The Dedalus Book of Medieval Literature

by Brian Murdoch

  But then she gave the king her word

  that death would soon come to her lord;

  she would arrange things with all speed,

  if he would help her at her need.

  The king agreed that he would do

  whatever she would ask him to,

  if good or evil were his task,

  he would do everything she’d ask.

  ‘Lord King,’ she said, ‘first you should

  go hunting in the leafy woods

  near that land where I live. And then

  stay in my lord’s castle again,

  and there arrange that you’ll be bled.

  The third day after that,’ she said,

  ‘you’ll bathe. Let my lord bathe there, too,

  after he has been bled with you.

  Tell him he must, insist firmly

  that he should keep you company.

  I’ll have the water heated through

  and tubs brought in for each of you.

  His tub will be so scalding that

  no man on earth could suffer it –

  in it he will be burned alive,

  scalded to death. He’ll not survive.

  When he is scalded to his doom

  summon your men into the room

  and his, and when they are inside

  tell them their lord suddenly died.’

  The king at once agreed that he

  would do her bidding willingly.

  Just three months passed. And then the king

  went to that land to go hunting.

  But he had himself bled as well,

  for health, as did the seneschal.

  On the third day the king decreed

  that he would bathe. His host agreed.

  ‘You’ll bathe with me, sir seneschal?’

  His host then answered: ‘Sir, I will.’

  The lady had the water boiled,

  the tubs were brought when they were filled,

  and each was placed before a bed.

  The tub of scalding water stood

  by the seneschal’s bed. The good

  man rose, and left the chamber where

  the king was, just to get some air.

  The lady came in to the king,

  sat on the other bed, near him.

  Soon on her husband’s bed they lay

  entwined, and they began to play

  and to enjoy their close embrace

  near where the scalding tub was placed.

  They set a maid to act as ward

  to watch the door, and to keep guard.

  The seneschal returned too soon,

  pushed at the door, but found the room

  was barred against him. Angrily

  he broke it down and forced entry.

  He saw his lady and the king

  still passionately embracing.

  The king saw him, and quickly tried

  his wickedness and guilt to hide,

  so, naked and unthinkingly

  he leapt into the tub that she

  had placed there ready by the bed.

  Scalded, the king at once was dead.

  His evil-doing was repaid,

  the would-be victim had been saved.

  The seneschal was well aware

  of what the king was doing there,

  and so he threw his wife, head-down

  into the tub, to burn and drown.

  And thus they met their ends: the king,

  and then the lady after him.

  To any who have ears to hear

  the moral is completely clear.

  Plots against others will revert,

  and cause the plotters to be hurt,

  as in the tale I’ve told you now.

  The Bretons made a lai of how

  King Equitan perished and fell,

  with the lady he loved so well.

  Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron

  Boccaccio was born in 1313 (illegitimately) in France, and was brought to Florence as a child. Sent to Naples to learn finance, he discovered that he preferred literature to business studies, and became a writer. Much of his work was inspired by his love for Maria d’Aquino – ‘Fiammetta’ – who died in 1348, but he is best known for the massive collection of tales called the Decameron – ten times ten stories told by a group of ten escaping from the plague, the Black Death, in Florence. The Italian text of this story is easy to find, because for years even in English translations this one was always retained in the decent obscurity of Italian, making it handy, perhaps, for au pair girls from Italy, where the work was on the Index of Prohibited Books, not for the sex, but largely because it mocked the clergy.

  Giovanni Boccaccio

  The Decameron

  III, 10

  Dear ladies, perhaps you have not heard yet how the devil is put into hell? And therefore, without leaving the subject which you have been discussing all day, I shall tell you how it is done. Perhaps, too, you will find it uplifting and instructive, and may also come to understand that, although love prefers to be in rich palaces and in chambres separées rather than in poor men’s huts, still it can have its effect and force in wild lands, with tangled forests, alps and lonely caves. And we shall see from this that all things are subject to the power of love.

  However, let’s come to the point. I must report that there was in the city of Capsa in Arabia a phenomenally rich gentleman who had, among other children, a most beautiful and well-bred young daughter, whose name was Alibech. This girl was not a Christian, but she heard the many Christians who lived in that city commend very highly the Christian faith and the service of God. One day she asked one of them in what way God could be served most easily. He replied that they served God best who fled from the world and from worldly things, like the hermits who lived out in the solitude of the desert.

  The young girl, innocent as she was, and about fourteen years of age, set off the following morning to walk to the desert all alone, not after careful thought, but simply on a girlish whim. With some suffering but much firmness on her part she made her way after a few days into the desert and, spotting a little hut in the distance, she made for it and found a holy man at the door, who was extremely surprised to see her there, and asked her what she was looking for. She replied that she had been inspired by God and was looking for a way of serving Him, and someone to teach her how to go about serving God.

