closely observed and recorded. For example, Stephen of Blois, as count of Mortain and Boulogne in the late 1110s and 1120s, had a long relationship and at least two children with a woman he called “Damette” (“Little Lady”).14 The famous Anstey inheritance case of the late 1150s hinged on the fact that in the previous decade the Essex landowner William de Sackville, who was married to Alberada de Tresgots, nonetheless lived and had children with Adelicia, daughter of the sheriff of Essex.15 John Marshal II (d. 1194) had a long affair with a woman called Alice de Colleville that produced at least one child, while both were apparently married to others.16 Such behavior was naturally condemned by the clergy. Thomas of Chobham, for example, made a particular point of condemning husbands who condoned or forgave their wives’ adultery, calling them no better than pimps.17 Nonetheless, the romance literature of the period often celebrated extramarital affairs as the truest form of love. The relaxed attitude to extramarital sex that can be seen in many sources should not be taken as evidence of a universally tolerant society, but it is clear from this letter and from Documents 72 and 73 that adultery was a common occurrence at all levels of society.
It is quite possible that this model letter is based on a genuine document. The identity of its sender is only lightly disguised. There was only one “H. bishop of C.” in early thirteenth-century England, and that was Hugh de Beaulieu, bishop of Carlisle (1219–23) and a former Cistercian abbot. It seems very likely that letters such as this were sent out by bishops to their underlings. Thomas of Chobham criticized archdeacons and rural deans who failed to pursue cases of adulterers on the run, saying—just as this letter does—that the failure to weed out adultery among the laity was as much a sin as adultery itself.18
There is evidence of archdeacons carrying out general visitations of their archdeaconries as early as the 1150s,19 and in the 1230s the statutes of the archdeaconry of London classified adulterers among those worthy of being excommunicated.20 This letter, together with Documents 72 and 73, provides a glimpse of the actual procedures that were used by the Church in England to identify and prosecute adulterers at the local level.21
Figure 13. King David commits adultery with Bathsheba, from the Maciejowski Bible (Paris, 1244–54), fol. 41v. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MS M.638, fol. 41v. Purchased by J. P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1916. Photograph courtesy the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
1 Add. 8617, fol. 102r–v.
2 su in MS.
3 sin in MS.
4 vobis in MS.
5 ille in MS.
6 errorum in MS.
7 Fol. 102v commences here.
8 1 Corinthians 5:6.
9 See David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169.
10 See the magisterial summary of canon law on adultery in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 385–89.
11 Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia, 25 (Louvain, 1968), 192. Thomas may have been recalling a recent case: the castration of William Wake for his adultery with the wife of Robert Butler of Candover (Hampshire) in 1212, which was noted in the Close Rolls of the English Chancery. Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 568.
12 Chobham, Summa Confessorum, 361, 368.
13 On kings and their mistresses and illegitimate offspring, see Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
14 Henry Gerald Richardson and George Osborrne Sayles, “Gervase of Blois, Abbot of Westminster,” in idem, The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 413–21.
15 Patricia M. Barnes, “The Anstey Case,” in A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton, ed. Patricia M. Barnes and Cecil F. Slade, Pipe Roll Society, new ser., 36 (London, 1962, for 1960), 1–24.
16 David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2002), 89–90 and n.
17 Chobham, Summa Confessorum, 366.
18 Chobham, Summa Confessorum, 367.
19 Brian Robert Kemp, ed., Twelfth-Century Archidiaconal and Vice-Archidiaconal Acta, Canterbury and York Society, 92 (London, 2001), 130.
20 The excommunications were to take place at the beginning of Advent and Lent, on Trinity Sunday (the Sunday after Pentecost), and on the Sunday following the feast of the Assumption (i.e., the Sunday following August 15). In 1240 the statutes of the diocese of Worcester enjoined archdeacons and their officials (legal deputies) to identify clergy who cohabited with women. Councils and Synods, 311–12, 332–33.
21 Cf. a letter written in 1289 by the official of the archdeacon of Ely to the sacrist of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, notifying him of the reported presence of an adulterous couple in his jurisdiction, and requesting that the sacrist have them publicly denounced as excommunicates who were to be shunned by all until they had been absolved by the Church. Antonia Gransden, ed., The Letter-Book of William of Hoo, Suffolk Record Society, 5 (1963), nos. 48 and 79. For this reference we are grateful to Paul Hyams.
72 Hoc est de fornicacione
Archidiaconus decano salutem. Ad audienciam domini episcopi perventum est quod in parochia de C., T. cum uxore alterius viri longo tempore transacto C. mecatus,2 sacerdote precio corupto ut celet eius adulterium. Quare tibi mando ex parte domini episcopi, quatinus capellanum predicte ville [et]3 adulterum prefatum, [T.]4 nomine, ut dictum, citari facias ut die lune proxima coram domino episcopo compareant, responsuri et iuri parituri de illis que eis obiciuntur. Et tantum faciatis ne illorum criminis particeps esse puteris. Vale.
This concerns fornication
An archdeacon to a dean, greetings. It has come to the lord bishop’s attention that, in the parish of C., T. has been committing adultery for a long time with another man’s wife at C., having bribed the priest to conceal his adultery. So I order you on the lord bishop’s behalf to have the chaplain of the village [and] the said adulterer, [T.] by name, as it is said, cited to appear before the lord bishop next Monday, there to answer and obey the law concerning the charges against them. And take care of this in such a way that you will not be considered an accomplice in their crime. Farewell.
Here, as in Documents 71 and 73, ecclesiastical authorities are preoccupied with the problem of adultery in their jurisdiction. In this letter, collusion is suspected between “T.” and his parish priest, whom T. allegedly has bribed to conceal his long-standing affair with another man’s wife.
Archdeacons and deans had themselves been accused of similar corruption. In 1158, for example, Henry II complained that archdeacons and deans were extorting more money from his subjects with false allegations of adultery than the king himself was able to extract from them.5 In 1170 the Inquest of Sheriffs, a royal inquiry into local corruption, had a clause (12) that required royal justices to inquire into payments that archdeacons and deans had demanded “unjustly and without judgement.”6 Denunciation for sexual irregularity entered an especially harsh phase in the mid-thirteenth century, when the intrusive power of the papacy reached its height in England and the Church attained a peak of influence over lay life. Matthew Paris reported that in 1246 Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln launched an inquiry into morals and behavior throughout his large diocese, inspired, it was said, by the Franciscans and Dominicans. The bishop went too far, however, by including the aristocracy in his enquiries and thus exposing a dangerous level of scandal among the powerful. The king was persuaded to intervene and to prohibit church officials from taking statements under oath about the behavior of people of rank.7
1 Add. 8167, fol. 103r.
2 I.e., moechatus. We are grateful to Ruth Karras for this suggestion.
3 et missing in MS but required by the sense of the passage.
4 c.in MS.
5 William Fitz Stephen, Vita sancti Thomae, in James Craigie Robertson and Joseph Brigstocke Sheppard, eds., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket., 7 vols., Rolls Series, no. 67 (London: Longman, 1872–85), 3:44.
6 Select Charters, 177.
7 Matthew Paris, Matthæi Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols., Rolls Series, 57 (London: Longman, 1872–83), 4:579–80.
73 Incipit aliud de eodem
Decanus capellano salutem. Relicta2 cuiusdam3 parochiani vestri michi datur intelligi ovem propriam et viro desponsatam longo tempore transacto in aldulterio fedasti. Quod sive sit verum sive non, priusquam rumor vulgetur4 in secretis ad me venias. Sciturus quod si hoc feceris et verum sit, veritatem extinguam; si falsum sit, ad nichilum faciam redigi. Si[c]5 ergo venias ut tibi prosit obieccio, et michi placeat tua presencia. Vale.
Here begins another letter about the same thing
A dean to a chaplain, greetings. The widow of a parishioner of yours has given me to understand that you have defiled in adultery one of your own flock, a woman long married. True or not, you should come to me in secrecy before it becomes common knowledge. You know that if you do as I say and it turns out to be true, I will suppress the truth; if it is false, I will make sure the affair comes to nothing. So make sure you come so that the charge might go well with you, and so that your presence will make me well disposed to you. Farewell.
This is the third of three letters by ecclesiastical administrators (see DOCUMENTs 71 and 72) concerning allegations of adultery. This time the alleged adulterer is himself a clergyman. Clerics were supposed to be celibate, but medieval sources are full of incidents of sexual incontinence by clergy. In the 1190s, for example, Gerald of Wales, archdeacon of Brecon, was very critical of colleagues who were lax in punishing clerics who had sexual relations with women. He called it a “gross abuse” and regarded it as an extremely widespread offense among clergy.6
The correspondence of the distinguished Franciscan friar Adam Marsh reveals how easy it was in the mid-thirteenth century for a clergyman to avoid exposure and evade censure for sexual misbehavior for quite some while. Around 1251 the abbess of Godstow had nominated an apparently respectable priest to the bishop of Lincoln for institution as vicar of Bloxham in Oxfordshire. The priest was interviewed and approved by a panel appointed by the bishop. But Adam—who had been present at the interview—subsequently learned that the priest, “to the offence of God and to public scandal,” had been carrying on a long-standing affair with a woman by whom he had already fathered a child. It was not until an enemy found a way of exposing him to Adam Marsh that the affair was revealed and the priest punished.7
The presence in a formulary of a model letter in which a church administrator offers to collude with a subordinate in concealing the latter’s adultery seems odd indeed. Like DOCUMENT 70, this letter may have been included simply to amuse its male readers, or perhaps it was the author’s own wry comment on the corruption of the times. Whatever the reason, it depicts all too clearly a seamy side of clerical behavior and patronage at the parochial level.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 103r.
2 Corrected in MS from relaicta.
3 Corrected in MS from cuidam.
4 wlgetur in MS.
5 Si in MS.
6 Gerald of Wales, Speculum Ecclesiae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. John Sherren Brewer et al., 8 vols., Rolls Series, 21 (London: Longman, 1861–91), 4:329.
7 Adae de Marisco Epistolae, in Monumenta Franciscana, ed. John Sherren Brewer, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 4 (London: Longman, 1858–82), 2:108–9.
74 Reverendo domino suo W. de G., senescallus [suus]2 salutem. Noscat discrecio vestra dominum R. de B. grave morbo vexatum, unde ipsum melius extimamus mori quam vivere.3 Preterea sciatis pro certo quod domina A. uxor sua, cum filia sua E. et cum quodam garcione, apud A. perendinavit. Unde placitum vestrum de mandato isto nobis mandetis. Valete.
To his respected lord W. de G., his steward [sends] greetings. Let Your Discretion know [that] Sir R. de B. is seriously ill, and I think he is more likely to die than to live. You should also know for certain that Lady A. his wife, with her daughter E. and a servant, has gone to stay at A. Therefore, send me word what your wishes are concerning that message. Farewell.
It was important for a lord to know the family affairs of his tenants, since his lordship over them gave him certain rights, including that of wardship. In this letter, therefore, the steward is not merely reporting local gossip; rather, the final sentence suggests that the sick knight was a tenant of the steward’s lord, and thus the knight’s expected death and the disposition of his widow and heir were matters of direct concern to him.
A sign of the importance of such information is that one of the earliest surviving surveys of the English royal administration was an inquisition, carried out in 1185, on widows and children who by rights ought to have been wards of the Crown. This resulted in the “Rolls of Ladies and Children” (Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris).4 The profits of wardship could be enormous, and the granting of wardships to favored subordinates, friends, or allies was a major act of patronage, one that King Henry II (1154–89) and his sons Richard I (1189–99) and John (1199–1216) exploited vigorously. Around 1185, for example, Henry gave William Marshal, one of his principal captains, the wardship of Heloise, the teenage heiress to the honor of Kendal in northern England. Marshal might have married her and made her estates his own, but instead he decided to wait for an even grander heiress. In 1188 the king fulfilled his expectations by promising Marshal the noble heiress of the great French honor of Châteauroux in Berry in return for his military support. But the next year the king raised the stakes further by the promise of Countess Isabel, the heiress to the earldom of Pembroke. For this promise, Marshal had to give up Heloise of Lancaster to a fellow courtier. In the end the king died before he could fulfil the promise, but the new king, Richard the Lionheart, sanctioned the grant, and so William Marshal, after five years of hopeful negotiation, married the heiress of his dreams in London and took charge of her and her estates.5
The fate of widows, female heirs, and under-age wards was an abiding subject of gossip in medieval society. In 1250 the French baron Jean de Joinville was scandalized by a group of knights who were chatting and laughing through the funeral mass of one of their fellows, distracting the priest at the altar. Joinville told them to keep quiet, remarking that talking during mass was not the way a nobleman should behave. They just laughed and told him that they were arranging the marriage of the widow. The outraged Joinville observed with some satisfaction that all of them were subsequently killed in battle.6
The inclusion of a letter such as DOCUMENT 74 in a formulary indicates that such letters must have been common in a society in which timely news of the mortal illness and death of landowners was crucial in establishing rights of wardship over heirs and collecting reliefs (death duties) owed by incoming tenants. At least one genuine example of such a letter survives from this period. It was dashed off in October 1227 by a clerk of Earl William Marshal II of Pembroke to Bishop John of Bath and Wells to notify him of the death of a wealthy knight, Nicholas of Anstey: “William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, gives greeting and devout reverence to the venerable father in Christ and lord, J[ohn], by the grace of God, bishop of Bath. It was given to us to understand at Llant[risant, Gwent] in all truth on the Monday after the feast of St Lawrence [October 14] that Nicholas of Anstey has died.”7
1 Add. 8167, fol. 127r–v.
2 In MS, the phrase reverendo W. de G. is mistakenly repeated here, and the word suus is omitted.
3 Fol. 127v commences here.
4 See Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), Chap. 9. Only the returns from several Midland counties survive.
