April Queen (7 page)

Among the few escapes from this claustrophobic existence was an occasional day trip to the abbey of St Denis, a dozen miles north of Paris, where Suger had just started construction of a great basilica with no expenses spared, in the belief that everything excellent and beautiful should be used to glorify God. For this, he received regular admonitions for his excessive love of luxury and magnificence from the ascetic and saintly Cistercian abbot of Clairvaux.
¹³
Occasionally too there was a pilgrimage to Sens, where William the Mason’s masterly use of the ogive or broken arch in the new cathedral of St Etienne
¹⁴
had been Suger’s inspiration to build in the new style that would later be dubbed Gothic.
¹⁵

The shops in Paris had not changed since Roman times. Open-fronted, they resembled lock-ups in an Arab
souk
, with their wares spilling out into the street, in the middle of which ran the open drain. Cows and small flocks of goats were driven into the city to be milked directly into customers’ receptacles – the only way to be certain the milk was fresh. Traffic in Paris was as chaotic as it had been in Rome when Augustus banned wheeled vehicles, not only because they caused frequent accidents and obstructed the narrow streets but also because the daily accumulation of dung from draught
animals was such that stepping stones were needed for pedestrians to cross busy thoroughfares dry-shod.

On the Ile de la Cité knights, barons, abbots and rich merchants on horseback forced a passage through streets no wider than two spans of a man’s arms between wagons bringing merchandise into the city and others carrying away the daily quota of waste and excrement; often the same cart would be used for both purposes and the river downstream was an open sewer. The side streets were even narrower, the timber-framed houses of lath and plaster leaning over them from both sides to gain maximum space on the upper floors at the cost of perpetual gloom for passers-by.

Pedestrians pushed between the mounts of the mighty with priest, pilgrim, poor student, potboy and ash-covered penitent treading the same filth underfoot as the most learned and famous teachers in the world. Here and there scavengers with rakes and brooms shifted the rubbish ineffectually from place to place until it was eventually tipped into the Seine, on whose surface floated the aloof and immaculate swan, the royal bird of the Capetians so unlike its Aquitain counterpart, the proud and colourful peacock.

The most congested areas were where traffic converged to cross the two offset stone bridges that linked the island to the north and south banks of the Seine, each protected by a
chatelet
or small castle at the landward end. The Grand Pont led from the royal palace to the hustle and bustle of the business quarter on the right bank; the Petit Pont led from near the
parvis
¹⁶
of Notre Dame to the left bank whither the schools had moved to escape the physical and metaphysical lack of space on the island.

Beneath the bridges, floating water-mills whose design had not changed in a thousand years were moored to grind grain for palace and city, an activity forbidden on Sundays because its noise disturbed the faithful at prayer. Washerwomen knelt on the wet flagstones of the sloping quays summer and winter, beating clothes on flat stones as they washed them without soap in the river water. Above their heads, cramped apothecaries’ shops were stocked with the repertoire of Hippocrates and Galen: therapeutic herbs, but also narcotics like opium, henbane to cure contractions, toothache and hysteria – and squill, an extract of lilies used as an expectorant, cardiac stimulant and diuretic. They also sold viper toxin, the dried and crushed excrement and organs of various animals, and worse. Moneychangers in booths on the bridges bought and sold all the coinage of Europe and farther afield, weight and purity of the metal deciding the rate of exchange.

Paris had around 50,000 inhabitants when Eleanor arrived there. Before the end of the century it would number half as many again, with the constantly expanding commercial area on the Right Bank pushing outwards into the vineyards and orchards and fields. There the butchers had their slaughter-houses, the odiferous fellmongers cleaned and prepared the hides and skins which the tanners converted into leather for the shoemakers, saddlers, clothiers, armourers, the makers of furniture and mugs and buckets and a host of other objects in daily use. Their stinking effluent of offal, oak bark and dog’s excrement mingled in the streams running down to the Seine with the fermented urine from the fulling mills, which is why these activities were usually grouped together.

Tailors, ironmongers, carpenters, bakers and candle-makers, the smiths and metalworkers, the potters and rope-makers all plied their skills and carried on the myriad specialised activities that kept the city alive. Ironbound wheels and shod hooves added to the din. Crying their wares were peddlers and sellers of cakes and sweet-meats balancing trays on their heads in the hope of keeping the delicacies out of the reach of urchins on the loose night and day because the single room they shared with the rest of their family had no space for play.

Water-sellers promised clean drinking water from their leather and wooden buckets to people who had no access to a well and no fountain nearby. Flat-bottomed barges brought food and wood for cooking and heating from up and downriver, and salt and wax and wine and millet for the flour that filled most of the stomachs in the city. Local fishermen delivered their catch fresh from the water while fast, light wherries brought food of all descriptions from further afield. Live animals and fowl arrived by land and water for slaughter.

To facilitate landing merchandise actually on the island, breaches had been made in the Roman wall that girdled it and crude wharves built that suffered in each winter flood, increasing the general effect of dilapidation. And through the thronging thousands, living and dying, tax collectors threaded their way, for like death, tax was already unavoidable. Tavern-keepers, goldsmiths, fish- and fowl-mongers, oil-sellers and pastry-cooks were among those taxed at the highest rate, with cobblers, potters, forgers of fish-hooks and dressmakers treated more favourably. Only the water-sellers and the poorest peddlers with a few trinkets on a tray were exempt.

