Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
A night journey on horseback from Blois to Tours in the middle of
March can have been no pleasure-trip, even in 1152; but, on arriving
at Tours in the morning, Eleanor found that her lovers were still so
dangerously near that she set forward at once on the road to
Poitiers. As she approached her own territory she learned that
Geoffrey of Anjou, the younger brother of her intended husband, was
waiting for her at the border, with views of marriage as strictly
honourable as those of all the others. She was driven to take
another road, and at last got safe to Poitiers.
About no figure in the Middle Ages, man or woman, did so many
legends grow, and with such freedom, as about Eleanor, whose
strength appealed to French sympathies and whose adventures appealed
to their imagination. They never forgave Louis for letting her go.
They delighted to be told that in Palestine she had carried on
relations of the most improper character, now with a Saracen slave
of great beauty; now with Raymond of Poitiers, her uncle, the
handsomest man of his time; now with Saladin himself; and, as all
this occurred at Antioch in 1147 or 1148, they could not explain why
her husband should have waited until 1152 in order to express his
unwilling disapproval; but they quoted with evident sympathy a
remark attributed to her that she thought she had married a king,
and found she had married a monk. To the Frenchman, Eleanor remained
always sympathetic, which is the more significant because, in
English tradition, her character suffered a violent and incredible
change. Although English history has lavished on Eleanor somewhat
more than her due share of conventional moral reproof, considering
that, from the moment she married Henry of Anjou, May 18, 1152, she
was never charged with a breath of scandal, it atoned for her want
of wickedness by French standards, in the usual manner of
historians, by inventing traits which reflected the moral standards
of England. Tradition converted her into the fairy-book type of
feminine jealousy and invented for her the legend of the Fair
Rosamund and the poison of toads.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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