5 David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd ed. (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2002), 59–60, 65–71.
6 Jean de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. and trans. Jacques Monfrin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1995), 146–48.
7 TNA, PRO: SC 1/2/19.
75 A. de G. dilectis sibi Iohanne uxori sue, et N. nepte sue. T. clerico, G. de Cestria, et ceteris fidelibus suis salutem. Noveritis me esse sanum et incolumum, et hoc idem de vobis scire desidero. Mitto vobis etiam .v. dolea vini, unde vobis, T. clerico et G. de Cestria, mando, quatinus quam cito poteritis per aliquam ydoneum nuncium, pro amore dei, quibus multum indigeo sicut alias vobis mandavi, michi mittatis. Per eundem vel per alium cicius intervenientem, michi rescribatis quod factum fuerit unde dominus rex multas accepit peticiones, et cum predictis statum et esse vestrum nec non terrarum mearum. Intim[a]ndum2 michi studeatis. Valeat dileccio vestra.
A. de G. to his beloved wife Joan and his niece N., to T. the clerk and G. of Chester and his other faithful servants, greetings. You will know that I am well and safe, and I hope to hear the same of you. Also, I am sending you five tuns of wine, and I ask that you, T. the clerk and G. of Chester, send me by some honest messenger, as quickly as possible, for the love of God, the things that I need very much, as I have sent you word about elsewhere. Write back to me by the same man—or by another who will come quickly—what took place when the lord king received all those petitions, together with how you are and the state of my lands. Keep me fully informed. May your love flourish.3
This is an unusually circumstantial letter. We are given the full initials of the writer, as well as the name of his wife, the initials or partial names of two of his senior officers, and possibly the initial of his niece, although in her case the initial “N.” more probably stands for nomen (name) or nepta (niece). In addition to the reference to the wine we are told that the writer is very anxious for news about his own lands and about an event at court. The writer is evidently a man of some wealth, since he has an estate and at least two household officers, and since he can afford to buy and transport wine in wholesale quantities. His anxiety for news of the court and of his lands suggests that he is far from home and has been for some time—for example, on business, or on a judicial circuit, a diplomatic mission, or a military campaign. The five tuns of wine that the writer is sending to his family may be an indication that he was taking part in the Gascon campaign of 1225–27.4 All of these details suggest that this text may be based on a genuine letter, while the urgent request for news about “what took place when the lord king received all those petitions” may give a clue to its date and political context.
In January 1227 the nineteen-year-old Henry III announced that, on the advice of the archbishop of Canterbury and “our bishops, abbots, earls, barons and other magnates and fideles [faithful men],” he would thenceforth issue charters under his own seal. This announcement marked the young king’s assumption of full regal powers, and the effective end of his minority, even though he was not yet twenty-one, the customary age of majority. It also marked a major change in national politics, since Henry III could now “dispense patronage on a permanent basis.”5 Petitions flooded in immediately,6 and the king’s response to these may well be the news that was so avidly sought by A. de G. in the letter above. If so, it was probably written in early 1227. This interpretation would also fit the possibility mentioned above that A. de G. was writing from the Gascon campaign.
The domestic content of this letter recalls letters written more than a century earlier by men who had joined the First Crusade to their wives and families back home. Two such letters survive from Count Stephen of Blois to his wife Adele, a daughter of William the Conqueror. In the second of these, dated March 29, 1098, Count Stephen wrote from Antioch as follows: “Count Stephen to Adele, his sweetest and most amiable wife, to his dear children, and to all his vassals of all ranks, his greeting and blessing. You may be very sure, dearest, that the messenger whom I sent to give you pleasure left me before Antioch safe and unharmed and, through God’s grace, in the greatest prosperity.” After giving a detailed account of the campaign to date, he closed by saying: “These which I write to you are only a few things, dearest, of the many which we have done; and because I am not able to tell you, dearest, what is in my mind, I charge you to do right, to watch carefully over your land, and to do your duty as you ought to your children and your vassals. You will certainly see me just as soon as I can possibly return to you. Farewell.”7
An intriguing feature of A. de G.’s letter is the inclusion of his niece among the senior members of his household. Perhaps she was an orphaned ward of his, or perhaps she had been sent by her parents, who would have been of equal or lesser rank than A. de G., for training in his household. This was a common arrangement for the children of wealthy families, but it is recorded more commonly of boys than of girls. A few details for such an arrangement can be found, however, in a model custody agreement copied into the Oxford formulary dating from c. 1202–9 in the Walters Art Museum (MS W. 15). In this agreement, the children of a deceased man of property are committed to the care of two men. One takes the dead man’s two sons, together with eleven acres of their father’s land and his principal messuage,8 and pledges to provide them with all their necessities until they are thirty years of age, when he will divide the property between them, as their father directed in his testament. The other takes the dead man’s two daughters, together with seven acres of land and some stone buildings. He pledges to provide for the daughters’ necessities until they are twenty years of age, or, when they have reached marriageable age, if they wish to marry, he will find them the best husbands he can, with the advice of their friends. If, instead, the daughters wish to become nuns or anchoresses, he will hand over their land to the next heirs, and the heirs will pay them ten marks (£6 13s. 4d.) in rent.9 This letter and custody agreement offer some rare glimpses into the lives of well-born girls of this period.10
1 Add. 8167, fol. 127v.
2 Intimendum in MS.
3 On this valedictory phrase, see DOCUMENT 51.
4 We are grateful to Robert Stacey for this suggestion.
5 David A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London: Methuen, 1990), 389. This episode was also discussed by Kate Norgate in The Minority of Henry the Third (London: Macmillan, 1912), 265–68.
6 Robert Stacey commented on this episode that “[a]n unseemly scramble ensued in the early months of 1227 to secure as many of the newly available prizes as possible.” Robert C. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance Under Henry III, 1216–1245 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 35.
7 The entire letter is printed in Dana Carlton Munro, ed. and trans., Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 1, no. 4 (Philadelphia: Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1900), 5–8. Count Stephen never returned home; he was killed at the battle of Ramla in 1102. Their son Stephen succeeded his uncle Henry I as king of England in 1135. On Adele, Stephen, and their relationship, see Kimberly A. LoPrete, Adela of Blois: Countess and Lord, c. 1067–1137 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007).
8 A messuage or tenement was a building plot with its buildings, if any; here it is evidently the father’s house.
9 Walters MS W. 15, fol. 81r.
10 On the education and training of boys and girls sent away from home in this way, see Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, Based on the Observations of Alexander Neckam in London and Paris (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 177–79.
76 Karissimo domino suo et amico B., M. uxor sua salutem et amicicie medullam. Preces vestras precepta repeto, et quicquid michi preceperitis in continenti sine dilacione faciam, et quod michi per B. garciferum vestrum mandatum, complebitur valde velociter. Vos autem quam cicius poteritis ad me redeatis, ut de bonis nobis2 a deo debitis perfrui simul et letari valeamus. Valete.
To her dearest lord and friend B., M. his wife sends greetings and deepest affection.3 Your wishes I repeat as orders, and whatever you will order me [to do] I shall do immediately, without delay, and what you sent me word about through B., your servant, will be finished very rapidly. And you are to return to me as quickly as you can, so that together we may enjoy to the full the good things from God and take pleasure in the duties owed by us. Farewell.
Behind the fervent expressions of wifely obedience in this letter one can see that the husband has, as was common, left his wife in charge of his household in his absence. In turbulent times, wives even deputized for their husbands in supervising military operations. On May 29, 1267, for example, William de Valence, earl of Pembroke, wrote to his wife, addressing her as “his dear companion and friend” (a sa chere conpaigne et amie), to tell her that he was sending Sir Robert de Immer and two assistants to provision and defend Winchester Castle under her command. The earl concluded by formally granting his wife full powers to act as she thought best: “we give you power over them all and of them all, to ordain and arrange in all things according to that which you shall see to be best to do” (vus donoms le poer sur eus tuz et de eus tuz, a ordener et a puruer en tute choses solom ceo que vus verrez que meuz fra a fere).4
In the model letter above, the husband evidently has sent his wife instructions both in writing and by word of mouth through his servant. Such verbal instructions may have been reserved for sensitive personal, political, or military matters that the husband was unwilling to entrust to a letter for fear that it would fall into the wrong hands. This sort of arrangement is mentioned explicitly in a letter written about 1217 × 1219 by Isabelle of Angoulême, widow of King John, to her young son, Henry III. After the death of King John in 1216, Isabelle had returned to her own county of Angoulême in France. Now she was asking for assistance in defending her lands against the king of France, and she closed her letter by saying that her messengers would report certain confidential information verbally, since it was unsafe to send it in writing: “we are sending over to you Sir Geoffrey de Bodeville and Sir Waleran, entrusting to them many matters which cannot be set down in writing to you, and you can trust them in what they say to you on our behalf concerning the benefit to you and us.”5
The last sentence in the model letter marks an abrupt shift from business to passion. Here the wife takes the upper hand, ordering—not begging—her husband to return to her as soon as possible so that together they can pay the marriage debt, a euphemism for marital sex. The Church taught that husband and wife were “one flesh,” and that neither spouse could refuse the sexual demands of the other. There were, however, restrictions on marital sex: it had to be procreative (intended to result in conception) rather than carnal (undertaken simply for pleasure), and it had to occur in a permissible manner (only vaginal sex in the “missionary position” was acceptable) and at a permitted time (sex was forbidden, for example, during many religious holidays or while the wife was menstruating). Sex outside these restrictions was deemed sinful. Women were assumed to have sexual urges that were as strong as men’s, or even stronger, and wives were not shy about demanding sex.6 Anti-feminist writers, many of them clerics who considered even marital sex to be polluting, viewed such displays of female power with alarm and outrage. For example, the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis (1075–c. 1142) alleged (improbably) that a number of the Norman barons and knights who had followed William the Conqueror to England in 1066 were summoned back to Normandy two years later by their wives who, “consumed by fierce lust, sent message after message to their husbands urging them to return at once, and adding that unless they did so with all speed they would take other husbands for themselves.” The husbands, terrified at the threat of cuckoldry, “returned to Normandy to oblige their wanton wives,” even though this meant forfeiting the English fiefs that they had obtained from the victorious William.7 Similar accounts of female sexual demands can be found in the satirical literature of the period. In the anti-matrimonial poem Lamenta (“Laments”), for example, written in Latin around 1280–90 by Mathieu de Boulogne-sur-mer,8 the narrator complains that a husband is tormented day and night by his wife’s constant demands for sex.9 And, he wails, when his own wife claims her conjugal rights but his advancing age makes him unable to perform, she rips out his hair.10
This breathless missive reads suspiciously like a man’s notion of an ideal letter from a wife. However, in its extravagant declarations of obedience and open avowal of sexual frustration, it also recalls the dozens of passionate letters in meticulous Latin, believed to have been written in Paris, c. 1115–17, by the brilliant young Heloise (c. 1094?–1164) to her lover and teacher, the celebrated scholar Abelard (1079–1142), during their tempestuous affair and before their clandestine marriage: “Just how excruciating your long absence since you left has been for me is known only to the one who looks into the secrets of everyone’s heart. . . . I cannot deny myself to you any more than Byblis could to Caunus, or Oenone to Paris, or Briseis to Achilles. . . . Do not delay in coming; the quicker you come, the quicker you will find cause for joy.”11 Years later, long after Abelard’s castration, downfall, and retreat to monastic life, Heloise, who had become a nun at his command and was now an abbess, poured out her heart to him in similar fashion from her convent of the Paraclete near Troyes: “I have carried out all your orders so implicitly that when I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found strength at your command to destroy myself. I did more, strange to say—my love rose to such heights of madness that it robbed itself of what it most desired beyond hope of recovery, when immediately at your bidding I changed my clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the possessor of my body and my will alike.” And, she continued:
I carried out everything for your sake and continue up to the present moment in complete obedience to you. It was not any sense of vocation which brought me as a young girl to accept the austerities of the cloister, but your bidding alone. . . . I would have had no hesitation, God knows, in following you or going ahead at your bidding to the flames of Hell. My heart was not in me but with you, and now, even more, if it is not with you it is nowhere; truly, without you it cannot exist. . . . I have finally denied myself every pleasure in obedience to your will, kept nothing for myself except to prove that now, even more, I am yours.12
1 Add. 8167, fol. 128v.
2 vobis in MS.
