140 Mediaeval England. 



we see a table covered by an ornamental cloth, but destitute of 

 plates, and although some rather good-looking vessels are in 

 use, the meats are presented by kneeling domestics upon the 

 spits with which they were prepared, and the guests cut off the 

 tit-bits with clumsy knives. The treatment of servants, even 

 by ladies, was -very brutal; fetters and flagellations being 

 freely employed. Mr. Wright thinks it probable that the early 

 babies of our country were swaddled, but whatever may have 

 been their treatment in this respect, maternal tenderness was 

 not sufficient to prevent the common occurrence of gross 

 negligence, and Archbishop Theodore, who lived in the latter 

 half of the seventh century, found it necessary to enjoin a special 

 penance to mothers who left their children on the hearth, 

 exposed to the unfortunate influence of an over-boiling pot. 

 Nor could the matrimonial system be considered quite perfect, 

 when a law of Ethelred provided that any gentleman who was 

 guilty of over fondness for his neighbour's wife should buy him 

 another as compensation for the wrong. 



At a very much later period it is surprising to find how 

 deficient our ancestors were in what we should call the neces- 

 saries of life. Thus the Menagier de Paris, a work written 

 about the year 1393, informs us, that the servants who had 

 charge of candles used to accompany those valuable articles to 

 the bed- rooms, and hold them in their hands until the would-be 

 sleepers had undressed and gone to rest. Similar adventures 

 repeatedly occurred to Mr. Olmsted, in his recent travels through 

 the semi-barbarous Slave States of America, and, indeed, as we 

 read his Cotton Kingdom, the details of brutality and discomfort 

 often remind us of the dark ages in European lands. The 

 coarseness of those times has been thought by superficial ob- 

 servers to have been consistent with moral innocence. Mr. 

 Wright, estimating them more profoundly, asserts that the 

 "whole tenor of contemporary literature and anecdote will 

 leave no doubt that mediaeval society was profoundly immoral 

 and licentious." Of course it was. Nothing else was possible, 

 unless in exceptional cases, when the rights of individuals were 

 very imperfectly recognized, when the mind of the people had 

 no rational employment, when ignorance was universal, and 

 gross superstition exercised an almost unbroken sway. 



The position of woman is a sure index to the condition of 

 society, and some old books which our author cites are very 

 instructive on this head. Thus we find a social moralist, the 

 Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, instructing his daughters in 

 matrimonial obedience, by telling them what happened to a lady 

 who ventured to contradict her lord and master, and was there- 

 upon knocked down and kicked, so as to break her nose, and 

 thus disfigure her for life — a punishment Avhich the chivalrous 



