Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/364

The Château Gaillard

BY THOMAS A. JANVIER

CHIVALRY being what it then was, and lions being what they still are, it is not too much to say that Richard Cœur de Lion—the builder of the Château Gaillard—was a chivalrous prince whose by-name fitted him to a hair.

On the whole, that is temperate praise. Primitively, chivalrous meant the better manners of a man who could—as compared with those of a man who could not—afford to own a horse. By the middle of the twelfth century, when (1157) Richard was born, the horse-owning class had evolved a code that may be described as ferocity partially restrained by etiquette. It was a great improvement on the unrestrained ferocity that had preceded it; but it still left on the side of humanity—not to mention the side of ordinary decency—a good deal to be desired. Within its not severely defined limits there was room for hate and for passion to have full swing. A chivalrous king could—as one of the kings who lorded it in the Château Gaillard did—have chivalrous gentlemen who had annoyed him skinned alive; and Richard himself, in a truly lion-hearted way, one day threw three inoffensive French prisoners—who had nothing in the world to do with his momentary worry—from off the height on which stands his gaillard castle to be mashed to a jelly on the rocks three hundred feet below. He was not quite within the code when he did that; but, no doubt, it was a relief to his mind.

Consideration of these facts is necessary to a proper understanding of medieval conditions: because chivalry nowadays has nothing to do with horse-owning, and in the course of the past half-dozen centuries a very great deal has been added to the scope of the word—with the result that we now read into the phrase "the age of chivalry" a meaning that Richard Cœur de Lion, and the others who flourished in that age, would have regarded as weakly sentimental and ridiculously over refined.

"The devil is loose—take care of yourselves!" was the breezily concise announcement and warning sent by the Emperor Henry VI. to King Philip of France and to Prince John of England when Richard, being ransomed, was set free (1194) from his Austrian prison to go upon his swash-bucklering way. The characterization—as may be inferred from what I have written above—was accurate. The warning, certainly, was necessary; and Philip especially took it to heart because he very well knew that the loosed devil of a Richard—who sometimes disappointed his friends, but who never disappointed his enemies—presently would be settling with him a long-standing account.

In a small way, that account had begun to run while the two kings were off crusading together; and had snarled and snapped at each other—greatly to the edi-