3 Literally, “the marrow of friendship.”
4 Shirley, ed., Letters, vol. 2, 311 (Anglo-Norman text), 371 (English translation). This letter is now TNA: PRO, SC 1/11/101. On powers exercised by women in the absence of their husbands, see also Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power, Chap. 3.
5 Anne Crawford, ed., Letters of the Queens of England, 1100–1547 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1994, rpt. 1997), 50–52. The Latin text of this letter can be found in Shirley, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 22–23; the original is TNA: PRO, SC 1/3/181. Shirley (p. 22n.) dates the letter to the period between Prince Louis’s departure from England in September 1217 and Isabelle’s second marriage in May 1220; perhaps in the spring or summer of 1219, “when war with France seemed imminent.” Patricia Barnes dates the letter to 1217–19 in PRO Lists and Indexes, No. XV: List of Ancient Correspondence of the Chancery and Exchequer, rev. ed. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1968), p. 51 (no. 181).
6 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 278–88, 348–51, 358–60. We are grateful to Merry Wiesner-Hanks for this reference.
7 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968–80), 2:218–21.
8 Mathieu’s Latin poem, also known as Liber Lamentationum Matheoluli (The Book of Lamentations of Little Matthew), was translated into French between 1380 and 1387 by Jean le Fèvre de Ressons, who wrote a response called Le Livre de Leesce (The Book of Joy). Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Jean le Fèvre’s Livre de Leesce: Praise or Blame of Women?,” Speculum, 69 (1994), 705 and n. 4. The texts of Mathieu’s Latin poem and Le Fèvre’s French translation can be found in Jean le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, ed. Anton-Gérard van Hamel, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences philologiques et historiques (Paris, 1892–1905), fasc. 95–96. For the Latin title, Lamenta, see Book I, p. 2 (Latin text, line 9). The poems are discussed in Charles Victor Langlois, La Vie en France au Moyen Âge, de la fin du XIIe au milieu du XIVe siècle, d’après des moralistes du temps, nouv. éd., 4 vols. (Paris, 1924–28), 2:241–90. On the date and authorship of the Lamenta, see also Jean Batany, “Un Drôle de métier: le ‘Status conjugatorum,’” in Femmes, mariageslignages: XIIe–XVIe siècles: mélanges offerts à Georges Duby, ed. Jean Dufournet, André Joris, and Pierre Toubert, Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 1 (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1992), 36.
9 (In Latin): “Nulla viro requies, cum nocte dieque legatur/Passio quindecies illi, semper cruciatur.” (In French): “Quinze fois de nuit et de jour/Avra passion sans sejour/Et sera tormentés forments.” (She’ll demand it fifteen times a day, sex without remission, it’ll be pure hell.) See le Fèvre, Lamentations, ed. van Hamel, Book I, p. 24, lines 759–61 (French text) and 341–42 (Latin text).
10 See le Fèvre, Lamentations, ed. van Hamel, Book I, pp. 40–41, lines 1307–56 (French text) and 560–87 (Latin text). In Book I, p. 4 (French text, lines 154–57; Latin text, line 29) the narrator explains that he has married a widow who turned out to be a virago.
11 Constant J. Mews, The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France, with a translation by Neville Chiavaroli and Constant J. Mews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), Letter 45, pp. 224–25. On the dates of the correspondence and the affair, see p. 146; on the date of Heloise’s birth, see p. 32; on the deaths of Abelard and Heloise, see pp. 174–75. The attribution of the letters in this volume to Heloise and Abelard remains the subject of debate.
12 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1974), Letter 1 (Heloise to Abelard), 109–18 (these excerpts are from pp. 113, 115–16).
77 Miles uxori sue salutem. Quicumque alii deficiant,2 suo viro non debet deficere ubi precipue desid[erio?]3 non deficit m[oneta?].4 Bene nosci quod diu iam regina meum5 detinuit servicium. Lineos pannos et linceamina6 consumpsi, et ideo, quam cicius poteritis, defectum illum emendare satagas,7 et in hiis et in aliis que presensium lator dixerit tibi. Michi subvenias ut cum ad te rediero tibi grates referre valeam.
A knight to his wife, greetings. Whatever other things one’s husband may lack, he should certainly not go short where there is no want of money (moneta) for what he desires (desiderio). You know well that for a long time now the queen has engaged my service. I have used up my linen cloth and sheets, and therefore, as quickly as you can, busy yourself with repairing that loss, both in these things and in others that the bearer of this present letter will tell you about. Please help me in this, and when I return to you I shall be duly grateful.
This document sheds interesting light on the conditions of royal service in early thirteenth-century England. The queen in this letter is presumably intended to be Eleanor of Provence, who married Henry III on January 14, 1236. Members of her entourage would have been provided each year with liveries of one or more suits of woolen outer clothing; shoes and woolen hose were sometimes included as well. Such liveries varied in quality, quantity, and value according to the rank or office of the recipients, and formed a substantial portion of their annual retainer or wage.8 The letter above makes it clear, however, that a knight of the queen’s household was expected to provide his own linens in the form of underclothing (shirts and drawers), bedding (sheets and pillow-covers), and towels.
Linen cloth of various kinds was widely used in medieval Europe. In addition to underwear, bedding, and toweling, its domestic uses included wall hangings, tablecloths, napkins, aprons, cleaning cloths, head coverings (veiling, kerchiefs, and coifs), girdles (belts), and baby linens. In well-to-do households it was customary to buy linen cloth in quantity, or to have it woven from the raw flax, and then to make it up into various articles as needed. For example, at her death in 1267 Cecily Heosey or Huse bequeathed all her towels and table linens “that are now made or to be made” to be divided among her husband and daughters. A post-mortem inventory of her possessions found that her household belongings at the manor of “Tephonte” (Teffont Evias, Wiltshire) included thirty-nine ells (44.577 meters) of linen cloth, and that she had died owing 12d. and 26d., respectively, to two women for weaving linen cloth.9
It is interesting to note that in this letter the knight writes home for fresh supplies of linen and sheets rather than buying them for himself. His motive seems likely to have been economic: if his household commissioned its linens from local weavers or purchased them in bulk at local fairs, it may well have been cheaper for the knight to have these goods sent to him from home than to buy them in London (or wherever the court was at the time). This letter thus also provides an intriguing glimpse into the domestic economy of a knight’s household.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 128v.
2 deficiat in MS.
3 defidi in MS. The proper reading here is uncertain; desiderio seems to best suit the context.
4 This word is uncertain; in the MS, it is given in abbreviated form as Ma. The same abbreviation occurs in DOCUMENT 84, where, however, it seems most likely to stand for miseria.
5 me in MS.
6 Corrected in MS from linceamena.
7 Corrected in MS from satagare.
8 Margaret Wade Labarge, A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 130–31; see also Frédérique Lachaud, “Liveries of Robes in England, c. 1200–1330,” English Historical Review, 111, no. 441 (April 1996), especially pp. 281–83, 290. Eleanor de Montfort provided shoes and hose for at least some of her servants. See, e.g., Thomas Hudson Turner, ed., Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Roxburghe Club Publications, no. 57 (London, 1841), 31. For livery robes, see also Documents 5 and 6.
9 mappe et manutergia que nunc sunt facta vel facienda. TNA: PRO, E 210/291 (testament); E 154/1/2 (inventory). Cecily and her husband Geoffrey had acquired a quarter of a knight’s fee in Teffont Evias before 1242–43. Victoria History of the Counties of England, Wiltshire, vol. 13, South-West Wiltshire: Chalk and Dunworth Hundreds, ed. D. A. Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Institute of Historical Research, 1987), 188. On knight’s fees, see DOCUMENT 34, note 9.
78 A. B. salutem. Quoniam de vestra quamplurimum confidimus amicicia, dilectum filium nostrum vobis transmittimus,2 suplicantes quatinus, pro amore meo et servicio, illum in servicio vestro recipiatis. Scientes3 pro certo quod morigeratus est, et ad omne servicium promtus et paratus et fidelis. Et eciam in omnibus eum talem promittamus, et si de illo fideiussores vel securitatem velitis habere, pro illo fideiubemus4 ut manucapiamus illius fidelitatem. Tantum ergo pro nostra peticione faciatis, ut preces nostras presens penes vos senciat profuisse. Valete.
To A., B. [sends] greetings. Since we have the greatest confidence in your friendship, we send our beloved son to you, asking that, for my love and service, you receive him into your service, knowing for certain that he is of good character, and prompt, ready, and loyal for every [kind of] service. And we also promise that he is such in all things, and if you wish to have guarantors and security for him, we stand surety for him, so we may guarantee his trustworthiness. Therefore, please act in such a way, for the sake of our request, that the bearer may think that our wishes have found favor with you. Farewell.
Obtaining employment in the medieval world was often a matter of whom one knew, and the use of unabashed patronage or nepotism by a lord or lady was considered a proper—indeed, an essential—demonstration of personal power. Offering or soliciting employment or similar favors for relations, friends, and dependents was an important aspect of lordship, one to be practiced openly and publicly, rather than a corrupt act to be practiced furtively or revealed only to intimates. Shame lay not in offering such patronage, but in failing to provide it, which is why men and women of the highest standing were constantly sending and receiving letters of this kind (cf. DOCUMENTS 86–87 and 92). Examples can be found in the correspondence of Queen Dowager Eleanor of Provence (d. 1291) and of her daughter-in-law, Queen Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290), both of whom wrote to the senior royal administrator John de Kirkby to request assistance for various dependents.5
The language of this model letter clearly reflected contemporary usage. For example, Peter de Maulay, who from 1215 to 1220 had custody of Richard of Cornwall, the king’s younger brother, wrote to the justiciar Hubert de Burgh about 1219 × 1221 on behalf of Richard’s tutor Roger of Acaster, and his letter employs very similar expressions. De Maulay asked de Burgh to assist Roger “for my love” (pro amore meo), and concluded: “please act in such a way concerning my wishes that I shall be deeply indebted to you, and that he [i.e., Roger] may feel that my request was useful to him” (super his tantum ad preces meas facientes, quod vobis ad multiplices tener gratiarum actiones, et quod preces meas sibi sentiat fructuosas).6
1 Fairfax 27, fol. 6r.
2 tranmittimus in MS.
3 Sientes in MS.
4 fideiudebemus in MS.
5 TNA: PRO, SC 1/10/47 (1274 × 86), SC 1/10/51 (1283), SC 1/10/132 (1287 × 90). On Kirkby, see Oxford DNB, s.n. “Kirkby, John (d. 1290).”
6 Shirley, ed., Letters, vol. 1., 179–80 (no. 156). This letter is now TNA: PRO, SC 1/1/ 153. It was dated by Shirley to c. 1221, and by Patricia M. Barnes to 1219–21 (see PRO, Lists and Indexes, No. XV, List of Ancient Correspondence, rev. ed., p. 13 [vol. 1, no. 153]). On de Maulay, see Oxford DNB, s.n. “Maulay, Peter (I) de (d. 1241).”
79 Siquis debeat in religionem convertere et habeat socios quibus velit mittere salutes, [?exemplum]2 habeat huiusmodi
Scolaris sociis salutem. Consilio amicorum m[e]orum3 et fructu divino, spero [quod]4 habitum die proxima induam monachalem, quare vobis omnibus humiles effundo preces, affectuose expostulans quatinus, divine caritatis respectu uniuscuiusque, vestr[as]5 pro me dignetis oraciones effundere. [et quod]6 rogaturi ut quod intuitu p[u]ericie7 minus egi perite, ante vesperam vite michi liceat illud corrigere. [Sciatis quod, me vivente, vestri immemor esse non potero, set ante meos oculos vestra imago tanquam presens habebitur.]8 Quare tantum faciatis ut oracionibus nostris9 memores efficiamini. Valete.
If a man feels compelled to enter a monastery and has fellow-students to whom he might wish to send regards, let him have a [?model letter] of this sort
A student to his fellow-students, greetings. By my friends’ advice and the working of God’s plan, I hope to assume the monastic habit tomorrow, and so I pour out my humble prayers to you all, tearfully requesting that, in consideration of God’s love of every person, you feel moved to pour out your prayers for me, [and that] you will ask that what, by the prompting of youth, I have done with little skill, it shall be vouchsafed to me to correct before the evening of life. [You should know that, while I am living, I shall never be able to be unmindful of you, but your image will always be before my eyes just as if you were present.] Therefore, I hope that you will act in such a way that you will be held as fond memories in our prayers. Farewell.
This letter, despite its many flaws in composition or copying, illustrates an important facet of medieval spiritual life. Renunciation of the world’s vanities was a prominent theme in twelfth- and thirteenth-century spirituality, and entry into the monastic life was the ultimate form of renunciation since, upon their profession, cloistered monks and nuns were supposed to have died to the world.
