April Queen (6 page)

Among Eleanor’s relaxations was the fashionable game of chess recently imported from the East, where the crucial piece that changed the fate of kings on the chequered board was called
firz
or vizier. First transliterated to
vierge
– the French for ‘virgin’ – it became in the European game the ‘queen’. Nothing symbolises better than the chess queen, who changes the fate of kings, this daughter of a duke who became queen of France and queen of England and had three sons anointed kings of England.

Although it is convenient to call her queen of ‘France’, Louis’ title was not
rex franciae
but
rex francorum
, meaning that he was king of the Frankish people, not the land itself. The idea of nationhood did not yet exist, frontiers were still flexible and the eastern fifth of modern France lay within the German Empire.

Modern genetic research has proven what Strabo and Caesar both knew: the Celts of the north were of a different ethnic stock from the shorter, darker, more relaxed, outgoing and sensuous people of the south. By the twelfth century the differences were greater, due to the entailing Salic law and grim guilt-ridden religion of the Germanic Franks who ruled the north and the more liberal attitude to religion of the Gothic aristocracy ruling the south under Roman law.

Little physical evidence remains of the
limes
or fortified frontier that separated the two peoples before Rome unified by force what it called the province of Gaul. However, the great north–south divide that split the country in the twelfth century still shows up in the differing patterns of blood groups in the modern population, which coincide closely with the isoglosses or lines on the map of France separating areas where two different languages were in everyday use until recently. Before the introduction of modern farming methods there was a tradition of rotating crops triennially north of the old
limes
and biennially to the south. Roofs to the south are of canal tiles laid with a shallow pitch; to the north they are steeper, with tiles or slates pinned on.

In Julius Caesar’s description of the province of Gaul, Aquitaine was that third which lay between the Pyrenees and the River Garonne; Augustus extended its borders northwards to the Loire and eastwards to the Massif Central, but the ethnic and linguistic boundary ran from the Atlantic to the Alps.

South of the line there had been no necessity during the
pax romana
to concentrate power in fortified cities. Far from the unconquered barbarians menacing the vulnerable north-east of the empire, life in the south-west had been lived in a few unwalled cities and many villas, where each local chieftain ruled several thousand dependants in the area surrounding his palace, within which he lived in Roman style with hot and cold bathing facilities and central heating. Although by Eleanor’s time this golden age was only a memory, the independence of each local chieftain continued.

Like the Nile, both major rivers of Aquitaine enjoy a prevailing wind blowing upstream. Drifting down with the current and sailing up with a favourable wind, traders penetrated deep inland since prehistoric times. But where traders could go, so could raiders.

Map of Isogloss. To the north of the dotted line
la langue d’oïl
was spoken; to the south, Occitan.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rich and fertile province that had been the posting of choice outside Italy for administrators and soldiers became an irresistible target for every invader. Its perimeter reduced, walled and turreted towards the end of the third century, Bordeaux was nevertheless sacked by the Vandals twice and by the Visigoths and Franks.

Devastation continued with the Muslims carving their way north with fire and sword in 732 at such cost to life and property that the Occitan place name
Sarrazins
still means a ruined house. Charles Martel stopped the Moors at Poitiers and pursued them southwards,
leaving Bordeaux in ruins again. Pepin the Short repeated the destruction in 768, after which it was the turn of Vikings, based in their off-shore colony on the whaling island of Noirmoutier, to sail their
drakkars
up the rivers to pillage and burn city, monastery and farm alike. Bypassing the high, thick walls now surrounding Bordeaux, they rowed and sailed and rode up the Garonne Valley halfway to the Mediterranean, looting what was movable and destroying everything else as far inland as Toulouse.

On their return visit in 848, the Northmen sacked Bordeaux so thoroughly that thirty years later ‘none of the faithful any longer have a roof over their head’
⁴
– according to the bull of Pope John VIII authorising the bishop of the city to abandon his diminished flock and move his see to the much safer city of Bourges in central France. As a result of this repeated destruction and reconstruction, Bordeaux dwindled to little more than ruins of baths and temples, part of the aqueduct and the remains of the amphitheatre. Yet, if just about everything material left by the Romans in the south-west was destroyed in the repeated devastation, two things survived: the system of law and the pagan tolerance of other customs and beliefs. In the local tongue, this was called
convivença
.

By the time of Eleanor’s birth improved climate and relatively stable government under successive dukes of Aquitaine had produced a slow-burning population explosion in the depopulated duchy. New towns were being built in open country and forest cleared for pasture and arable use. Although not on the scale of the
bastides
of the following century, they attracted inhabitants by enfranchising anyone who could reach them, a precious inducement to serfs otherwise tied to their owner’s land until death. An astonishing 25 per cent of place names of the south-west date from this period,
⁵
as do the thousands of large and small Romanesque churches that dot the landscape.

Gradually the old Roman vineyards
⁶
were being replanted and new ones brought into production. The cartularies recording gifts to religious foundations bear witness to a resurgence of viticulture around Bordeaux, on the eastern side of the Gironde and in the triangle of Entre Deux Mers
⁷
between the lower reaches of the Dordogne and Garonne.

Yet although Eleanor’s lifetime fell within what is called ‘the medieval warm period’, when temperatures were several degrees milder than today and the vineyards of southern Britain were more extensive than they would ever be again, reaching further north than Ely in Cambridgeshire, this warmer weather did not necessarily bring
good harvests: the lack of winter cold to kill off pests and disease meant that famine was an ever-present possibility. Medieval varieties of cereal produced extremely low yields by modern standards. Deducting taxes and/or a tithe to the Church, plus the seed for sowing, left little of the meagre harvest for food.

