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Frequent complaints such as this about the shrewish woman shows that men did not always enjoy absolute dominance.
The commons' views, however, remain difficult to ascertain.
Professor Coulton muses that we know how the common men were used to working shoulder to shoulder with their women: yet on Sundays in church they heard sermons telling them on the one hand of woman as the gate of hell, and simultaneously that Mary was the Queen of Heaven. On feast days they listened to fabliaus ridiculing women. It was only in the rare moments of revolt when their voices were heard that they showed they might refuse to see woman as a betrayer of humanity:
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman? 17
From this, Coulton reaches a conclusion that concurs with Power's interpretation: where the capacity and the will existed, he writes, statutory restrictions were constantly swept away by ordinary men and women, as the cleric John of Ayton admitted in the early fourteenth century when he expostulated that those attempting to subjugate nuns might as well beat the air.
And mothers throughout Europe in fact had enormous household power, ruling their homes as domestic dictators.
"We must not forget...that the medieval lady who might receive those blows was the true-blooded female of the lord who dealt them: a sister spirit, it might be, to that countess who killed the architect of her castle lest he should off and build one equally strong for someone else."18
This reminds us of how important it is to see women within the context of their own time, unaware of changes that were to occur in the centuries to come. They made the best of the conditions they had, and somehow the sexes survived each other's often jaundiced views of each other.
SO FAIR THE MAIDS
It is only to be expected that one outcome of the Crusades was a conflict of views about women and in particular, their sexual nature.
The Muslim view of the proper relationship between men and women conditioned their views of the intimacies of Frankish behaviour, and not favourably. It seems that the committed Muslim regarded European mores with the disapproving air of the puritan.
From the point of view of the cultured but gossip prone chronicler Usama, the Frankish women were without shame.
He describes with a sense of outrage how the Europeans who settled in Palestine were without any vestige of sexual honour or fidelity. For instance, if one of them walks along the street with his wife and meets a friend, says Usama, this man will take the woman's hand and lead her aside to talk, while the husband stands by waiting until she has finished her conversation. If she takes too long about it, he leaves her with the other man and goes on his way.19
This does not sound like the kind of public conversation that would have been permitted in a French court before 1100. Our image of the traditional Frankish court of Northern Europe, is a place where women were carefully chaperoned and spent most of their life in a separate part of the building, not unlike a harem. Traditionally, women servants in a hall were permitted only occasional visits from their husbands.
But the women of Outremer were in a different case. The original pilgrims had marched beside their men, had slept and eaten and given birth amongst the men. They had together walked through hell to get to the gates of Heaven. It follows that they would have taken a much more public role in every aspect of life after that experience.
According to Usama, this was a characteristic that extended beyond the ranks of noble women, who are usually seen as the leaders in changing sexual mores during the twelfth century. He says that while in Nablus he heard of a Frankish merchant, a wine seller, who returned home from his shop one day to find his wife in bed with a man. In reply to the inevitable question, that man replied that he was tired, and so lay down to rest, and as the bed was already made, it was the place he chose. Pressed further, as to the degree of intimacy with the wine merchant's wife, the weary traveller denied everything, commenting merely that as the bed belonged to the woman, he could hardly prevent her getting into her own bed! The merchant seemed satisfied with this account, confining his expression of jealousy to a threat of legal action if this was to be repeated.
Usama gives a further account which suggests a degree of physical freedom unknown to Europeans at home. This, he says, was related to him by a bath attendant, one Salim, who worked in Marat. Salim claimed that one day a Frankish knight came in. Apparently, the Franks sat around in the bath houses naked, unlike the Moslems, who wore a cloth around their waist. The Frank snatched away Salim's loin cloth, and saw that he had recently shaved his pubic hair. He was struck with the artistic results of the operation, considering it to be magnificent, and demanding the same. He lay flat on his back and was shaved immediately by Salim. Declaring himself agreeably smooth, the knight then requested the same for his wife. The wife was fetched, lay down flat on her back, and her pubic hair was shaved, while the husband stood by watching.
Usama expressed his amazement at the contradictory nature of the Franks - how they are without jealousy or sense of honour, yet at the same time, they had the courage that usually springs from a readiness to take offence against slighted honour.
One senses that the Arab observer may have protested too much about the apparent lewdness of Frankish women. Usama seem to have been fascinated with the possibilities of these new women.
We might well say with Lear:
...Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
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