  The worthy man, who saw how young and beautiful she was, was afraid that if he kept her there the devil might well tempt him, so he praised her good intentions, gave her a small meal of roots, sour apples, dates and water, and then said:

  ‘My daughter, not far from here is a holy man who can teach you what you are looking for much better than I can, so you should go to him.’ And he showed her the way to go.

  But when she reached that man, she was given the same answer as before, and then, having gone on even further, she came to the cell of a young hermit, a man of piety and devotion, whose name was Rustico, and she asked him the same thing that she had asked the others. Rustico wanted to subject his devotion to a severe testing, so he did not send her away like the others, but kept her with him in his cell. At night he made her a little bed of palm-leaves, and told her to sleep there.

  After that, the temptations of the body began to do battle with the forces of steadfastness. Rustico found himself deserted by steadfastness, and came under many attacks before he gave in, and stopped thinking about holy meditation, prayers and discipline, and concentrated instead on the youth and beauty of his companion. He wondered how he could talk to her in such a way that he would not seem to be completely dissolute, but could still get what he wanted. And so, with careful questioning, he established that she had never known a man, and was indeed as innocent as she appeared to be. In view of this he worked out a plan for getting what he fancied under the guise of serving God. First of all he talked to her for a very long time about how the devil is the enemy of God. After that he explained to her that the best w
ay in which she could give service to God was to put the devil in hell, to which God had condemned him.

  The girl wanted to know how to do this, to which Rustico replied:

  ‘You will soon know; just do what you see me do.’

  With that he took off the few clothes that he was wearing and knelt down, completely naked, and when he did so, the girl took hers off as well, and then knelt down facing him, as if they were going to pray.

  Seeing her there, beautiful as she was, Rustico was overcome with desire, and there was a visible resurrection of the flesh, which Alibech noticed, wondered at, and said:

  ‘Rustico, what is that thing which I see you have, but which I haven’t got?’

  ‘Oh, my dear daughter,’ said Rustico, ‘that is the devil I was telling you about. Can you see? He is tormenting me so greatly that I can hardly bear it.’

  With that, the girl said:

  ‘God be praised! I can see that I am better off than you are, because I haven’t got a devil like that.’

  ‘That’s true. But you have something instead that I don’t have,’ said Rustico.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Alibech.

  ‘What you have is hell,’ he answered, ‘and I tell you that my belief is that God sent you to me for the salvation of my soul, and so that, if this devil goes on tormenting me this way, you will have pity and will let me put him in hell. This will give me great comfort, and will render a great and worthy service to God, if you have indeed come here for that reason, as you told me.’

  The girl replied in good faith:

  ‘Oh Father, since I have hell, let us do so whenever you like.’

  To this, Rustico replied:

  ‘Bless you, my daughter; so let us go and put him in hell, and maybe he will leave me alone.’

  And having said this, he led the girl to one of the narrow beds, and showed her the appropriate position in which they could incarcerate this thing despised by God.

  The girl had never put anybody’s devil in hell before, and experienced a certain amount of pain the first time, and she said to Father Rustico:

  ‘It’s true, Father, this devil really is a wicked fellow and quite properly rejected by God, because there is even pain in hell and its environs when he is put in there.’

  ‘My daughter,’ replied Rustico, ‘it will not always be like that.’

  And to make sure of things, they put him in six times before they moved from the little bed, and by doing it so many times knocked the pride out of his head, so that he would keep the peace.

  But it rose again several times after this, and since the girl obediently did her best to control it, it happened that she started to enjoy the game, and she said to Rustico:

  ‘Now I see that what the wise men of Capsa told me was true – that the service of God is sweet. I cannot, indeed, remember doing anything else that gave me so much pleasure and delight as putting the devil into hell. And I reckon that anyone who wants to do anything except this service of God is a fool.’

  And because of this she often came to Rustico and said:

  ‘Father, I came here to do service to God, not to be idle. Come on, let us put the devil in hell.’

  And while they were doing it, she often said:

  ‘Rustico, I don’t know why the devil should ever leave hell. If he were as eager to stay in hell as hell is to receive and hold him, he would never come out again.’

  And so the girl kept on inviting and urging Rustico to the service of God, until eventually he was so drained that he felt cold where anyone else would have sweated. And because of this, he told the girl that the devil was not to be castigated or put into hell, unless pride had actually made him rear his head. And – he told her – we, by the grace of God, have so tamed him that he prays God to leave him in peace. And by this he kept the girl quiet.