In the early thirteenth century, the emerging universities often served as recruiting grounds for the religious orders, although students were more likely to be drawn to the popular new mendicant orders of Franciscan and Dominican friars than, as here, to one of the older monastic orders. In the 1220s, hundreds of teachers, graduates, and undergraduates of Padua, Paris, and Oxford joined the Dominicans in what amounted to a deliberate mission to the universities.10
In this letter, the student apparently has had an intense conversion experience that has led him to leave his studies and renounce the world, including his family and friends, in order to become a monk. St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the celebrated Cistercian abbot, wrote an eloquent letter to a young scholar, Master Walter of Chaumont, who was contemplating a similar move. Bernard urged the eternal benefits of the spiritual life over the temporal joys of scholarship:
I am filled with sadness for you, my dear Walter, when I think of the flower of your youth, the brightness of your intelligence, the ornaments of your knowledge and scholarship and, what more becomes a Christian than all these, your noble bearing, all being wasted in futile studies and the pursuit of what is merely passing, when they would be so much better used in the service of Christ. God forbid that a sudden death should snatch them from you, that all should suddenly wither like grass in the fury of a burning wind, fall from you like leaves from autumn trees. What fruit will you have then of all your labours upon earth? What return will you be able to make to God for all he has given you? What will you have to show for all the talents he has entrusted to you? What will happen to you, if with empty hands you stand before him who, although he willingly gave you all your gifts, will nevertheless exact a strict account of how you have used them? He will come, he will soon come, who will demand back with increase what was his own. He will take away all those gifts which have earned you such spectacular, but such treacherous, applause in your own country. Noble birth, a lithe body, a comely appearance, a distinguished bearing, are great acquisitions, but the credit of them belongs to him who gave them. You may use them for your own advantage, but there is one who will enquire into it and judge if you do.11
1 Add. 8167, fol. 104r.
2 Word supplied to preserve the sense of the passage.
3 morum in MS.
4 Word supplied to preserve the sense of the passage.
5 vestrum in MS.
6 Words supplied to preserve the sense of the passage.
7 pericie in MS.
8 The text in square brackets comes from a more accurate version of the same letter, in CCCC 297, fol. 114v. It was printed by H. G. Richardson in H. E. Salter, W. A. Pantin, and H. G. Richardson, eds., Formularies Which Bear on the History of Oxford, c. 1204–1420, 2 vols., Oxford Historical Society, 2nd ser., 4–5 (1939–42), 2:347. In Add. 8167, fol. 104r, this passage is so garbled as to be incomprehensible: Sciatis quod in iuventute iuvenior esse non potero. set ante meos oculos ymago vestra tanquam presens habituri.
9 Corrected in MS from vestris.
10 Clifford Hugh Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, 3rd ed. (Harlow, Essex: Longman: 2001), 261–62.
11 The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. B. S. James (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998), 152.
80 Proles parisius scolam excercens mandat patri ut indiget auxilio2 suo
Venerabili domino suo et patri A., B. suus proles et alumpnus salutem. Ad consilium et preceptum iter arripui parisius ut, adversans paupertatem, pacior multimodam. Hinc enim fames, hinc enim frigus, hinc laboris assiduitas de labore. Tamen non conqueror, quia non debet esse alienus. Set cetera incommoda defleo, quia laborem non fit in actum procedere. Esuriens enim et languens, vix possum opera operi inpendere. Quare paternitati vestre pias preces porrigo, petens attencius quatinus divine pietatis intuitu paupertatem meam oculo respicias clemencie. Et tantum faciatis ne3 compulsus ab honesto proposito redire compellar. Valete.
A son studying at a school in Paris sends word to his father that he needs his aid
To his venerable lord and father A., B. his son and student sends greetings. I have eagerly embraced the path to wisdom and instruction at Paris so that, encountering poverty, I might be capable of enduring many forms of it. For on this side [is] hunger, on that side cold, and on the other side the exhaustion of labor. Nevertheless, I do not complain, because this should not be unfamiliar [to me]. But I do bewail certain other misfortunes, because it makes it impossible for my work to advance in performance. For, starving and languishing, I can scarcely pour out works on top of work. Therefore, I send pious prayers to Your Paternity, seeking anxiously that, by the prompting of holy charity, you look on my poverty with the eye of clemency. And I hope that you will act in such a way that I will not be compelled to withdraw from my honest design. Farewell.
The four student letters included in this volume (Documents 80–83) are typical examples of a genre that became popular throughout medieval Europe. Such letters were sent not only to parents, but also to anyone else who might be willing to provide financial assistance, such as guardians, brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, and patrons.4 The theme of these letters, exemplified in the letter above, was universal: the writer is working diligently, but suffers greatly for want of money, and if it is not forthcoming he will have to pawn his belongings, give up his studies—or perish of cold and hunger. As a father in an Italian formulary letter sighed, “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.”5 Such letters, while sometimes adapted to include circumstantial details particular to the correspondents, were for the most part purely rhetorical exercises. To demonstrate the writer’s scholarly attainments, the text was often garnished with classical or biblical quotations or allusions, or elaborate metaphors drawn from the natural world, while to ingratiate the sender with the recipient, it was sprinkled with expressions of respect for the latter, mingled with suggestive reminders of the obligations of Christian charity.
Some historians have seen the routine resort to model letters by medieval students as evidence that they were not especially proficient themselves at composition and rhetoric.6 Others have argued more charitably that students naturally turned to model letters, not because they were unable to compose letters themselves, but because they wished to make use of the advanced rhetorical skills of the professional dictatores.7 A notable feature of many such letters is their singleness of purpose: the writer speaks only of his own situation and does not inquire about the health or circumstances of the recipient, even in a cursory way. These missives, written in the classic four- or five-part structure of the formal letter,8 thus were intended to serve not as personal correspondence, but rather as a genteel form of bill.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 104r.
2 Corrected in MS from aluxilio.
3 ut in MS.
4 See Alan Cobban, English University Life in the Middle Ages (London: UCL Press, 1999), 22, 35–36; Charles Homer Haskins, “The Life of Medieval Students as Illustrated by Their Letters,” American Historical Review, 3, no. 2 (January 1898), 203–29, revised and expanded in idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), Chap. 1; and Salter, Pantin, and Richardson, eds., Formularies, vol. 2, 331–450.
5 Primum carmen scolarium est petitio expensarum, nec umquam erit epistola que non requirit argentum. Boncompagno (or Buoncompagno), Rhetorica antiqua (composed at Bologna in 1215), quoted in Haskins, “Life of Medieval Students,” 208–9; see also 207, n. 3 (last paragraph); idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 7–8 ; see also 6, n. 2 (last paragraph, extending to p. 7). There is one known English copy of Boncompagno’s Rhetorica antiqua, in BL, Cott. MS Vitellius C. VIII, fols. 91r–130v. See also Martin Camargo, “The English Manuscripts of Bernard of Meung’s Flores Dictaminum,” Viator, 12 (1981), 208–9.
6 See, e.g., Haskins, “Life of Medieval Students,” 203–4, and idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 2.
7 See, e.g., Cobban, English University Life, 22, 35.
8 For a model student letter that is broken down into its four main component parts (proverbial exordium, narratio, petitio, and proverbial conclusio), see Haskins, “Life of Medieval Students,” 209, n. 2, and idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 9, n. 2 (quoting BL, Additional MS 18322, fol. 59).
81 Alie de eodem
Venerabili domino suo. A., B. salutem. Noverit universitas vestra quod ego Oxonie studeo cum summa diligencia, set moneta2 promocionem meam multum impedit. Iam enim due mense transacte sunt ex3 quos michi misisti expendidi. Villa enim cara est et multa exigit; oportet hospicium conducere et utensilia emere, et de multis aliis extra predicta que ad presens non possum nominare. Quare paterni[tati]4 vestre pie suplico quatinus, divine pietatis intuitu, michi succuratis ut possim [con]cludere5 quod bene incoavi. Sciatis quod sine Cerere et [Baccho]6 [f]rigescit7 Apollo.8 Quare tantum faciatis ut vobis mediantibus incoatum bene possim terminare. Valete.
Another letter of the same type9
B. to his venerable master A., greeting. This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg Your Paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres and Bacchus Apollo grows cold. Therefore, I hope that you will act in such a way that, by your intercession, I may finish what I have well begun.10 Farewell.
In this letter the sender claims to have been without funds for the past two months. He begs his father’s aid on the grounds of his own zealous work and his father’s natural obedience to God’s will, and ends with a flourish of allusion to classical mythology and literature as both a demonstration of his attainments and a graceful reminder of what is needed. Another student letter in the same collection begins, “To my father, his son sends greetings and his entire self. [Know that] he is giving himself completely to his studies and to preserving the flower of his chastity untouched.”11
The frequent references in letters such as these to the impoverished writer’s diligence, obedience, and chastity would have been inspired, at least in part, by the biblical story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), in which a younger son demanded his inheritance from his father and then left home and squandered it all, so that he was forced to return in abject poverty and beg once more for his father’s assistance. The point of this parable (that God, like a good parent, rejoices in welcoming home the child that was lost and now is found) was driven home by medieval commentators and illustrators, who portrayed the Prodigal Son as having lost his inheritance not through simple misfortune, but through his own sinful behavior—indolence, wine, sex, and gambling. The dictatores who composed model letters, therefore, were careful to reassure anxious (or skeptical) parents and other sponsors that the writer was hardworking and of upright character, and not a wastrel, spendthrift Prodigal Son.12
The student in this letter is studying at Oxford. He may be enrolled with a master at the university, then in its early years of development, or he may be taking a business course with a private instructor of dictamen (the art of letter-writing) and other subjects related to estate-management. It was for the latter sort of student that formularies such as those represented in this volume were compiled.13
1 Add. 8167, fol. 104r–v.
2 Fol. 104v commences here.
3 Sic.
4 patrui or paterni in MS.
5 includere in MS.
6 bacone in MS.
7 strigescit in MS.
8 This tag derives from a line in Eunuchus (The Eunuch), a comedy by Terence (d. 159 B.C.), Act IV, Scene 5, line 732: Sine Cerere et Libero [another name for Bacchus] friget Venus (“Without Ceres [bread] and Bacchus [wine], Venus [love itself] grows cold”). In Terence, The Eunuch, ed. and trans. A. J. Brothers (Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris and Phillips, 2000), 118–19, where this line is translated as, “No food and drink, and love’s out in the cold.”
9 This letter was printed (with silent emendations to the Latin) and translated by Haskins in “Life of Medieval Students,” 210, and again in Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 10. The translation given here, as far as the word “Apollo,” is by Haskins. In his translation, Haskins omitted the final sentence and the valediction.
10 This sentence largely re-states an earlier one, which may be why Haskins omitted it from his translation.
11 BL, Add. MS 8167, fol. 125v: Patri filius salutem et se totum fundere in scolis sue que castitatis florem illesum conservare. The letter breaks off immediately after this opening.
12 For additional student letters, see Documents 80, 82, and 83.
13 On Oxford University in the first half of the thirteenth century, see Introduction, pp. 12–13. On the private instruction of dictamen and estate-management there, see Camargo, “English Manuscripts of Bernard of Meung’s ‘Flores Dictaminum,’ ” 205; Henry Gerald Richardson, “The Oxford Law School Under John,” Law Quarterly Review, 57 (1941), 319–38; and Richardson and and George Osborne Sayles, “Early Coronation Records [Part I],” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 13 (1935–36), 134–38; Cobban, English University Life, 146–48.
82 Alu[m]pnus2 mandat matri
Karissime matri sue A., B. suus alumpnus salutem. Maternus affectus erga prolem promptus et propicius tenetur, sin3 mores maternas mutat vidua4 erit crudelior noverca. Vos autem hactenus5 tam opere quam verbo maternam pietatem michi exibuistis. Si indigentem aliqua muneris largicione in opere refocillastis [sic], ut mens pristina6 vobis maneat, ut vos talem inveniam7 qualem solebam invenire—et inveniam, deo volente, quia nunquam offendi nec offendam in tota vita mea. Noveritis autem quod sanus sum Oxonie et illaris [sic] tantum quantum esse possum, set longo tempore nudus sum et famem sustineo quia monetam non habeo, unde sitim malo8 sedare9 aud [sic] famem. Quare maternitati10 vestre pias preces effundo, petens attencius quatinus filium vestrum, in lacu miserie iacentem, dextra largitatis [eum turpitior11 mori quam oneste]12 hactenus13 educatis.14 Et15 sic eum ad presens consulatis ut vos possit visitare in statu meliori et manere16 diutius.17 Valete.
A student sends an appeal to his mother
To his dearest mother A., B. her son sends greetings. A mother’s love for her child is bound to be strong and gracious, but if a widow changes her maternal habits she will be crueler than a stepmother. For until now, both in deed and in word, you showed me maternal piety. If you relieved my want through some lavishing of favor, would that your former feelings might endure in you, so that I might find you as I used to find you—and as I shall find you, God willing, because I have never offended nor shall I offend [you] in all my life. You will know, moreover, that I am well at Oxford, and as happy as possible, but I have been bare of clothing for a long time, and I am hungry because I have no money with which I may choose to allay thirst or hunger. And so I pour out pious prayers to Your Maternity, seeking anxiously that, with the right hand of largesse, you raise up your son, who has been lying until now in a lake of misery, in a manner more shameful than honorable. And thus, may you look to his immediate welfare, so that he might visit you in a better state and stay for a longer time. Farewell.
