17 Gillmeister.indd
Transcription
17 Gillmeister.indd
What Literary Works Can Tell Us about Sports and Games: A Fifteenth-Century Example Heiner Gillmeister In the absence of any explicit records, one of the approaches to investigating medieval games is the analysis of literary works. For this essay, a poem by Jean Molinet has been singled out for this purpose. Written in the early 1490s in the Picard dialect, it celebrates the victory of Maximilian, then archduke of Austria and husband of the duchess of Burgundy, over the rebellious city of Ghent, an ally of the French. Molinet was born in Desvres halfway between Saint Omer and Boulogne-sur-Mer in Artois in 1435 and died, aged 72, in Valenciennes in Hainaut. Both places belonged at the time to the duchy of Burgundy, and indeed his allegiance to this duchy was a lifelong one. After studies in Paris where he obtained a master’s degree, Molinet in 1475 became the successor of the famous Burgundian court historiographer Georges Chastellain. In this capacity, he was, of course, a champion of the Burgundian cause in its struggle with the French king Charles VIII and his allies. One of these was the Flemish city of Ghent, and when Maximilian in 1492 eventually succeeded in capturing it, Molinet felt obliged to celebrate his master’s triumph in a ballad. The poem is part of a poetic tradition first instanced at the beginning of the fifteenth century in an English poem titled The Batayle of Agincourt, in which Henry V’s victory in the battle of Agincourt was described by an unknown English poet in terms of a contemporary tennis match. Here the canon balls hurled on the French Channel port of Harfleur are likened to the balls used in a tennis match, the guns — which all have names (very funny ones such as the King’s Daughter, Messenger etc.)1 — act as players who for the first time in history make use of the strange method of counting by fifteens 1 Guns have been named throughout history and those recorded in the Agincourt ballad seem to be the earliest known so far. The Dicke Berta, “Big Bertha,” the 42cm German howitzer of World War I, was so called after Berta Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the manufacturer’s wife. 365 366 Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Gillmeister 1997, p. 113). The motif of the tennis match as an allegory of a real battle was, as is well known, adapted much later by Shakespeare in his Henry V, but there are further examples of the genre in sixteenth-century Holland, e.g., a poem on the attack of the French on the city of Antwerp by Jeronimus van der Voort (1583), and another titled “Het Kaetspel van syne Excellentie” (1591) in which Cornelis van Nierwant, gunner in the Stadholder’s army, rejoices over the military triumphs of Maurits of Nassau over his papist enemies (Gillmeister 1997, p. 127; de Bondt, p. 69).2 Molinet belonged to the notorious school of the Rhetoricians, the literary output of which was characterized by an excessive use of wordplay.3 Molinet’s poem on the capture and subjugation of Ghent (described, as in the Agincourt ballad, in terms of a tennis match) is no exception. But although this device normally makes the reading of his and his contemporaries’ literary output extremely difficult, it is a blessing in this case. In order to bring his message home, Molinet had recourse to a real plethora of tennis terms. Not all the linguistic intricacies of the text will be dealt with here, only the particularly interesting ones which shed new light on the evolution of the tennis game will claim our attention.4 For the remainder, the reader is referred to the annotations to the poem in the appendix to this article. The whole poem is centred on an ingenious idea, that of the homonymy of the French words Gand, the name of the city of Ghent, and gant, denoting the precursor of the racquet, the glove. Hence, for instance, the double entendre in the first stanza: “l’archiduc d’Austrisse a Gand en main,” the archduke of Austria has Ghent in his hand, or has put on a glove. The wordplay itself, intriguing as it may be for the literary scholar, is of a special significance for the sports historian. In the fourth stanza, it is said that tennis at the time was played over a line which spanned the centre of the court. It has always been thought that the line (which 2 De Bondt’s source is Leendertz, 2, 30–34. 3 Cf. http://95.1911encyclopedia.org/M/MO/MOLINET_JEAN.htm 5 September 2004: “He is noteworthy as the head of the vicious [sic] Burgundian school of poetry known as the rhétoriqueurs, characterized by the excessive use of puns and of puerile metrical devices.” His friend Jean Lemaire des Belges called him “le chef et souverain de tous les orateurs et théoriciens de notre langue gallicane […] renommé par tous les quartiers d’Europe où ladite langue a lieu.” 4 A more comprehensive analysis of the poem (in German) has appeared in a festschrift dedicated to Rolf Lessenich, published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, Germany. A century after Molinet, Henri Estienne commented on the ways in which the vocabulary of tennis had penetrated ordinary French