Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/54

34 to the other: “Lord, do you say it, speak to the king. I shall not speak before you.” So, for a time they were debating, as none would begin to speak “par honneur.” Till at last the king ordered Sir Monne de Basele to tell what he knew.

Messire Gaultier Rallart, “chevalier du guet” at Paris, in 1418, was in the habit of never going his rounds without being preceded “by three or four musicians playing brass instruments, which appeared a strange thing to the people, for they said that it seemed that he said to malefactors: ‘Get away, for I am coming.’” This case, reported by the Burgher of Paris, of a chief of police warning malefactors of his approach, is not an isolated one. Jean de Roye tells the same thing of Jean Balue, bishop of Evreux in 1465. At night he went his rounds, “with clarions, trumpets and other instruments of music, through the streets and on the walls, which was not a customary thing to do for men of the watch.”

Even on the scaffold the honours due to rank are strictly observed. Thus the scaffold mounted by the Constable of Saint Pol is richly shrouded with black velvet strewn with fleurs-de-lis; the cloth with which his eyes are bandaged, the cushion on which he kneels, are of crimson velvet, and the hangman is a fellow who has never yet executed a single criminal—rather a doubtful privilege for the noble victim.

The struggles of politeness, which some forty years ago were still characteristic of lower-middle-class etiquette, were extraordinarily developed in the court life of the fifteenth century. A person of fashion would have considered himself dishonoured by not according to a superior the place which belonged to him. The dukes of Burgundy give precedence scrupulously to their royal relations of France. Jean sans Peur never fails to show exaggerated respect to his daughter-in-law, the young princess Michelle of France; he calls her Madame; he bends his knee to the earth before her and at table always tries to help her, which she will not suffer him to do. When Philip the Good learns that his cousin, the dauphin, in consequence of a quarrel with his father, has removed to Brabant, he at once raises the siege of Deventer, which formed the first step to his very important scheme of conquering Friesland. He travels in hot haste to Brussels, there to receive his royal guest. As the moment of the