The cruelty of stepmothers, so familiar today from fairy and folk tales such as Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, was proverbial in medieval Europe as well. Charles Homer Haskins quoted a model student letter similar to that above, in which the exordium (the proverbial expression or scriptural quotation used to open the letter and to establish its theme and tone) declares sternly that “a mother who does not relieve the poverty of her son has the smell of a stepmother about her.”18
Here the writer also draws on Psalm 39 to evoke the “lake of misery” in which his poverty has forced him to lie, while beseeching his widowed mother to emulate, by implication, the generosity of St Nicholas in extending to him the “right hand of largesse.” The exaggerated description of the writer’s wretchedness may be especially designed to appeal to a mother’s tender heart; another letter in this collection from a son to a father merely states, rather gruffly, “If you want to know about my situation, I shall tell you briefly: I am alive, and shall be fine if I have the things I need for school.”19
1 Add. 8167, fol. 105r.
2 Alupnus in MS.
3 sine in MS.
4 vedua in MS.
5 actenus in MS.
6 pristena in MS.
7 qualem expunged here in MS.
8 malleo in MS.
9 Richardson printed this single sentence from this letter, in which he mistranscribed these three words as “sitium malleo sedere.” He then corrected them to “sitium malleum sedem,” while noting that “[t]he scribe has so bungled the letter to the student’s mother . . . that it is difficult to make sense of it.” Salter, Pantin, and Richardson, eds., Formularies, vol. 2, 347.
10 mrnitati in MS.
11 turpiter in MS.
12 The phrase in square brackets was inserted in the margin in the same hand as the main text.
13 actenus in MS.
14 Cf. Psalms 39:3: eduxit me de lacu miseriae (“He has led me from a lake of misery”). This sentence also recalls a twelfth-century hymn to St Nicholas (“Cantu miro summa laude”), of English provenance, which extolled the saint’s dextra largitatis (“right hand of largesse”). See John Stevens, The Later Cambridge Songs: An English Song Collection of the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119 (line 1b).
15 set in MS.
16 mentere in MS.
17 diociori in MS.
18 Assumendum est proverbium in hunc modum: Mater moribus redolet novercam que filii non sublevat egestatem. Haskins, “Life of Medieval Students,” 209, n. 2, repeated in idem, Studies in Mediaeval Culture, 9, n. 2, quoting from an anonymous treatise in BL, Add. MS 18322, fol. 59.
19 BL, Add. MS 8167, fols. 104v–105r: de statu meo si queritis breviter expediam vivo et valebo si necessaria in scolis habuero. The Latin text of this letter was printed by H. G. Richardson in Salter, Pantin, and Richardson, eds., Formularies, vol. 2, 347. For additional student letters, see Documents 80, 81, and 83.
83 Patri filius salutem. Scolari, pie paternitas, affectum semper et habundanter effluere [?faciatis].2 Nature linea penitus obliquatur et equitatis iura violari vide[n]tur3 in patre filio dificiente.4 Saneque5 pietas in homine6 qui vi[s]cerum7 suorum oblivi[s]citur8 Leones et tigri def[endunt]9 catulos suo donec naturali feritate vigeant, et sui compotes effectu10 educare videntur illis victui neccessaria subministrantes.11 Feris ergo ferocior est qui de se genito deficit filio, precipue cuius intencio talis est ut honestate vivat et honeste vivendo simul deo et parentibus suis acceptus existat. Ve[st]re12 paternitatis litteras suscepi quibus verbotenus affectum nos13 habere paternum ostendistis,14 set, [ne]15 affectum literatorie tantum modo16 sit expressum, aliquis effectus in necessariorum tran[s]missione17 licet fere subsequeretur, [ne]18 vestre paternitatis auxilium aliter19 nullam habeam ([vel] sentiam)20 valorem. Valet[e].21
To his father, his son sends greetings. Upon your scholar, O Pious Paternity, [may you cause] your affection to flow always—and abundantly. The course of nature is seriously distorted, and the laws of equity seem violated, in a father who does less than he might for his son. And, for God’s sake! (saneque) what sort of goodness is there in a man who is oblivious of his own offspring? Lions and tigers defend their young until they can thrive by their own natural fierceness, and are seen to teach their skills (compotes) by demonstration (effectu) while providing the necessities for life for them. More savage, therefore, than savage beasts is he who fails to come to the aid of his own son, especially one whose intention is to live honestly and, by living honestly, to be acceptable both to God and to his parents. I have received Your Paternity’s letter by which you showed, so far as words go, that you hold us in tender paternal affection but, so that your affection is not expressed only in a literary form, some practical performance in the sending of necessities should generally follow it up, [lest] otherwise I regard ([or] consider) your paternity’s assistance as valueless. Farewell.
In the three previous student letters in this volume (Documents 80–82) the student writes humbly to request financial assistance from his father or mother. The student in this letter, however, writes in a much sharper tone in responding to a letter from his father in which the latter evidently professed paternal affection for his son, but did not send any practical demonstration of it in the form of cash or supplies. The student is aggrieved; he considers that his father has let him down—after all, he argues, even wild animals provide for their young until they are able to fend for themselves. A father who fails to do likewise is therefore worse than a savage beast; a father who neglects the support of his son—especially an honest and diligent son!—contravenes the laws of both nature and justice.
In another letter in the same collection, a son similarly argues that Nature as well as God demands that a father support his hardworking and obedient son: “The wild birds of the sky bring up their chicks until they can fly; the beasts of the forest nurse their young until they can feed themselves; the ewe does not desert her lamb until it can satisfy itself with grass . . . you should do [the same] for your son who is not yet able to support himself; for your son who is obedient in all things; for your son who is working hard at honest study. . . . Therefore, I earnestly request that you behave towards me as Nature would tell [you]; as the Creator has ordained.”22 There may be a hint of legalism in the appeal to the laws of nature, God, and equity that figure so strikingly in these two demands for paternal assistance; perhaps these model letters were especially designed for students who were studying law.
1 Add. 8167, fols. 125v–126r.
2 This or a similar verb in the hortatory subjunctive appears to be missing here, meaning something like “may you cause.” The Latinity throughout this letter is especially problematic; we are very grateful to the late John Barron for his kind help with it.
3 videtur in MS.
4 difice in MS.
5 sane que in MS.
6 Fol. 126r commences here.
7 vicerum in MS.
8 oblivicitur in MS.
9 des in MS.
10 effco in MS.
11 subministrantis in MS.
12 vere in MS.
13 vos in MS.
14 offendistis in MS.
15 ut in MS, but the sense appears to require a negative here.
16 m9 in MS.
17 tranmissione in MS.
18 et in MS.
19 aliunde in MS.
20 In MS, “sentire” alone, without the preceding “vel,” but the sense here suggests a variant phrase for “habeam.”
21 valet in MS.
22 BL, Add. MS 8167, fol. 104v: volucres celi pullos educant donec possint volare. bestie silve fetus suos lactant dum possint sustentare. Ovis agnum non deserit donec possit herba saturari . . . agere debeatis erga filium vestrum non dum sibi sufficientem. erga filium vestrum per omnia parentem erga filium honesto studio invigilantem . . . ergo postulo attentissime quatinus erga me faciatis sicut natura dixerit. sicut creator induxit.
84 Magister scolari2 salutem. Decenti sedulitas totum3 exigit discipulum ut magister paciatur ociis indulgere. Vero vagi4 vanitas discipuli defectum discendi non admittit si5 sui monitoris exercitium6 interrumpit, et sic uterque7 desidie miseria8 gravitur. Set ne tuum tempus admittas, ne tuorum parentum et amicorum facultates tibi transmissas in cassum consumeri,9 videaris a tuo debili principio vitupera[bi]lique10 propositum tuum animum[que]11 retrahere;12 satagas bene discencium emitando vestigia, ne pro defectu tuo13 tarditas14 mee possit imputari pigricie—que non in medico semper relevetur,15 nec in doctrina16 quam auditor bene discat. Valete.
A master to his student, greetings. Zeal for what is fitting requires that a master allow a dedicated student to enjoy some free time. However, the fecklessness of a wandering student cares nothing for the harm to his studies if he breaks the training of his instructor, and thus each of them is burdened with the misery of idleness. But, lest you allow your own time, and the resources of your parents and friends that were sent to you, to be wasted in vain, you should show that you are changing your attitude and intention from their feeble and blameworthy beginning, and repay [your benefactors] by following in the footsteps of those who learn well, lest through your own fault your slow progress—which cannot always be cured by the physician, nor by the instruction that the auditor might learn well—be imputed to indolence on my part. Farewell.
In this classic example of professorial exasperation, a teacher upbraids his student for wandering off instead of attending to his studies. This, the teacher scolds, results in a waste of his own time as well as the student’s, and also wastes the funds sent to the student by his parents and friends. He advises the student sternly to shape up and to become a credit to his benefactors by modeling himself on successful students. In closing, however, the teacher makes it clear that he is concerned not only for the student’s welfare but also for his own reputation, which would be damaged if the student’s lack of progress were imputed to the teacher’s laziness rather than to the student’s indolence or inability.
In the early thirteenth century, a master’s concern for his reputation was not merely a matter of professional pride, but of money. Teachers at Paris, Oxford, and similar centers of learning were not paid a salary by the nascent universities; instead, they obtained much or all of their income from fees paid directly to them by their pupils.17 A master who developed a reputation, however undeserved, for poor teaching would be unable to attract new students and would lose his livelihood.
It is ironic that the letter above, whose tone is one of outrage and alarm at a student’s poor academic performance, is itself so peppered with errors in its Latinity. This may have been the result of poor drafting by the original author (possibly a student himself), or of poor editing and copying by a later compiler and copyist. Perhaps, however, as is also suggested in the case of DOCUMENT 93, the flawed Latin grammar of this letter was intentional; in this case, as a deliberate burlesque of the genre of admonitions by teachers to students, intended as much to amuse as to instruct.
1 Add. 8167, fols. 128v–129r.
2 scolaribus in MS, but (with the exception of tui tardatis, for which see below) the sender subsequently addresses the recipient using verbs and pronouns in the second person singular, not plural, so evidently the addressee is really a single student, not a group.
3 The meaning of “totum” here ought to be something like “absorbed,” suggesting that an accompanying phrase such as “in his work” is missing. It is translated below as “dedicated.”
4 vagii in MS.
5 set in MS.
6 excercitum in MS.
7 utrique in MS.
8 This word is uncertain; in the MS, it is given in abbreviated form as Ma. The same abbreviation occurs in DOCUMENT 77.
9 consumere in MS. Fol. 129r commences here.
10 vituperalique in MS.
11 animum in MS.
12 Retraere in MS.
13 tui in MS.
14 tardatis in MS.
15 This line recalls Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, 1:3 (to Rufinus), lines 17–18: Non est in medico semper relevetur ut aeger:/ interdum docta plus valet arte malum (“No doctor can always ensure that the patient recovers—/ sometimes the disease will win despite (or because of) his skill”). Latin text in P. Ovidi Nasonis, Tristium libri quinque; Ibis; Ex ponto libri quattuor; Halieutica fragmenta, ed. S. G. Owen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1915; rpt. 1946); English translation in Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
16 doctrine in MS.
17 Cobban, English University Life, 7–10, 58–59.
85 Adhuc de huiusmodi literis dicemus
A. B. salutem. Obsequium aliud exigit, et subtraccio exigit subtraccionem. Pecii nuper ut michi succureres de tignis et trabibus quorum copia penes te est. Tu autem surdas aures peticioni mee prebuisti, et ideo non mireris2 si preces tuas presentes audire recusem. Nolo enim, [nec]3 velle debeo, tibi de meo succurere, quoniam [quando]4 de rebus vestris unum pecii, dedignatus fuisti michi subvenire. Et ideo ut de cetero amicum h[ab]eas,5 amicu[s]6 inveniaris. Vale.
Again we speak of letters of the same type
A. to B., greetings. One consent demands another, and a refusal demands a refusal. Lately I asked you to help me out with some boards and beams, of which you have plenty at your place. But you turned deaf ears to my petition, and therefore you will not be surprised if I refuse to listen to your own present requests. For I do not wish, [nor] ought I to wish, to aid you from my stock (de meo), since, [?when] I sought one thing of yours, you disdained to come to my aid. And so, in future, if you want to have a friend, you will need to behave as a friend. Farewell.
This is a classic rejection letter, one designed according to the standard dictaminal model (described above in the Introduction, p. 17) of salutatio, exordium, narratio, and conclusio, rather than to the somewhat looser instructions given in DOCUMENT 7. The writer begins by asserting a general principle—that one good or ill turn deserves another—and then proceeds to apply it. Recently, he says, the man who has just petitioned him for a favor unreasonably refused his own similar request. As a result, he now duly rejects the other man’s petition. He concludes his letter with another general statement of principle, a variation on the golden rule, expressed in the form of a rather patronizing recommendation to the unsuccessful petitioner that, if he wishes to have a friend, he needs to act like a friend himself.