A dry spring and summer meant a poor harvest; a damp autumn saw grain crops rotting on the stalk. Two bad years in succession meant a choice between watching children and old people starve and having insufficient seed to plant the following spring. In time of conflict, the age-old defence tactic of scorched earth combined with Vegetius’ maxim ‘First destroy his land, then attack the enemy’, meant not only hunger for the combatants but also a spiralling death-rate among the peasantry after hostilities ceased.

However, Louis’ first demonstration of kingly power at Orleans was more a show of force than a campaign. The dissidents punished, he continued to Paris, where Eleanor joined him, installing herself and her personal servants in the palace of the Capetian kings. It was a comfortless Merovingian fortress at the western end of the Ile de la Cité where her lavish lifestyle and exuberant personality disturbed the sober household headed by her pious mother-in-law, Adelaide de Maurienne. The once-powerful dowager queen had little reason to welcome a daughter-in-law whose arrival deprived her of her dower lands. After a short battle of wills, she retired to one of her own castles in Champagne and married a minor noble by name of Mathieu de Montmorency, leaving Eleanor the only queen on the Ile de la Cité.
⁸

There she scandalised the establishment by her sheer exuberance, her unbridled curiosity, her
gai saber
and the introduction of southern culture in the shape of poets and musicians playing on the traditional instruments such as flutes and tabors and bagpipes, and also the plucked and bowed stringed instruments introduced from the East – rebec and viol, cithara and fiedel – that concerted together for the pleasure of the ear and the delight of idle minds with no thought of praising God.

The young queen made it easy for her enemies to criticise her use of cosmetics and jewellery, ignoring the jibes from Clairvaux against ‘the beauty that is put on in the morning and taken off at night’.
⁹
A born leader of fashion, her own extravagant dress incited the ladies of her court to wear garments of fur-lined silk, a material that had reached the west only in the previous century, transforming the cut of fashionable clothes in the process. Over linen shifts that were the only female undergarments, their ankle-length underdresses had close-fitting embroidered sleeves that peeped through the floor-length sleeves of
their overgarments, buttoned back at the cuff to reveal the richness beneath. On their wrists were bracelets of gold to match the settings of the gemstones in their earrings. Their overdresses not only reached to the floor, but trailed on it behind them, with sleeves worn so long they were often knotted up out of the way. The origin of Cinderella’s mislaid slipper was the footwear worn by Eleanor and maids-and ladies-in-waiting, fashioned not from
verre
, meaning glass, but the homophone
vair
, which is the soft fur from a squirrel’s belly that kept their elegant feet insulated from the chill of stone-flagged floors in the palace on the Ile de la Cité.

Good Christian men then required women to disguise their curves and hide their hair. Yet instead of modest, all-obscuring wimples suitable for married women, Eleanor and her ladies wore fashionably draped veils of fine linen held in place by bejewelled circlets, revealing as much as they hid. We owe the description that fits so well the statue at Chartres to a description by saintly Bernard of Clairvaux of the behaviour and dress at court, when warning nuns how they should
not
behave and dress. Of the ladies likened to snakes for dragging the trains of their dresses behind them, he upbraided those ‘not so much adorned as burdened with gold, silver and precious stones in regal splendour’.
¹⁰

Much of the time, Eleanor ruled the palace because Louis kept to his old habits, returning to the cloister of Notre Dame whenever his kingly duties permitted, observing the offices, fasting and making vigil like any monk. If his regal status brought him to the forefront occasionally to read the canticles –
Benedictus
at Lauds,
Magnificat
, the canticle of the Virgin Mary, at Vespers and
Nunc Dimittis
at Compline – he eschewed any distinction of dress and maintained an attitude so humble and self-effacing
¹¹
that no stranger attending the services would have guessed he was the ruler of the Franks, those bellicose Germanic warriors who had swept out of the Rhine Valley and subdued the former Roman province of Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Sharing the monks’ privations did not mean that he forewent much in the way of creature comforts. With no table linen or individual plates in the royal palace until Eleanor introduced such luxuries for herself and her ladies, a place setting at table consisted of a drinking vessel and a knife to hack off portions of meat or skewer vegetables, which were then placed on flat breads used as plates
¹²
and afterwards eaten by the servants. The windows of the palace were narrow and few for defensive reasons but still a source of draughts in winter, being closed with wooden shutters until the queen introduced glazing in her apartments.

Beneath the palace foundations were vestiges of hypocausts dating from the Roman city, but the only heating above ground level before Eleanor arrived was by charcoal braziers, whose carbon monoxide fumes could be lethal in enclosed spaces, and open wood fires in the centre of large and high-ceilinged public rooms with a hole above through which the smoke could escape, but which also let in wind and rain. There was virtually no privacy on the Ile de la Cité until the advent of the masonry fireplace, seemingly introduced by her, or at any rate shortly after her arrival. Built against a wall with a mantelpiece supporting a chimney through which smoke could escape without letting in too much weather, this new architectural device altered for ever the communal lifestyle of early medieval times by enabling small private rooms to be heated, so that a lord or his lady could at last keep to their private apartments without freezing.

West of the palace buildings and extending to the tip of the island was a triangular area of gardens planted with herbs, fig trees, olives, cypresses, vines and shrubbery, beyond which the divided waters of the Seine rejoined to flow seawards. Though a pleasant enough place, opened on occasion to commoners, it was hardly compensation for an energetic and vivacious teenage queen, accustomed to range throughout the length and breadth of Aquitaine.