discourse (Estienne, pp. 135–137). What Literary Works Can Tell Us 367 constitutes an early form of the net) did not come into being before the 1530s and thus decidedly after the invention of the racquet which took place at the turn of the century (Gillmeister 1997, p. 49). Molinet now informs us that the line was apparently introduced well before the racquet: surprisingly, the players of his time still availed themselves of the good old glove, but disposed of a line! Another intriguing term is Molinet’s reference to coppenolles in the third stanza. On the literal level of the tennis game, the term denoted a silver coin, officially known as the double gros d’argent au lion de Flandre. The man in the street called it a coppenole after Jean Coppenole, a citizen from Ghent, who had been granted the right to coin it by the king of France.5 The coin was worth two gros deniers, and the gros denier, in turn, fifteen deniers or pence. Molinet in his poem testifies to the fact that in his days at least the great penny was staked in tennis, and this supports the theory that the strange counting method in tennis goes back to a specific French coin, the gros denier tournois, the great penny of Tours (Gillmeister 1997, pp. 123–125). In the first line of the fourth stanza, we find the phrase en mont et en vallee, which, of course, seems to make little sense unless one thinks of battles which can be fought on a hillside as well as in a valley. In a tennis match, however, a reference to hill and dale would seem irrelevant. Initiates to medieval and traditional tennis games, however, might know that in these games a terminological distinction was made between the party defending the so-called dedans, the gallery to the rear of the server, and their opponents, the former being referred to as playing upwards, the latter as those playing downwards (uppe and unne respectively, for example, in the oldest known tennis game, that of Germany’s Saterland). What we here have before us is, perhaps, the oldest terminological layer of competitive ball games reminding us that they all took as their model the medieval chivalric tournament. Here, in the subdiscipline of the passage of arms, the defenders of the castle gate used to be called those de amont, from above, the attackers as those de aval, from below. From the tournament, the terms were adopted into medieval football (there are notable instances of this usage from Italian calcio, the French game of soule and from traditional football in England).6 From football they found their way into 5 On the brothers Coppenole see Molinet, 3, 981, note to p. 255 (17); cf. also Dupire 1932, p. 243. 6 Cf. again Gillmeister 1997, pp. 88–96, and 2002b, pp. 111 and 113. Recently, yet another example of the old distinction between the upwards and downwards positions has come to light from Italian calcio, cf. Busetto, p. 234, who refers to a late 18th c. painting by Gabriel 368 Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe medieval tennis, that brand of football initially played by monks in the seclusion of their monasteries. Not only does Molinet avail himself of the terminology of tennis, he also draws upon that of skittles and chess.7 Chess allegories were very popular in the Middle Ages. Medievalists in general will be aware of Caxton’s attempt at writing one, and those familiar with Chaucer will recall his Book of the Duchess where the Black Knight complains about the loss of his Queen.8 The game of chess is another example of how the warfare of old gave rise to the invention of games, in much the same way as was the case with the medieval sham battle, the tournament. Chess originated in ancient India where it was called by a Sanskrit term caturanga meaning “consisting of four elements.” (Syed, pp. 13f.). These were the four divisions of the Indian army: division one, the king and his counsellor, occupied the centre and was flanked on either side by war chariots, elephants, and mounted knights (Syed, p. 47). Each of these divisions of elite fighters was, in turn, supported by ten foot soldiers (the pawns on our chessboards are what remains of them). The English noun chess goes back to the plural of Medieval French eschec (eschecs) (Gillmeister 2002a, p. 67). And this French plural is exemplified in the first line of stanza 8, although Molinet again could not refrain from creating another wordplay which was at least understood by those scribes who wrote jeu d’exés rather than jeu d’eschecs. The French, Molinet wants to insinuate, played their wicked game “excessively.”9 Of course, continuing his chess allegory Molinet is not quite correct: even in those days only one king held sway on the chessboard. Molinet however has a surplus of three, namely Frederick III who was both king of Bella, Il gioco del calcio a Sant’Alvise, that reproduces an engraving from Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’huomeni e donne venetiane (Venice, 1610). Busetto comments on the fact that the two teams were baptized “del monte” and “del piano.” 