The writer’s language here is markedly curt and blunt, suggesting that he is writing to someone, such as a fellow merchant, who is his equal or inferior in rank and power, to whom he uses the familiar “tu” rather than the respectful “vos,” and whom he is willing to offend and unafraid to anger. His opening exordium and closing conclusio, however, are couched in lofty proverbial terms. The opening recalls the Roman expression “manus manum lavat” (“one hand washes the other”), which at least one modern translator has rendered as “one good turn deserves another,”7 while the conclusion echoes a number of Roman sayings on friendship, including Ovid’s “ut ameris, amabilis esto” (“if you would be loved, be lovable”),8 Seneca’s “Si vis amari, ama” (“If you wish to be loved, love”),9 and Pliny the Younger’s “habes amicos, quia amicus ipse es” (“you have friends, because you yourself are a friend”).10
1 Add. 8167, fol. 98r.
2 Corrected in MS from mirereis.
3 The sense of this phrase requires a negative here; it may have been inadvertently dropped because its abbreviation resembled that of the preceding “enim.”
4 The sense of this phrase requires some such word as “quando” (“when”) here. It may have been skipped because its abbreviation resembled that of the preceding “quoniam.”
5 heas in MS.
6 amicum in MS.
7 Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. Alfred R. Allinson (New York: Panurge, 1930), Chap. 7, p. 45. The same expression was used by Seneca in Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii, cap. 9:6, edited by Allan P. Ball in Selected Essays of Seneca, and the Satire on the Deification of Claudius (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 32.
8 P. Ovidi Nasonis de arte amatoria libri tres, ed. Paul Brandt, vol. 2 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963), 107.
9 L. Annaei Senecae: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, ed. L. D. Reynolds, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Universty Press, 1965), Lib. I, 9:6. This dictum of Seneca’s was quoted by Albertano of Brescia in De amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vitae (1238), cap. 12, ed. Sharon Hiltz Romino (unpub. doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1980), available online at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/LAT0673/_PL.HTM#$G0 [seen January 10, 2008].
10 Epistularum libri novem; Epistularum ad Traianum liber panegyricus, ed. R. C. Kukula (Leipzig: Teubner, 1908), Panegyricus, 85:3, p. 395.
86 Pro parente fiant huiusmodi litere
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Pro honore et obsequio G. connato meo a vobis collato, et adhuc si placet conferendo, multiplices grates reffero vobis et relaturus sum omnibus diebus vite mee. Set quia, cum dicitur, “Nil nocet amisso subdere calcar equo,” ideo pro eo preces precibus acumulo, petens attencius quatinus, divine pietatis intuitu, opus in ipso incoatum bene terminetis. Sciturus quod si deus vitam et salutem michi annuerit, ego vobis et vestris cum videro opus ingruere persolvam, nec magis deero vestre necessitati quam proprie commoditati mee.2 Quare tantum faciatis predicto G. ut preces meas penes vos sibi senciat profuisse. Valete.
For a kinsman, let there be a letter of this type
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. For the honor and courtesy that you have previously shown and, if it pleases you, will confer in future, to my kinsman G., I send you thanks again and again, and I shall be bound to you all the days of my life. But because, as it is said, “it does no harm to set spur to a galloping horse,”3 therefore on his behalf I pile up prayers upon prayers, seeking earnestly that, by the prompting of holy charity, you complete the work that you have begun well on his behalf. For you know that, as long as God grants me life and health, when I shall see need threaten you and yours, I shall repay the debt in full, nor shall I be more neglectful of your need than I am of my own advantage. So I hope that you will treat the said G. in such a way that he may know that my prayers to you were of service to him. Farewell.
Soliciting favors on behalf of family, friends, and dependents was a commonplace in the medieval world, and the intricate networks of reciprocal obligations that resulted from such arrangements must have underlain friendships and alliances at all levels of society. Here the writer asks a friend to assist the writer’s kinsman, whom the friend has already helped. The writer promises to offer reciprocal assistance to his friend, should the latter ever require it, and he closes with the revealing request that not only should the friend offer the kinsman assistance, but that the kinsman should know that he owed this assistance to the writer’s petition. A similar request can be found in DOCUMENT 45.
Genuine examples of such letters survive. In one, sent by William Wickwane, chancellor of York, between 1266 and 1268, Wickwane writes that he is compelled by the wretchedness of a friend, and emboldened by the generosity of the addressee, to request assistance for the friend, who is also the bearer of the letter. He closes, like the letter above, by asking that the friend know that Wickwane’s request on his behalf has proved fruitful.4 While many such petitions were successful, sometimes they ended unhappily, with the rejection of the request or the ungrateful behavior of the recipient of the favor. Examples of such outcomes can be seen below in Documents 87 and 88.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 99r.
2 me in MS.
3 This Latin tag comes from Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, 2:6 (to Graecinus), line 38 (final line): nec nocet admisso subdere calcar equo (printed in P. Ovidi Nasonis, Tristium libri quinque; Ibis; Ex ponto libri quattuor; Halieutica fragmenta, ed. Owen). In 1242 it was quoted by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, in a letter to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln. Roberti Grosseteste quondam episcopi Lincolniensis epistolae, ed. Henry Richards Luard, Rolls Series, 26 (London: Longman, 1861), Letter 95, pp. 296–297. It was later quoted by Pope Clement IV in a letter of January 25, 1268, to Amatus de Amatis, Podestà of the Mercanzia of Cremona. Epistole et dictamina Clementis pape quarti, ed. Matthias Thumser, no. 431, pp. 235–36, available online as a PDF file at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/∼sekrethu/clemens/index.htm [seen July 13, 2010].
4 Christopher R. Cheney, “Letters of William Wickwane, Chancellor of York, 1266–1268,” EHR, 47 (1932), 188 (October 1932), 626–42, Letter XIV (“pro amico,” p. 635).
87 Litere responsales
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Preces vestras pro G. cognato vestro effusas nuper accepi, quas preces pro posse duxi ad effectum. Ex quo enim illum vidi in partibus nostris, suscepi eum in domo mea, susceptum procreavi, et de substancia mea acomodavi ad negocium suum prosequendum. Set nec ille nec aliquis pro eo me respecsit.2 Quare vos precor ut, sicut pro eo promisistis, ita michi reddatis meas expensas et peccuniam [sic] quam illi commisi. Et tantum faciatis ut alias vobis fiam obnoxius. Valete.
A letter of response
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. I lately received your request concerning your kinsman, G., which I carried out to the best of my ability. For, as a result of it, I met with him here, I took him into my home, I got his enterprise off the ground (susceptum procreavi), [and] I made him a loan from my own assets to carry out his business. But neither he, nor anyone else on his behalf, has shown any concern for me. So I pray you that, as you promised, you reimburse me for my expenses and for the money that I lent him. And take care of this in such a way that I may [be willing to] come to your assistance on another occasion. Farewell.
The exchange of favors was a mainstay of medieval life at all levels of society and (as discussed in DOCUMENT 86) frequently served to initiate and bind friendships and alliances among powerful people and their dependents. When someone failed to reciprocate a favor or reneged on an obligation to a person of rank, however, this was viewed as far worse than a mere social or financial slip. It was a personal affront, a loss of face that people of standing could not tolerate, since it represented a challenge to their prestige and reputation. The consequences of such a lapse, therefore, could be grave, ranging from social coldness and financial embarassment all the way to mortal enmity (see DOCUMENT 48).
In this letter, a man writes to a friend that he has put himself to considerable trouble and expense to assist the latter’s kinsman, but the friend has so far failed to make good his promise to reimburse his expenses. The sender reminds his friend quite civilly of his obligations, but ends on a more threatening note with a warning that a continued failure to pay up will make him reluctant to respond to any future requests for assistance.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 100r.
2 Corrected in MS from respeccit.
88 Litere responsales et quesitive
Karissimo amico suo A., B salutem. Peticionem vestram nuper accepi, ut G. cognatum vestrum in partibus nostris mantinerem,2 et si opus haberet de denariis meis illi acomodarem, quantum opus haberet, vobis in manucapientibus omnia nos esse reddituros pro illo que ipse non redderet. Set volo ut scias nec volo nec possum illi aliquid de meo acomodare, quia aleator3 est fortis et omnia perdidit que lucratur. Quare neuter vestrum tutum est aliquid illi acomodare dum vicio tali laborat, quia4 sortem idem dedit intelligi quod ex animo malivolo denarios petitos illos denegaret. Set illi qui cum eo erant5 in taberna quando6 .x. perdidit. et vadia sua profuit usque ad extremas braccas. Quare tantum faciatis ne peccuniam [sic] propriam de me promptam ei amplius tradetis, et perdere in eo quod reddere debetis. Valete.7
A letter of response and [advice]8
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. I lately received your request that I maintain your kinsman G. here and, if he should have need, lend him my own money as his need should require, with you standing surety for him to repay anything that he does not repay himself. But I want you to know that I do not wish, nor am I able, to lend him anything of mine, for he is an inveterate dice-player and he loses everything that he gambles. Nor is it prudent to lend anything to him of yours while he labors under such a vice, since he has made it quite clear that, because of his malevolent spirit, he will repudiate his debts. But as for those who were with him in the tavern when he lost “x” [perhaps ten shillings, marks, or pounds] and his pledges—they gained everything, right down to his drawers. So take care that you refrain from handing over any more of your own money—which you borrowed from me—and so lose on him what you ought to repay me. Farewell.
This letter was evidently designed as a variant to DOCUMENT 87. Here the sender, instead of aiding his friend’s kinsman G. and then asking the friend to reimburse his expenses, declines outright to give G. any assistance at all on the grounds that his reckless addiction to gambling makes him an impossible credit risk.
Gambling with dice was a common pastime, much decried by moralists.9 The French preacher Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), for example, told of a man who lost his entire inheritance at dice and was reduced to rags, much like the reprobate in this letter.10 In similar fashion, the early thirteenth-century windows of Chartres and Bourges cathedrals show the Prodigal Son losing his clothes at dice (Fig. 14).11 An especially vivid depiction of the kind of tavern gambling described in this letter can be found in the Play of St. Nicholas, the earliest French miracle play, written around 1200 by Jean Bodel of Arras. In several lively scenes a courier and three thieves gamble in a tavern at two different games, Highest Points (plus poins) and Hazard, each played with three dice on a dicing board or table, as in Fig. 14. The players do not have their own dice, but one of the thieves hires some from the tavern-keeper, who charges a penny, and the barman lends a set of dice of his own, which he claims are “square cut, regular, and standard size,” and which he has had “officially tested.”12
The popularity of such games is reflected in a contemporary Latin poem that contains probability calculations on the throw of three dice. This poem, called De vetula, written in France about 1250, provides the earliest evidence for the establishment of an elementary probability calculus. After reviewing the odds, the author concludes wryly, “If you play honestly, you won’t win much” (Si recte iacias, modicum valet).13
Compulsive gambling of the kind described in this letter was generally viewed as a male vice. One reason for this was that women rarely controlled the amount of cash or credit that compulsive gambling required. In addition, such gambling was commonly associated with heavy drinking and with public displays of competitiveness, trickery, anger, and aggression, sometimes leading to nudity or violence.14 These behaviors were considered acceptable (if regrettable) in men but not in women, and strong social sanctions prevented most women from engaging in them.15 Such a depiction of male gambling appears in the Roman de Brut (1155), an Anglo-Norman verse expansion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138). The writer, a Norman canon of Bayeux named Wace, elaborated Geoffrey’s account of the coronation of King Arthur.16 In Wace’s version, the after-dinner entertainments enjoyed by Arthur’s guests included dice games at which the men played in pairs. Like the ne’er-do-well in the letter above, those who ran out of cash or credit ended up gambling their clothing on the outcome:
Figure 14. The Prodigal Son loses his clothing at dice, from the Prodigal Son window of Bourges Cathedral (c. 1215).
Two by two they were joined in the game, some losing, some winning; some envied those who made the most throws, or they told others how to move. They borrowed money in exchange for pledges, quite willing only to get eleven to the dozen on the loan; they gave pledges, they seized pledges, they took them, they promised them, often swearing, often protesting their good intentions, often cheating and often tricking. They got argumentative and angry, often miscounting and grousing. They threw twos, and then fours, two aces, a third one, and threes, sometimes fives, sometimes sixes. Six, five, four, three, two, and ace—these stripped many of their clothes. Those holding the dice were in high hopes; when their friends had them, they made a racket. Very often they shouted and cried out, one saying to the other: “You’re cheating me, throw them out, shake your hand, scatter the dice! I’m raising the bid before you throw! If you’re looking for money, put some down, like me!” The man who sat down to play clothed might rise naked at close of play.17
1 Add. 8167, fol. 100r–v.
2 maniterem in MS.
3 alliator in MS.
4 et in MS.
5 orant in MS.
6 Fol. 100v commences here.
7 Walete in MS.
8 “inquiry” (quesitive) in MS, but this is clearly a letter of advice, not inquiry.
