Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/112

90 as he kisses the Testament! Two servants come to rub them with grease from the neck to the ankles. Both champions rub their hands with ashes and take sugar in their mouths; next they are given quartersticks and bucklers painted with images of saints, which they hold upside down, having, moreover, in their hands “a scroll of devotion.”

Mahuot, a small man, begins the combat by throwing sand into Jacotin’s face with the point of his buckler. Soon afterwards he falls to the ground under the formidable blows of Jacotin, who throws himself on him, fills his eyes and mouth with sand, and thrusts his thumb into the socket of his eye, to make him let go of a finger which Mahuot has between his teeth. Jacotin wrings the other’s arms, jumps upon his back and tries to break it. In vain does Mahuot cry for mercy, and asks to be confessed. “O my lord of Burgundy,” he calls out, “I have served you so well in your war of Ghent! O my lord, for God’s sake, I beg for mercy, save my life!” ... Here some pages of Chastellain’s chronicle are missing; we learn elsewhere that the dying man was dragged out of the lists and hanged by the executioner.

Did Chastellain end his lively narrative by a moral? It is probable; anyhow, La Marche tells that the nobility were a little ashamed at having been present at such a spectacle. “Because of which God caused a duel of knights to follow, which was irreproachable and without fatal consequences,” adds the incorrigible court poet.

As soon as it is a question of non-nobles, the old and deep- rooted contempt for the villein shows us that the ideas of chivalry had availed but little in mitigating feudal barbarism. Charles VI, after the battle of Rosebeke, wishes to see the corpse of Philip of Artevelde. The king does not show the slightest respect for the illustrious rebel. According to one chronicle, he is said to have kicked the body, “treating it as a villein.” “When it had been looked at, for some time”— says Froissart—“it was taken from that place and hanged on a tree.”

Hard realities were bound to open the eyes of the nobility and show the falseness and uselessness of their ideal. The financial side of a knight’s career was frankly avowed. Froissart never omits to enumerate the profits which a successful