Thus kept up, the roads stretched away from the towns and plunged into the country, interrupted by rivulets in winter and dotted with holes; the heavy carts slowly followed their devious course, and the sound of creaking wood accompanied the vehicle. These carts were numerous and in very common use. Some were square-shaped timbrels, simple massive boxes made of planks borne on two wheels; others, somewhat lighter, were formed of slatts latticed with a willow trellis. To add to their solidity, the wheels were studded with big-headed nails.83 Both sorts were used for labour in the {91} country; they were to be found everywhere, and as they abounded their hire was not expensive. Twopence for carrying a ton weight a distance of one mile was the average price; for carrying corn, it was about a penny a mile per ton.84 All this does not prove that the roads were excellent, but that these carts, indispensable to agriculture, were numerous. They did not cost much to the villagers, who usually were the makers thereof; they were built solid and massive because they were easier to set up thus and resisted better the jolts of the roads; a modest remuneration would suffice for their owners. The king always employed a number; when he moved from one manor to another, the brilliant cortège of the lords was followed by an army of loud-creaking borrowed carts.
The official purveyors found the carts wherever they went and freely appropriated them; they exercised their requisitions ten leagues on either side of the road followed by the royal convoy. They even took without scruple the carts of travellers who had come perhaps thirty or forty leagues distance, and whose journey was thus abruptly interrupted. There were indeed statutes against forced loans, which specifically provided that suitable payment should be made, that is to say, “ten pence a day for a cart with two horses, and fourteen pence for a cart with three horses.” But often no payment came. The “poor Commons” renewed their protests, the parliament their statutes, and the purveyors their exactions.
Besides the carts they required corn, hay, oats, beer, meat; it was a little army that had to be fed, and the requisitions caused the villagers painful apprehension. People did what they could to be exempted; the simplest way was to bribe the purveyor, but the poor could not. Yet numberless regulations had successively promised {92} that there should never be any further abuse. The king was powerless; under an imperfect government, laws created to last for ever rapidly lose their vitality, and those made at that time died in a day.
Purveyors swarmed; impostors gave themselves out as king’s officers who were not, and did not prove the least greedy. All bought at inadequate prices and limited themselves to fair promises of payment. The statute of 1330 shows how these payments never came; how also when twenty-five quarters of corn were taken only twenty were reckoned because they were measured by “the heaped bushel.”85 In the same way, for hay, straw, etc., the purveyors found means to reckon at a halfpenny what was worth two or three pence; they ordered that supplies of wine should be held in readiness for them, kept the best for themselves in order to sell it again to their own profit, and exacted payment for returning a part to the original owners, which was a strange reversal of things. The king acknowledged all these evils and decreed reforms accordingly. A little later he did so again, with no more result. In 1362 he declared that henceforth the purveyors should pay ready money at the current market price; and he gravely added, as an important guarantee, that the purveyors should lose their detested name and should be called buyers: “that the heinous name of purveyor be changed, and named achatour.”86 A word reform, if any.87
The same abuses existed in France, and numerous ordinances may be read in the pages of Isambert, conceived in exactly the same spirit and corresponding to {95} the same complaints; ordinances of Philip the Fair in 1308, of Louis X in 1342, of Philip VI, who willed that the “preneurs pour nous” (takers for us), should not take unless they had “new letters from us,” which shows the existence of false purveyors as in England. John of France renews all the restrictions of his predecessors, December 25, 1355, and so on.
