Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/233

Rh ancients who knew ...” etc. She sees with sorrow signs of decline. For a good many years the ladies of Flanders have been putting the bed of a woman newly delivered of a child before the fire, “at which people mocked a good deal,” because formerly this was never done. What are we coming to? “But at present everybody does what he pleases: because of which we may well be afraid that all will go badly.”—La Marche gravely asks the following question: Why has the “fruit-master,” also the “wax-department” (le mestier de la cire), that is to say, illumination, among his attributes?—He answers, not less gravely: Because wax is extracted from flowers whence the fruit comes too: “so that this matter is very well ordained thus.”

In matters of utility or of ceremony medieval authority creates a special organ for every function, because it regards the function as an idea and considers it as an actual thing. The “grand sergeanty” of the king of England comprised a dignitary whose office it was to hold the king’s head when he crossed the Channel and was suffering with sea-sickness. A certain John Baker held this office in 1442, and after his death it passed to his two daughters.

Of the same nature is the custom, very ancient and very primitive, of giving a proper name to inanimate objects. We witnessed a revival of this usage when the big guns during the late war got names. During the Middle Ages it was much more frequent. Like the swords of the heroes in the chansons de geste, the stone mortars in the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had names of their own: “Le Chien d’Orléans, la Gringade, la Bourgeoise, Dulle Griete.” A few very celebrated diamonds are still known by proper names: this, too, is a survival of a widely spread custom. Several jewels of Charles the Bold had their names : “le sancy, les trois frères, la hôte, la balle de Flandres.” If, at the present time, ships still have names, but bells and most houses have not, the reason lies in the fact that the ship preserves a sort of personality, also expressed in the English usage of making ships feminine. In the Middle Ages this tendency to personify things was much stronger; every house and every bell had its name.

In the minds of the Middle Ages every event, every case,