[“Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise. That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of carnality for the moral edification of his motherless daughters need not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not “come to men’s chambers by nights darkly without candle nor to coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing, playing and japing and making such noise they could not have heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry husband.
Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern, and probably cloister.
Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé, poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he “did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”]
barbara w. tuchman, from a distant mirror: the calamitous 14th century, 1987
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