The king and his lords journeyed on horseback for the most part, but they had carriages too. Nothing gives a better idea of the awkward, cumbersome luxury which gave its splendour to civil life during this century, than the structure of these heavy machines. The best had four wheels, and were drawn by three or four horses, one behind the other, one of them mounted by a postilion provided with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an archway rounded like a tunnel;88 an ungainly whole. But the details were extremely elegant, the wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and gilded, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half lying; pillows were placed in the corners as if to invite sleep or meditation, square windows opened on the sides and were hung with silk curtains.89 {96}
Thus travelled the noble lady, slim in form, tightly clad in a dress which outlined every curve of the body, her long slender hands caressing the favourite dog or bird. The knight, equally tight in his cote-hardie, looked at her with a complacent eye, and, if he knew good manners, opened his heart to his nonchalant companion in long phrases imitated from romances, themselves supposed to imitate the language of his peers. The broad forehead of the lady, who has perhaps coquettishly plucked out some of her hair as well as her eyebrows, a process about which satirists were bitter,90 brightens up occasionally, and her smile is like a ray of sunshine. Meanwhile the axles groan, the horse-shoes crunch the ground, the machine advances by fits and starts, descends into the hollows, bounds all of a piece at the ditches, and comes down with a heavy thud. The knight must speak pretty loud to make his dainty discourse, Round Table flavoured, heard by his companion. So trivial a necessity ever sufficed to break the charm of the most delicate thought; too many shocks shake the flower, and when the knight presents it, it has lost its perfumed pollen.
The possession of such a carriage was a princely luxury. They were bequeathed by will from one to another, and the heirloom was valuable. On September 25, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, wrote her last will and endowed her eldest daughter with “her great carriage {99} with the covertures, carpets, and cushions.” In the twentieth year of Richard II Roger Rouland received £400 sterling “for making the Queen’s chariot”; and John le Charer, in the sixth of Edward III, received £1,000 for the carriage of the Lady Eleanor.91 These were enormous sums. In the fourteenth century the average price of an ox was thirteen shillings, one penny farthing; of a sheep, one shilling and five pence; of a cow, nine shillings and five pence; and a penny for a fowl.92 Lady Eleanor’s carriage thus represented the value of a herd of sixteen hundred oxen.
Scarcely less ornamented were the horse-litters sometimes used by people of rank, especially by ladies. They were of the same shape as the carriages, being covered with a sort of rounded vault, in which were cut more or less large openings. Two horses carried them, one before, the other behind, each being placed between the shafts with which the contrivance was provided at both ends.93
Between these luxurious carriages and the peasants’ carts there was nothing analogous to the multitude of middle-class conveyances to which we are now accustomed; the middle class itself being as yet but imperfectly developed. True, there were some not so expensive as {100} those belonging to the princesses of Edward’s Court, but not many. Every one at this time knew how to ride on horseback, and it was much more practical to use one’s mount than the heavy vehicles of the period. One went much faster, and was more certain to arrive. “The Paston Letters” show that matters had changed little in the fifteenth century. John Paston being ill in London, his wife wrote asking him to return as soon as he could bear the horse-ride; the idea of returning in a carriage did not even occur to them. Yet it was a serious case, “a grete dysese.”
Margaret Paston writes on September 28, 1443, “If I might have had my will, I should have seen you ere this time; I would ye were at home, if it were your ease, and your sore might be as well looked to here as it is where {103} ye be, now liefer than a gown though it were of scarlet. I pray you if your sore be whole, and so that ye may endure to ride, when my father comes to London, that ye will ask leave, and come home, when the horse shall be sent home again, for I hope ye should be kept as tenderly here as ye be at London.”94
Women were accustomed to riding almost as much as men, and when they had to travel they usually did it on horseback. A peculiarity of their horsemanship, which we have seen of late becoming again the fashion after a lapse of five centuries, was that they habitually rode astride. The custom of riding sideways did not spread in England before the latter part of the fourteenth century, and even then it was not general. In the invaluable manuscript of the Decretals in the British Museum,95 ladies on horseback are constantly represented, always riding astride. At one place96 horses are shown being brought for a knight and a lady; both saddles are exactly the same; each have tall backs, so as to form a sort of comfortable chair. The numerous ivories of the fourteenth century in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the British Museum often represent a lady and her lover, both on horseback, and hawking. In almost all cases the lady unmistakably rides astride. Both ways of riding are shown in the fifteenth-century illuminations in the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” The wife of Bath rides astride, with large spurs; the prioress sits sideways.