Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/70

50 of labouring men, of whom it is not becoming to give such a long exposition as of the others, because it is hardly possible to attribute great qualities to them, as they are of a servile degree.” Humility, diligence, obedience to the king, and docility in bowing “voluntarily to the pleasure of the lords,” those are the qualities which bring credit to “cestuy bas estat de François.”

May not this strange infatuation, by preventing them from foreseeing future times of economic expansion have contributed to engender pessimism in minds such as that of Chastellain, who could only expect the good of mankind from the virtues of the nobility?

Chastellain still calls the rich burghers simply villeins. He has not the slightest notion of middle-class honour. Duke Philip the Good was wont to abuse his power by marrying his archers or other servants of lesser gentility to rich burgher widows or heiresses. To avoid those alliances, the parents on their side married their daughters as soon as they reached marriageable age. Jacques du Clercq mentions the case of a widow, who for this reason remarried two days after the burial of her husband. Once the duke, while engaged in such marriage-broking, met with an obstinate refusal from a rich brewer of Lille, who felt affronted at such an alliance for his daughter. The duke secured the person of the young girl; the father removed with all his possessions to Tournay, outside the ducal jurisdiction, in order to be able to bring the matter before the Parlement of Paris. This brought him nothing but vexation, and he fell ill with grief. At last he sent his wife to Lille “in order to beg mercy of the duke and give up his daughter to him.” The latter, in honour of Good Friday, gave her back to the mother, but with scornful and humiliating words.—Chastellain’s sympathies are all on the side of his master, though, on other occasions, he did not at all fear to record his disapproval of the duke’s conduct. For the injured father he has no other terms than “this rebellious rustic brewer,” “and such a naughty villein too.”

There are in the sentiments of the aristocratic class towards the people two parallel currents. Side by side with this haughty disdain of the small man, already a little out of date,