Because of cheap and simple construction methods, fire was an ever-present menace in cities; in the first quarter of the thirteenth century the Norman capital Rouen burned six times. Lack of adequate
sanitation and ignorance of hygiene encouraged vermin, in whom the plague bacillus lurked. In the same year that Eleanor arrived to live on the Ile de la Cité, Dijon was ravaged by plague; three years before it had been the turn of Chartres. No one knew when it would strike Paris. Because disease and death were never far away and pain ubiquitous, even the poorest gave to the Church in the hope of a better world to come.

However, vocation played little part among the oblates dominant in many monasteries, who had been literally offered in infancy or childhood by their parents. Other monks were younger sons with no property to fight for, or an aversion to the violent life of males in the equestrian classes. Thousands of women took the veil each year to escape a repugnant arranged marriage, usually buying their way into a convent with a dowry from their families.

Yet many people were devout, their fervour ignited by the wonderment aroused in those whose lives were spent in hard labour, pain, grief and hunger at the idea of a Godhead
choosing
to suffer even worse than they had to. So deeply did it touch them that countless thousands left the little they had every year, to set out penniless for Rome, Compostela or the Holy Land – only to die on the way. There were also Christian groups living in towns to serve the sick and the poor and to educate children: women known as Beguines and men called Beghards did not take vows but lived in poverty, humility and service to others – some for life, others until they entered a monastery or convent, or returned to normal life.

Balancing the temporal power at the western end of the Ile de la Cité was the archbishop’s palace at the eastern end. Lately repaired by Fat Louis, the twin basilicas built on the remains of a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter or Zeus Pateras – God the Father in His Greco-Roman incarnation – would shortly be demolished to make way for Notre Dame Cathedral. Around the basilicas were crowded the lodgings of the prelates and the canons. Bells tolled night and day on a dozen lesser churches clustered there. To the sound of plainsong, monks processed through narrow streets that had not been repaved since the Romans left, chanting and swinging their censers to briefly perfume the foetid air with lingering traces of incense, the sweetest of all perfumes to Louis’ nostrils.

I
f the clamour of street life in Paris was similar to that of Eleanor’s own cities of Bordeaux, Poitiers and Limoges, the intellectual pace of the Frankish capital was very different. Latin, spiced by all the accents of Europe, was the common language of academics and their pupils from all over Christendom. The area still called ‘the Latin quarter’ was a cauldron of learning, bubbling with a naïve hunger for all knowledge. Like restaurants of the mind, each of the schools on the Left Bank displayed its menu to attract a body of students so hungry for instruction in the theoretical and practical sciences and the trivium
¹
and quadrivium
²
that they accepted poor food and cramped attic dormitories, often paid for from the king’s purse. And if some slavishly repeated their lessons parrot-fashion, others endorsed Peter Abelard’s assertion that students’ criticism of teachers was a healthy way of testing the truth of instruction, for no one should teach what he did not fully understand.

Occasionally Louis threw open the palace gardens to the doctors and their boisterous followers to pursue the debate ongoing since Plato and Aristotle as to whether universals – the properties that each member
of a class of things must possess if the same general word were to apply to them all – were ‘real’ as the Realists argued or merely words, as the Nominalists asserted.

The theology expounded in Eleanor’s Paris also had wide variations between the orthodox teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux and those of Peter de Bruys, a vigorously campaigning apostate monk who maintained that baptism did not save infants from original sin, that all churches should be destroyed as unnecessary, that the representation of a crucified man was not fit for veneration, that prayers and alms offered for the salvation of the dead were a useless waste of time and money and that the new doctrine of transubstantiation was nonsense because anyone could see that the bread and wine did
not
become the body and blood of Christ when offered upon the altar.
³

Peter Abelard’s application of rational methods to questions of faith repeatedly offended believers. Yet Bernard, who opposed Eleanor and engineered Abelard’s final downfall, was not a mad visionary monk. His voluminous correspondence reveals a humane and widely read man, as liable to quote Terence or Ovid as the Fathers of the Church.

And although Abelard had a mindset more logical in the modern sense, inventing etymology to clarify doctrinal contradictions due to changes in usage and stressing that language by itself cannot demonstrate the truth of things which lie in the domain of physics, his downfall was due not so much to the views he propounded as the arrogance that made him boast of being able to prove by citing accepted authorities that God was one or that He was three, that He was able or unable to prevent evil, that He had free will or that He had not.

Somewhere in the centre of the spectrum was Abbot Suger, the churchman–politician who served both king and God for the good of Church and society both. Ruling the most opulent monastery in France, he was accused by Bernard of turning it into an office for the affairs of state under Fat Louis, where voices were raised in argument and soldiers
and even women
came and went.
⁴
But Suger was also attacked by Abelard, who used the methods of his banned book
Yes and No
⁵
to prove that the abbey’s patron saint was not an Athenian convert of St Paul called Dionysius the Areopagite, but a less prestigious local martyr of similar name. The resultant clamour at St Denis that Abelard be tried for heresy forced Héloïse’s castrated ex-lover to flee the capital yet again and seek asylum in Champagne.

It was this intellectual vigour and diversity of thinking that made Paris unique.

Into the all-male world of doctors and students, the ladies of Eleanor’s court occasionally intruded. Her sister Aelith was a constant companion; others of her inner circle were Mamille de Roucy, Florine de Bourgogne, Torqueri de Bouillon, Faydide de Toulouse and Countess Sybille of Flanders. They shared the queen’s outdoor amusements of riding and hawking in the countryside around Paris. Indoors, they embroidered, played board games like chess and backgammon or amused themselves with simple games like blind man’s buff. They watched court productions of stage plays in Latin and were regaled in risqué Occitan by troubadours brought by the young queen from Aquitaine and the sober
trouvères
of the north retelling
chansons de geste
and the Arthurian legends called
la matière de Bretagne
.