  When the girl saw, however, that he did not want her to come and put the devil in hell, she said to him one day:

  ‘Rustico, your devil has been thoroughly punished and no longer bothers you, but my hell will not let me rest. And so it would be good if you, with the help of your devil, should help ease the anger of my hell, just as I, with my hell, helped you control the pride of your devil.’

  Rustico, however, lived on a diet of herbs, roots, and water, and could barely rise to her suggestion. He told her that it would take a lot of devils to do anything about her hell, but that he would do what he could, and he did manage to satisfy her a few times, but so infrequently that it was little more than a drop in the ocean. The girl, meanwhile, not being able to serve God as much as she would have liked, was rather unhappy about it.

  At the time when Alibech’s hell and Rustico’s devil had reached the point of too much desire on the one side, and not enough power on the other, it happened that back in Capsa a fire broke out, and Alibech’s father’s house was burned down, and he, his sons and the whole family perished with it. Through this, Alibech herself inherited all his wealth. A young nobleman called Neerbale, who had squandered his own entire fortune, found out that she was still alive, looked for her and found her before the government could take over the property on the grounds that the father had died intestate, and took her, much to the delight of Rustico, though against her will, back to Capsa, married her and shared her large inherited fortune. However, before Neerbale had been to bed with her, her ladies asked her how she had served God in the desert, and she told them that she had served him by putting the devil in hell, and that Neerbale had committed a great sin by taking her away from that service.

  ‘How do you put the devil in hell?’ asked the ladies.

  The girl made it clear to them with words and with gestures, and at this they laughed and laughed again, and then said:

  ‘No need to worry, my dear, that is done here as well. Neerbale will be able to serve God with you very well in that fashion.’

  The joke went round the city until it became a popular phrase, that the most pleasing way to serve God is to put the devil in hell. The phrase travelled overseas, even, and it is still current today.

  And as for you, dear ladies, if you want God’s grace, then make sure you find out how to put the devil in hell, because it pleases God and both of the participants.

  And it can bear excellent fruit.

  The Monk and the Wee Goose

  The fifteenth-century manuscript of German poems now in Karlsruhe that contains the mock Adam and Eve also has this story about a monk. It probably doesn’t represent very serious sinfulness; the monk at the centre of it all is too innocent to be wicked, and the abbot (out rent-collecting, probably at Martinmas) is simply unwise. It does show us the Middle Ages not taking monks terribly seriously again, but the real point seems to be the vigorously opportunist attitude of the young lady. She certainly isn’t on a pedestal, and knows an opportunity for enjoyment when she sees one. It’s rather like the Boccaccio story in reverse.

  A Tale from the Karlsruhe Codex

  A tale once was told to me

  how once there was a monastery

  (and it was rich, and well-endowed)

  of which the monks could well be proud.

  Their house for travellers on their way

  did not have fixed times in the day

  when food was served. When travellers

  on horse or foot came to those doors

  they’d find a meal would be waiting

  for them, plenty of everything

  that they could eat or ask for. Would

  that every monastery were as good!

  No man was ever turned away.

  The gatekeeper had to obey

  one rule, and keep that rule in mind,

  that no member of womankind

  should ever be let through the doors.

  The monks spent all their waking hours

  on moral thoughts, to live and pray

  according to their order’s way.

  About this place I did hear tell

  it was remote, and hidden well,

>   so that the monks within its rule

  but rarely saw a living soul,

  and men have told me, furthermore,

  that in that monastery were

  many who never went outside.

  Now one young monk did there reside

  who’d spent his whole life in the place,

  and who had been there since the days

  when he was just a tiny lad.

  Because of this, he never had

  upon the outside world laid eyes,

  and therefore could not recognise

  a horse, a cart – all of the ways

  that people travelled in those days.

  The time of year had come about

  when the Abbot had to travel out

  on monastery business. So

  the young monk begged that he might go

  and travel with him, so that he

  might see and study the country.

  The Abbot gladly granted this –

  the young monk’s very heartfelt wish;

  thanks to his innocence wide-eyed,

  the Abbot took him at his side.

  The servants now looked after things,

  and when the monks were travelling

  the horses went at steady pace.

  As they got further from that place,

  and on the way saw farmyard beasts,

  the monk gave the Abbot no rest

  but asked him time and time again

  to give each animal its name.

  The Abbot always answered him,

  gave him the name of everything,

  like cows or oxen, sheep or lambs,

  or even donkeys, pigs and rams.

  The Abbot named them, every one.

  And when a day’s journey was done

  they reached a tenant-farmer’s land

  where an overnight stay was planned.

  The yeoman saw them and came out,

  and ran and hailed them with a shout:

  ‘Lord Abbot, my welcome to you,

  and to all your companions, too!’

  When the horses had been cared for,

  the monk and Abbot went indoors