9 Playing cards are not recorded in Europe until the fourteenth century. On dicing, see Rhiannon Purdie, “Dice-Games and the Blasphemy of Prediction,” in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2000), 167–68.
10 Vitry, Exempla, ed. Crane, no. 296, pp. 124–25, 263–64.
11 For the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son, see Luke 15:11–32. On the Prodigal Son windows from Chartres and Bourges, see Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22–41. The scene from Chartres Cathedral is available online at http://fits.depauw.edu/aharris/Courses/Gothic/TopicImages/ProdigalSonFS.jpg [seen October 17, 2007].
12 Le jeu de saint Nicolas, in French Medieval Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Stevens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), lines 300–309, 813, 827–940, 1055–1141. For the original Old French text with a translation into modern French, see Le jeu de saint Nicolas de Jehan Bodel, ed. and trans. Albert Henry, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Travaux de la Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, Tome XXI (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, and Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). For a discussion of the dice games in this play, see Purdie, “Dice-Games,” 170–71.
13 D. R. Bellhouse, “De Vetula: A Medieval Manuscript Containing Probability Calculations,” International Statistical Review, 68, no. 2 (August 2000), 123–36. The author of De vetula (which was fictitiously ascribed to the Roman poet Ovid) may have been the mathematician and scientist Richard de Fournival (1201–60), son of the French king Philip Augustus’s personal physician. The poem circulated widely; an early reader was the English scientist Roger Bacon, who quoted it in his Opus Maius (1266 × 69). On the authorship, circulation, and Latin text of De Vetula, see Dorothy M. Robathan, The Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968), 1–10 (authorship), and Book I, lines 428–95 (dicing and probability calculations). About 960, Bishop Wibolf of Cambrai calculated all fifty-six possible throws with three dice but not, apparently, the odds of casting them. F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era (New York: Hafner, 1962), 31–33; http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/41346/1/aih.pdf [seen January 4, 2009].
14 Purdie, “Dice-Games,” 167, 171.
15 At Acre in 1250 Count Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of Louis IX, “courteously” (courtoisement) invited both noblemen and ladies (gentilz homes et les gentil femmes) into the hall of his residence where he was playing dice, and they all apparently joined in the gambling at his invitation. However, the ladies’ gentility was not threatened on this occasion, because Count Alphonse provided the stakes and made up the losses. Jean, sieur de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin, 2nd ed. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1998), 206.
16 On Wace and his text (which was based on a revised version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work), see Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), xi–xxix.
17 Wace’s Brut, ed. Weiss, 264–67, lines 10561–88.
89 Litere grates reddentes
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Quia pro me et meis multa fecisti, cum merces vestras acomodando, [t]um2 denarios vestros michi dando, ideo si tantam habere facultatem quantam habeo voluntatem vobis honore respiciendi, ego domum vestram opibus cumularem. Set qui facit quod potest non est culpandus, quia eciam voluntas pro facto reputetur.3 Ego constanter promitto quod [ad]4 messem novam vobis dabo de omni genere bladi duo quarteria ad minus. Precor ergo ut in principio augusti tri[t]uratores5 perquiratis qui in [horreo]6 meo prefatum bladum triturent et tri[t]urato7 vano mundant ad vos deducant. Sciatis quod homines non habeo qui hoc facere possint. Et ideo tantum faciatis ne commoditas vestra differatur.
Letter bearing thanks
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. Because you have done many things for me and my people, not only by lending your own goods, but also by giving me your own money, therefore, if I had as great means as I have the desire to provide for you with honor, I would heap your house with wealth. But he who does what he can, cannot be faulted, since the will is taken for the deed. I firmly promise that at the new harvest I shall give you at least two quarters8 of every kind of grain. Therefore I pray that at the beginning of August you find threshers to thresh the grain in my barn (horreo), and to winnow the threshed grain,9 [and] then carry it to you. You should know that I do not have men who can do this. And therefore, take care of this matter in such a way as to serve your best interests.
Figure 15. Threshing and winnowing grain, from the Maciejowski Bible (Paris, 1244–54), fol. 18r. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MS M.638, fol. 18r. Purchased by J. P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1916. Photograph courtesy the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
Edible grains are the seeds of certain grasses, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye. In medieval England, the stalks of ripened grain were reaped (cut) in the autumn by hand, bound into sheaves (bunches), and stooked (stacked) in a barn or sheltered place to dry. The dry stalks were threshed (thrashed or beaten) with a flail, to crack off the clusters of seeds from their heads and to loosen the chaff (papery husk) that surrounded the grain. Then the grain was scooped into a winnowing fan (a broad, shallow basket) and tossed in a breezy spot to blow away the chaff (Fig. 15). The cleansed grain, much heavier than the chaff, fell back into into the basket, and was stored for later use in baking, cooking, or brewing. The straw (threshed grain stalks) was used for animal litter, for filling mattresses, and for many other purposes.
Repaying a loan after the autumn harvest was a common arrangement. Sometime between 1224 and 1226 the precentor of Chichester Cathedral, who had fled Chichester because he was unable to pay his debts, wrote to his bishop, Ralph de Neville, to thank Neville for offering to lend him some grain until Michaelmas (September 29). However, he says that he has so many other debts due at that time that he will have to sell most of his own grain to satisfy them, and so will not be in a position to repay the bishop’s loan.10
1 Add. 8167, fol. 101r.
2 cum in MS.
3 Cf. the gloss “voluntas reputatur pro facto” in the Glossa Ordinaria to the Liber Extra (Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, 1234), in Corpus juris canonici emendatum et notis illustratum, Gregorii XIII. pont. max. iussu editum (Rome: In aedibus Populi Romani, 1582), Part 2: Decretales d. Gregorii papae IX, Lib. 2, Tit. 15, Cap. 1, Col. 666, s.v. “voluntatem,” between lines 20 and 30; available in an electronic edition at UCLA Digital Library Program, Corpus Juris Canonici (1582); http://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw [seen July 7, 2009].
4 Word missing in MS.
5 tricuratores in MS.
6 ortu (i.e., hortu, garden) in MS, probably in mistake for horreo (barn).
7 In MS, tricurato.
8 A quarter was eight bushels, or 281.92 liters.
9 Literally, “cleanse the threshed grain with a winnowing fan.” See below.
10 Shirley, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 283–84, no. 235. This letter is now TNA: PRO, SC 1/6/51 (April 21, 1224 × June 28, 1226).
90 E. mandat F.2 ut comodat sibi aratrum ad arrandum terram3 suam
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Vicinus non debet deesse vicino. Vicinitatem tuam exoro ut aratrum tuum et vomerem et unum iugum michi acomodetis. Sciatis quod aratrum michi emi, set4 non habeo ferrum ad vomerem faciendam. Tantum ergo faciatis ne terra mea iaceat inculta. Sciturus quod ea diucius non peto quam ferrum inveniam ad emendum. Valete.5
E. sends word to F. to lend him a plow to plow his land
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. A neighbor should not fail to aid a neighbor. I beg your neighborliness to lend me your plow and plowshare and a yoke. You should know that I bought myself a plow, but I do not have the iron for making a plowshare. Therefore, I hope that you will act in such a way that my land does not lie untilled. Rest assured that I do not seek to borrow them for longer than it will take me to find some iron to buy. Farewell.
Many of the letters in this collection make an appeal to neighborly generosity, and this letter is a reminder that such mutual dependence was not restricted to the poor. The scarcity and costliness of iron and steel meant that many common agricultural tools, such as rakes and pitchforks, were made entirely of wood, while others, such as spades and plows, were made primarily of wood with a minimum of metal. Only the front edge of spades and shovels was reinforced with a strip of iron; the rest was made of wood. Plows had a wooden frame, often wheeled, with an iron or steel knife called a coulter that sliced the soil vertically, and a thick, sharpened, iron bar or tip called a “share” that sliced under the sod horizontally, enabling the wooden moldboard to turn over the furrow (the entire strip of sod).6 A letter written between 1214 and 1222 by Ralph de Neville, dean of Lichfield (later bishop of Chichester and chancellor of England), reflects a concern similar to that in DOCUMENT 90 about the availability of iron for plows. Nevill was writing to his steward or agent G. Salvage about the sale of wheat and other matters, and mentions that he has spoken to Sir Richard Duket, who is to supply him with herring, wax, a fur lining, and “iron and steel for my plows” (de ferro et ascero ad carucas meas). Evidently anxious to secure these supplies, Nevill told Salvage to meet with Duket as soon as possible.7
1 Add. 8167, fol. 101v.
2 As in Documents 10, 16, 33, 50, and 70, this letter was evidently copied from another collection, and the initials in the body of the letter were revised, but not those in the heading.
3 Corrected in MS from terrram.
4 terra mea expunged in MS following set.
5 Or Vale (Val’ in MS); the sender addresses the recipient using a mixture of singular (familiar) and plural (polite) verbs, and singular pronouns.
6 John M. Steane, The Archaeology of Medieval England and Wales (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 155–56 and Fig. 5.4; London Museum, Medieval Catalogue (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1940), 123–24 and Pl. XXII. For a late thirteenth-century sketch of a nonwheeled plow from the cartulary of Nun Cotham or Coton Priory, Lincs., with the parts labeled in Latin, see Howard M. Colvin, “A Medieval Drawing of a Plough,” Antiquity, 27, no. 107 (September 1953), 165–67. This sketch is now Bodleian Library, MS. Top. Lincs. D.1, fol. 53.
7 W. H. Blaauw, “Letters to Ralph Neville,” Sussex Archaeological Collections, 3 (1850), 41; also in Shirley, ed., Letters, vol. 1, 190–91 (no. 165). This letter is now TNA: PRO, SC 1/6/3. The accounts of a prebendary of St Paul’s cathedral included 7½d. for the final payment for iron for a plow (In ferro caruce acquietando), and 6d. for iron and steel for a plow. Christopher M. Woolgar, ed., Household Accounts from Medieval England, vol. 1, British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new ser., 17–18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1992–93), 119–20, 124. These accounts date from the early thirteenth century (probably 1219 or 1224; or possibly 1213).
91 Vicinus mandat vicino ut subveniat ei
Vicinus vicino salutem. Vicinus non debet deesse vicino, si tamen deus dederit ei unde vicino possit succurere. De vobis reperto magnam2 fiduciam, et de vestra liberalitate3 spem habeo certissimam. Si quo modo potestis, michi subveniaris? Latrones enim nocturno tempore domum meam pridie fregerunt, omnia bona que possidebam asportaverunt, et me letaliter vulneraverunt;4 me semimortuo relicto abierunt. Curata5 iam deo dante vulnera6 mea, set rerum mearum detrimentum nondum est restauratum. Et ideo vos precor quatinus in denariis meam miseriam relevare7 velitis, et de bonis vestris meum supplere defectum, pro certo scientes quod in articulo consimili pro posse meo vobis [non]8 deficerim. Valete.
A man sends word to his neighbor to come to his aid
A neighbor to his neighbor, greetings. A neighbor should not fail to assist a neighbor if God should give him the means whereby he can aid him. I place great confidence in what I have heard of you, and I have the firmest hope of your generosity. If you can in some way, would you help me out? For yesterday thieves came at night, broke into my house, carried off all the goods that I possessed, wounded me gravely, and left me half-dead. My wound has been treated, thank God, but the loss of all my possessions has not been made good, and therefore I pray that you might be willing to relieve my misery with money and to supply my want with your own goods, knowing for certain that in a similar situation I would [not] let you down, to the best of my ability. Farewell.
The unfortunate sender of this letter (apparently a victim of the criminal gang described in DOCUMENT 40) has been burglarized, injured, and robbed of all his possessions. Evidently lacking family and friends of his own who might aid him in his distress, he appeals to a wealthy and generous neighbor for cash and goods to make up his losses, pledging himself to reciprocate if the neighbor should ever find himself in a similar plight.
Although this is clearly a fictitious model letter (one in which the author seems to have enjoyed dreaming up a worst-case scenario), it nevertheless neatly sums up some of the very real everyday dangers of the medieval world, in which the threat of armed violence was ever present, police and emergency services were minimal at best, and insurance did not exist. When disaster struck, there were no relief agencies or legal or social services to aid the victims, and it is striking that none of the appeals for emergency assistance in this collection is addressed to a member of the clergy or to an ecclesiastical institution. Instead, the victims’ recourse was to beg for assistance from family, friends, and neighbors. It is not surprising, therefore, that so many of the letters, including the one above, resort to invoking the claims of kinship, friendship, neighborliness, piety, and charity in their anxious attempt at securing aid.
In another letter on the same theme in this formulary, a knight begs a neighboring freeman for assistance by similarly invoking the duties of good neighborliness: “A knight to a free man, greetings. Good neighbors mean a good night’s rest.9 For the law of neighborliness demands that the good things that the lord might grant to one of them, be granted to the other to have as his own, since the more every good thing is brought into common use, the more fragrant it seems and the more sweetness it has.” The knight explains that necessity compels him to seek relief from his friends and neighbors, and begs his neighbor to assist him, and concludes: “And because I [have] trust in you as in a special friend, and because I wish to make this request to you first, and to your benevolence, I earnestly beg you to help me if you will. Farewell.”10
1 Add. 8167, fol. 107r.
2 magnan in MS.
