Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/102

80 nine years had only eaten and drunk standing. Bertrand du Guesclin was dangerously prone to utter vows of this kind. He will not undress till he has taken Montcontour; he will not eat till he has effected an encounter with the English.

It goes without saying that a nobleman of the fourteenth century understood nothing of the magical meaning implied in these fasts. To us this original meaning is clear. It is equally so in the custom of wearing foot-irons as signs of a vow. As early as the eighteenth century, La Curne de Sainte Palaye remarked that the usage of the Chatti, described by Tacitus, corresponded exactly with the fashion which medieval chivalry had preserved. In 1415 Jean de Bourbon vowed, and sixteen knights and squires with him, that each Sunday during two years they would wear on the left leg foot-irons—the knights of gold, the squires of silver—till they should find sixteen adversaries ready to fight them to the death. The “adventurous knight,” Jean de Boniface, arriving at Antwerp from Sicily in 1445, wears an “emprise” of the same sort, so does Sir Loiselench in Le petit Jehan de Sainitré. The propensity to vow to perform some thing, when in danger or in violent emotion, undoubtedly always remains a powerful one. It has very deep psychological roots, and does not belong to any particular religion or civilization. Nevertheless, as a form of chivalrous culture, the vow was dying out at the end of the Middle Ages.

When, at Lille, in 1454, Philip the Good, preparing for his crusade, crowns his extravagant feasts by the celebrated Vows of the Pheasant, it is like the last manifestation of a dying usage, which has become a fantastic ornament, after having been a very serious element of earlier civilization. The old ritual, such as chivalrous tradition and romance taught it, is carefully observed. The vows are taken at the banquet; the guests swear by the pheasant served up, one “bluffing” the other, just as the old Norsemen vied with each other in fool-hardy vows sworn in drunkenness by the boar served up. There are pious vows, made to God and to the Holy Virgin, to the ladies and to the bird, and others in which the Deity is not mentioned. They contain always the same privations of food or of comfort: not to sleep in a bed on Saturday, not to take animal food on Friday, etc.