OF SIX MEDIÆVAL WOMEN
accepted facts of everyday life then, would strike us as strangely rude and repellent now. Take, for instance, the attitude towards his queen of a king we have all been taught to revere—Arthur, the semi-saint, and the so-called pattern of courtesy. When Guinevere deserts him, and some of his knights are slain, his remark not whispered into the ear of a confidant, but uttered aloud in the presence of all around him—is, "I am sorrier for my good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair Queen, for queens I might have enow." Such a sentiment, expressed in public, does not seem quite up to our modern standard of courteous, or even civilised, conduct, and yet here we have the sentiments of the Prince of Chivalry, as conceived by the poets of the thirteenth century. So it is obvious that before passing judgment upon the standard of life of the mediæval woman, we must endeavour to arrive at the truth by thinking and living in imagination on the same plane, as near as may be, as she did.
Then again, it is largely owing to certain stories in the Middle Ages that the women of those times have been defamed. If we consider the sources and the transcribers of these stories, we shall perhaps find a reason for their distorted outlines, filled in with so much imperfectly understood detail. Many of these tales originated
xviii