3 libertate in MS.
4 wlneraverunt in MS.
5 Corrected in MS from curanta.
6 wlnera in MS.
7 revelare in MS.
8 Word supplied to preserve the sense of the passage.
9 Literally, “He who has a good neighbor has a good morning.” This is the inverse of an otherwise-unknown proverb quoted c. 1108 by Fulcher of Chartres: “In country proverbs is written: ‘He who has a bad neighbor has a bad morning’”—that is, a bad night’s sleep (qui habet malum vicinum habet malum matutinum). Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64), vol. 155, col. 937. See also Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1107, trans. Frances Rita Ryan, ed. Harold S. Fink (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 297; and Arpad Steiner, “The Vernacular Proverb in Mediaeval Latin Prose,” American Journal of Philology, 65: 1 (1944), 37–68.
10 Add. 8167, fol. 106v. Miles libero homini salutem. Qui bonum habet vicinum bonum habet matutinum. Ius enim vicinitatis exigit ut bona que dominus eorum alteri concessit alteri tanquam propria possidente concedantur, siquidem omne bonum in commune deductum plus sapit plus et dulcedinis habere videtur . . . et quia de vobis [?habeo] tanquam speciali amico fiduciam et quia vos primum et vestram benevolenciam volo exortari, vos diligenter exoro michi si placet succurratis. Valete. The freeman’s response is discussed under DOCUMENT 92.
92 Concessio ad peticionem predictam
Vicino vicinus salutem. Iustum est et equitati consocium2 ut a vicino vicini penuria relevetur,3 si tamen vicinus habeat unde vicino suo remedium faciat (vel conferre valeat).4 Literas vestras accepi vestrum narrantes5 infortunium, et tam corporis vestri quam rerum vestrarum6 detrimentum et dispendium ultra modum doleo. Deum testor7 quod vobis factum est michi factum, reputans de mea vobis substancia quantum michi facultas suppeditat.8 Libentissime subveniam, scientes potero; quod sicut literis vestris michi significastis in casu consimili nullo modo defeceritis. Hoc enim quod per latorem presencium vobis transmitto accipiatis, ac si preciosiora vobis destinassem. Valete.
Agreement to the aforesaid request
To his neighbor, a neighbor sends greetings. It is right and fitting that the poverty of a neighbor should be relieved by his neighbor. If a neighbor has the means (or, is in a condition to do so), he should give aid to his neighbor. I received your letter describing your misfortune, both the harm to your body and to your goods, and I mourn your loss beyond measure. I call God as my witness that your problems are mine, and I consider that my means can provide from my resources for you as well as for me. I shall come to your aid with great pleasure, knowing that I shall be able to do so; as you signified in your letter to me, in a similar situation you would in no way fail [me]. Therefore, please accept this, which I send to you by the bearer of this present letter, since indeed if it were even more precious I would have intended it for you. Farewell.
This high-minded response to the request for aid in DOCUMENT 91 is a fine example of the rhetorical skill of the master or student of dictamen (the art of letter-writing) who composed it. Conforming to the classic four-part structure of a formal letter, it begins with a brief salutatio (greeting), and then introduces the theme of the letter with a proverbial exordium (introduction) on the duties of neighborliness that also recalls St. Paul’s epistle to the Colossians. The narratio (body of the letter) rehearses the sad events described in the addressee’s original petition (DOCUMENT 91) and proclaims that the sender will be happy to come to his aid, since he has the means to do so. Finally, the conclusio implicitly sums up the major premise of the exordium (that neighbors should assist one another) and the minor premise of the narratio (that the sender has the means to help, and knows that the addressee would aid him if their positions were reversed), and ends with additional expressions of courtesy and a brief valediction (farewell).
The underlying moral of this letter—the importance of observing the Golden Rule—has a suggestion of sermon literature about it (cf. Matthew 7:12), but suits its secular subject equally well. The writer here displays the same magnificently disinterested generosity as the neighbor in DOCUMENT 11. In the same fashion, the freeman to whom a neighboring knight has appealed for assistance (discussed under DOCUMENT 91) sends the following encouraging response:
To a knight, a free man [sends] greetings and expressions of friendship. I grieve beyond measure and in many ways over your difficulties. You may count harm done to you as to me, and because you have considered me first among your friends, I want you to know [i.e., that you will have] aid and counsel quickly with me. I send you an ox for improving your land, and two measures of each kind of grain for eliminating the barrenness of your lands, and to satisfy the requirement of your legal pleas I shall appear in person whenever and wherever you wish. In this way I very much want your other kinsmen and friends to take me as an example of how to assist you.9
While all three of these positive responses to requests may be idealized, they reflect the frequency with which petitions of this kind must have been presented to people of wealth, and the need to provide ready models for responding to them.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 107r.
2 Cf. Colossians 4:1: Domini, quod justum est et æquum, servis præstate: scientes quod et vos Dominum habetis in cælo (“Masters, give what is just and fair to your servants, knowing that you, too, have a Master in heaven”).
3 reveletur in MS.
4 Here, as in Documents 5, 24, 32, 44, 46, 47, and 62, the parenthetical phrase represents an alternate phrasing provided in the model letter.
5 Following narrantes, the word officium is expunged in MS.
6 mearum in MS.
7 testes in MS.
8 suspediat in MS.
9 Add. 8167, fol. 106v. Responsio ad peticionem predictam. Militi liber homo salutem et amicicias. De gravamine vestro multipliciter ultra modum doleo. Nocumentum vestrum meum reputaris et quia me primum inter ceteros amicos vestros reputastis, volo quod mecum indilate sencias consilium et auxilium. Ad culturam terre vestre meliorandam, mitto vobis .i. bovem, et ad sterilitatem terrarum [corrected in MS from terrrarum] vestrarum amovendam, duas summas uniuscuiusque bladi, et ad inportunitatem placitorum vestrorum solvendam, quandocumque et quocumque volueritis propriam personam exibeo. Multum sic desidero ut ceteri parentes et amici vestri de me capiant exemplum vobis benefaciendi.
93 Rusticus rustico salutem. Plurimum humani generis viciavit condicioni qui peccatis suis exigentibus emergere fecit2 servitutem. Quia res in estimabilis est libertas;3 servitus suus [sic] honerosa [sic] poscessionibus [sic] existit. Bene vidisti quod durum habemus dominum, hastutum [sic] servientem, propositum [sic] iniquissimum, terram fere sterilem, et hec omnia ultra modum adversantur. Requie penitus alterna caremus, et4 quod caret alterna requie durabile non est, [ut]5 arcum incesses tendere lentus erit,6 nec est in mundo quicquam dum vivimus quod nostras refocillat animas. A te consilium expeto cum racione rusticitatis; michi non deesse debeas. Libere siquidem condicionis et homines non tanquam et habitos et publicos7 abhorrent,8 nisi racionabiles nobis9 essent10 anime, tanquam rabidi cani11 inter illos haberemur. In hiis autem nobis neccessaria est paciencia, quia si murmurantes repungnabimus nostra miseria nobis apocopabitur. Illud unicum solacium habemus: quod12 moriemur, et in morte nostra servitus terminentur. Valete.
A peasant to a peasant, greetings. Most of the human race has degenerated to the point that, for its sins, it has caused slavery to emerge. For freedom is an inestimable thing; their slavery is burdensome to those who are property. You have seen well that we have a harsh lord, a sly serjeant, a wicked reeve, and almost barren land, and all these are adverse beyond measure. We almost entirely lack intervals of rest, and that which lacks daily rest cannot endure, just as a bow that you do not cease to bend will grow slack, nor is there on earth anything while we live that revives our spirits. I need advice with rustic wisdom from you; you must not fail me. And since men of free condition abhor both common manners and common people,13 were it not for our rational souls14 we would be held but as rabid dogs (rabidi cani) among them. In these things the ability to endure hardship (paciencia) is necessary for us, because if, complaining, we resist, our misery will be cut short15 for us. We have but one solace: we shall die, and at our death our servitudes will end.
This anguished account of the miseries of villeinage, sprinkled (despite its flawed Latinity) with quotations from Ovid and Justinian’s Digest and an allusion to contemporary scholastic debate on the nature of the soul, obviously cannot have represented a genuine letter by a genuine villein. It reads instead, like the letter ostensibly written by a villein in DOCUMENT 49, much more like a classroom exercise in composition, but one that echoes, in its sympathetic depiction of the villein’s hard life, a much earlier school text. This was the Latin dialogue on daily life known as the Colloquy, written about 998 by Ælfric (c. 950–c. 1010), a monk at Cerne Abbas in Dorset and later (1005) abbot of Eynsham.16 In the Colloquy, which Ælfric wrote in the form of a dialogue to teach Latin to his students, a villein describes the wretchedness of his unfree condition, though in much less dramatic terms than those in the letter above:
MASTER: |
What do you say, plough boy, how do you do your work? |
PLOUGH BOY: |
Oh, sir, I work very hard. I go out at dawn to drive the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough; however hard the winter I dare not stay at home for fear of my master; and having yoked the oxen and made the ploughshare and the coulter fast to the plough, every day I have to plough a whole acre or more. |
MASTER: |
Have you anyone with you? |
PLOUGH BOY: |
I have a boy to drive the oxen with a goad, and he is now hoarse with cold and shouting. |
MASTER: |
What more do you do in the day? |
PLOUGH BOY: |
A great deal more. I have to fill the oxen’s bins with hay, and give them water, and carry the dung outside. |
MASTER: |
Oh, it is hard work. |
PLOUGH BOY: |
Yes, it is hard work, because I am not free.17 |
The text of the letter above, ostensibly written by an unnamed villein, is so riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors that it seems possible that these were intended by the author to represent a peasant’s uneducated speech and accent. Here the writer may have been drawing upon a classical model, a poem by the celebrated Roman poet Catullus. In this letter, the addition of an aspirate “h” to words such as (h)onorosa and (h)astutum recalls Catullus’s lampooning of a man called Arrius for inserting inappropriate aspirates, such as saying chommodas for commodas, and hinsidias for insidias, and calling the Ionian Sea the “Hionian.”18
1 Add. 8167, fol. 128r–v.
2 fecerit in MS.
3 This phrase derives from the line “Libertas inaestimabilis res est” in the Digest (50.17.106), a collection and abridgement of Roman juristic writing, produced in AD 530–533 under the Byzantine emperor Justinian. The Digest was the first and most important part of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis, which had a profound effect on the development of law and legal studies in medieval Europe. For this reference we are grateful to Paul Hyams.
4 A second et is expunged here in MS.
5 et in MS.
6 These lines derive from Ovid’s Heroides, 4:89–92: “quod caret alterna requie, durabile non est; . . . arcus . . . si numquam cesses tendere, mollis erit” (“that which lacks alternations of repose will not endure; . . . the bow . . . if you never cease to bend it, will become slack”). The same quotation, together with a discussion of its context, appears in DOCUMENT 66.
7 puplicanos in MS.
8 abornant in MS.
9 vobis in MS.
10 esset in MS.
11 rabilicanos in MS.
12 Fol. 128v commences here.
13 This appears to be the sense of the emended phrase libere siquidem condicionis et homines non tanquam et habitos et publicos abhorrent.
14 This appears to be the sense of the emended phrase nisi racionabiles nobis essent anime. There was a major scholastic debate in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the nature of the soul; see Richard C. Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
15 See Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “apocopare.”
16 Oxford DNB, s.n. “Ælfric of Eynsham.”
17 Excerpt from A. F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 37–41, quoted in Educational Documents, vol. 1, England and Wales, 800–1816, comp. David William Sylvester (London: Methuen, 1970), 7.
18 The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, translated, with commentary by Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), Poem 84, pp. 190–91 (commentary, pp. 260–61): Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda uellet/ dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias,/ et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,/ cum quantum poterat dixerat hinsidias./ credo, sic mater, sic liber auunculus eius,/ sic maternus auus dixerat atque auia./ hoc misso in Syriam requierant omnibus aures:/ audibant eadem haec leniter et leuiter, / nec sibi postilla metuebant talia uerba,/ cum subito affertur nuntius horribilis:/ lonios fluctus, postquam illuc Arrius isset,/ iam non lonios esse sed Hionios. (“Arrius aspirates: ‘chommodore’ when trying to articulate/ ‘commodore,’ while ‘insidious’ came out ‘hinsidious’—/ imagining that he’d spoken up with wondrous impact/ by delivering ‘hinsidious’ full force./ His mother, I gather, as well as his (free-born) uncle/ and both maternal grandparents talked that way./ When he was posted to Syria, our ears all got a respite,/ heard these same words smoothly and lightly pronounced,/ without any lingering fear of such verbal mishandlings—/ then, suddenly, there arrived the horrible news:/ the Ionian sea, after Arrius had arrived, was/ Ionian no longer, but Chionian.”
