Free Life in a Medieval City by Frances Gies, Joseph Gies Page B

spiced wine, wafers, and fruit are served the entertainment begins. It starts off with handsprings, tumbles, and other acrobatics. Imitations of bird calls, sleight-of-hand tricks, and a juggling act are likely to be on the program. Interspersed are singers who accompany themselves on two musical inventions of the Middle Ages: the six-stringed, pear-shaped lute, which is plucked, or the five-stringed viol, the first bowed instrument. Both are tuned in fourths and fifths, the accompaniment following the tune either in unison or at intervals of an octave or a fifth, sometimes with a drone note (a repeated tone with unchanging pitch) in the bass.
    The professional entertainment over, tables are dismantled and guests join hands to dance and sing carols, accompanied by lute and viol, or perhaps by a tabor-pipe and tabor—a small flute played with the left hand and a light tambourine-like drum played with the right; sometimes the tabor is fastened to the player’s shoulder and he uses his own head as a drumstick.
    At suppertime the tables are set up again, for more food, more wine, more music. At Vespers the priest arrives, and the guests accompany the young couple to their house. The priest blesses the new hearth, the chamber, and the nuptial bed, and gives his blessing again to bride and groom. The bride’s mother has taken care to search the bed to make sure that no ill-wisher has secreted anything there that may impede conjugal relations, such as two halves of an acorn or granulated beans.
    The celebration is usually over in the morning, but a really big wedding can go on for days. One such wedding, described in a romance called Flamenca , lasted “several weeks.” The streets were decorated with tapestries, spices burned in all the squares of the town; “five hundred sets of clothes, of purple decorated with gold leaf, a thousand lances, a thousand shields, a thousand swords, a thousand hauberks and a thousand chargers” were prepared as gifts for the wedding guests. The wedding cortege was “several leagues long.” “Two hundred jongleurs” fiddled while the guests danced, and story tellers recounted the tales of “Priam, Helen, Ulysses, Hector, Achilles, Dido and Aeneas, Lavinia, Polynices, Tydee and Eteocles, Alexander, Cadmus, Jason, Dedalus and Icarus, Narcissus, Pluto and Orpheus, Hero and Leander, David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Julius Caesar, the Round Table, Charlemagne and Oliver of Verdun.” The festivities were “as delightful as Paradise.”
     
    Like marriage, death has its ritual. For a well-to-do burgher the most important task in preparation for departure from this world is the disposition of his property. The Church strongly advises not only making a will in plenty of time, but giving in advance the endowments that will speed the donor through purgatory. The preacher Henri of Provins tells the story of a man dining at the house of a friend, who sends a servant to light his way home so that he will not stumble and fall in the mud. If the servant carries the lantern behind the guest’s back, says Henri, it will not prevent him from stumbling or falling. Thus it is with alms: If you keep them to distribute after your death, your lantern will be carried behind your back. Henri to the contrary notwithstanding, many burghers like to hang on to their wealth till the last possible moment.
    That moment is extreme unction, after which the Church considers a man as good as dead. A sick man who recovers after receiving it must fast perpetually, go barefoot, and never again have intercourse with his wife. In some places he cannot even amend his will.
    A dying man in particular fear of hell, because he is pious or guilty, may express his penitence by having himself laid on the ground on a hair cloth sprinkled with ashes. Louis IX, given up by the doctors, adopted this practice and discoursed so eloquently on the insubstantiality of this world’s wealth and power that he drew tears from his