stately Guinevre? contrasting, perhaps, an
opposing coarseness of King Arthur's, who, as the
elder man, could scarcely be expected to have
come up to the degree of polish of the other, and
who besides, as is often the case with the graver
hero, might be considered as too thoughtful and
preoccupied for the observance of such mere
nothings as this. Oh, the truth of the past
times, and the false colouring of romance, how
different they are!

After the banquet, then, was finished, the
fragments given to the beggars, the obscenity of
the jongleurs brought to an end, the murdered
men removed to be buried and no questions
asked, and the wounded to be tended with such
skill as the time afforded, the fair knights and
ladies went to games. They were fond of chess
and " tables" in those early days, but they could
not play even at those quiet unexciting pastimes,
in an ordinary Christian manner, but must needs
make them occasions of quarrel and bloodshed
—as indeed they made everything, no matter
what. It is said that the feud between Charlemagne
and Ogier le Danois began about a game
of chess; and the story is this: During one of
the Easter festivities at the court of Charlemagne,
the Prince Charles, his son, and young
Bauduin, an illegitimate son of Ogier the Dane,
sat down to play at chess. Bauduin was the
better player of the two, and after a time pressed
young Charles up into a corner and gave him a
comfortable mate. Charles was furious at his
defeat, and " not content with treating the son
of Ogier with the most insulting language, he
seized the chess-board in his two hands, and
struck him so violent a blow on the forehead
that he split his head and scattered his brains
over the floor." Whence ensued, says the
romance, the famous quarrel between Charlemagne
and Ogier: and whether that authority is true or
not true, the anecdote at least proves the thing
possible. The cause, too, of the long-continued
feud between King John and our old friend
Fulk Fitz-Warine, if not brought about, was
partly caused and much aggravated by a game
of chess. Fulk was brought up at the court
of Henry II., bred with his four sons, and much
beloved by them all save John; and he and
John were ever at deadly war, with only the
ends and tags of a hollow truce to keep them
straight. Now, "it happened that John and
Fulk were sitting all alone in a chamber playing
at chess; John took the chess-board and
struck Fulk a great blow. Fulk felt himself
hurt, raised his foot, and struck John in the
middle of the stomach, that his head went
against the wall, and he became all weak and
fainted. Fulk was in consternation, but he was
glad that there was nobody in the chamber but
they two, and he rubbed John's ears, who
recovered from his fainting-fit, and went to the
king his father, and made a great complaint.
' Hold your tongue, wretch.' said the king,
' you are always quarrelling. If Fulk did
anything but good to you, it must have
been by your own desert;' and he called his
master, and made him beat him finely and
well for complaining." So cowardly John took
nothing by his move then; but when he came
to the throne, he remembered his old grudge
and the chess-table, and Fitz-Warine was an
outlaw for many a long year in revenge of
that day.

Another pleasant habit they had, was sleeping
without night-clothes; half a dozen or
more in the same room without regard to
sex. Very little privacy was there in those
crowded bed-chambers; in hostelries, in homes,
in palaces, strange people seem to have
walked in and out those big menageries,
inspecting the naked human animals beneath
their coverlets, the hawks on the perches over
head, and the clothes of the company dangling
from long poles thrust in the wall, pretty much
as they liked. Even in the king's chamber
Dunstan, unbidden, walked up to the bed where
lay Edgar and his too lovely wife—the Mrs.
Bathsheba of the chronicles—and scolded them
both in full prelatical style for their sins; the
guilty monarch and his frail wife having to
bear it as they best might. In those same
bedrooms, too, were helpless new-born babes
delivered over to the tender mercies of a set of
ignorant women, who swathed and swaddled
them out of all likeness to anything human,
often making them mere crooked abortions,
hump-backed and crippled; sometimes, indeed,
swaddling them out of life altogether, because
they were afraid to trust to nature, and thought
their own stupid superstitions the better guide.

Then to think of what other parts of the life
were like—to run over the filth, and coarseness,
and discomfort, and ignorance that pervaded
society from end to end—from the king on his
throne to the churl in his sty—and to hear
those times idealised, and their braver lessons
regretted! The undrained houses, so badly built
that they kept out neither foe nor weather;
excepting, indeed, the big lord's castles, which
were massive enough, but which were fortresses
rather than dwelling-houses; and so poorly
furnished, for fear of thieves and plunderers, that
nothing movable of any value was to be seen in
them; and the floors—the rush-covered floors!—
" Strew, oh strew my bed with rushes, here I'll
stay till morning blushes," sounding very well
in rhyme and set to music, but the reality of the
most filthy and indescribable nastiness. No
wonder that the plague, and the black death,
and half a hundred other frightful diseases,
decimated Christendom every summer, and attested
the need of cleanliness by the majesty of
natural laws! no wonder that, with a perpetual diet
of salt meat and bacon, with black bread and no
fresh vegetables, no salads, no potatoes, no green
peas, no early Brussels sprouts, no spinage, no
asparagus, nothing but salt meat and bacon, just
like the savages' " biltongue" and " pemmican,"
no wonder that scrofula and madness broke out
in every possible form, and that strong men and
women were hurried to their graves by scores,
where now they drop leisurely by units. And
when we come to their medicines—the arts they
employed to counteract all this abomination—