7 For an example of a late medieval skittles allegory see Gillmeister 1985, pp. 12 f. and fig. 3. The latter is a woodcut of 1522 depicting Luther in the company of the Pope and clerics and the Emperor with knights and his entourage; Luther is holding Holy Scriptures in the shape of a skittle ball in his left hand. The skittle alley represents “this earthly vale of tears” at the end of which laymen (the skittles) await their being knocked over. The wager at stake is life eternal. 8 9 On medieval chess allegories see Petschar, passim. This instance of wordplay apparently escaped the scribe who penned the variant “BC j. d’esches” = jeu des esches, cf. Dupire’s different reading of line 57. What Literary Works Can Tell Us 369 the German-Roman Empire and of Hungary, and his son Maximilian who had been crowned Roman king in Aachen in 1486. An interesting terminological development can be observed in the same stanza. In the Indian and later in the Persian and Arabic game, the “queen” was male, the king’s counsellor. Hence the medieval French name fierce, Middle English fers, the term used by Chaucer in his Book of the Duchess, both derived from Arabic.10 However, the fact that in Chaucer’s poem the fers on the allegorical plane clearly denoted a woman, namely Blanche, the Black Knight’s lady, may have paved the way for the introduction of the term queen, or in this case Molinet’s belle roynette, the ‘beautiful little queen’ referred to in stanza 8. In Molinet’s allegory, the beautiful little queen referred to is Anne de Bretagne, who had been married by proxy to Maximilian. In an act which caused an outcry in the German Empire,11 Charles VIII had abducted her in 1491 and married her on 6 December at Langeais Castle. Molinet’s hopes that Maximilian might snatch her away from Charles never materialized, however. But still his poem in a way proved to be prophetic. On 7 April 1498, when Charles wanted to show his spouse an interesting tennis match which was in progress in the moat of his castle of Amboise, and in a hurry to watch it, he crashed his forehead into a lintel and died as a result (Gillmeister 1997, pp. 21 and 308, n. 52).12 So in a literal sense he met his fate as a result of a tennis match. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn 10 Cf. The Book of the Duchess, vv. 651–654: “At the ches with me she [Fortune] gan to pleye; / With hir false draughtes dyvers / She staal on me and tok my fers” (Chaucer, p. 338). According to Chaucer, v. 663, chess was invented by Attalus III, king of Pergamos, who was described as its inventor in the thirteenth c. French Roman de la Rose, to which Chaucer is indebted here (Chaucer, p. 972, note). 11 12 Cf. Angermann, vol. 1, col. 656 f. Why the tennis match should have been staged in the castle moat remains a mystery. There existed fully-fledged tennis facilities in the castle proper. Cf. Androuet du Cerceau, who started his expeditions to the monuments he described and his research around 1550 (p. iii). In his description of the castle located above the banks of the river Loire he states, somewhat misleadingly, the following (p. 2): “Il y a un jeu de paulme en l’une des courts, pris dans terre comme en un fossé” [?]. Both his ground-plan (plate 6) and his aerial view (plate 8: “Face du coste de la riviere de Loire”) show a roofless court near the outer wall on the left and inside the plateau. There is a dedans supported by five pillars, a side gallery to its right running towards the viewer, and a sagging cord — precursor of the net — crossing the middle of the court. 370 Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe Appendix Jean Molinet, “Le jeu de palme” (after July 1492) 13 Vous qui vollés d’honneur porter le palme Et querir bruit soubz le sceptre romain, Venés esbattre et jouer a le palme, Car l’archiduc d’Austrisse a Gand en main, Qui estoit dur, rude, fort inhumain, A la main gauche et de fachon estroite, Mais aujourdhuy, sans attendre a demain, Est retourne a la bonne main droite. Gand, endurcy en sa vaine follie, A tant este frotté et manïet Qu’il s’est trouvé le peau fort amollie Par gens qui n’ont le bon sang regnïet You, who want to wear the palm of honour, and to seek fame under the Roman sceptre, Come to be edified and to play tennis, For the archduke of Austria14 has a glove15 on his fist/Ghent in his hand, Which had in a hard and inhuman manner been trussed up in the left hand, but has today without waiting until tomorrow returned to the good right hand. Et s’on lui a les doictiers racourchiet Nouvellement, par ung trenchant ciseau, Ghent/the glove, stubborn in her folly, has been so much chafed and cudgelled that she now finds that her skin is rather softened by people who have not denied their good blood, and if she has had her fingers curtailed recently, with a sharp pair of scissors, C’est pour le mieux: il est sy radouchiet then this is all the better: she has been Que l’on y entre ainsy qu’en ung houseau. made so supple that one slips into her [Ghent/the glove] as into a stocking. [or the ‘greave’ or leg-piece of a knight’s armour]. Quand on a mis en jeu les coppenolles, Gaigniet avons quarante cincq pour trente; Ceux qui s’y sont rompus col et canolles, Pour nous grever ont receut povre rente; Joueurs avons de puissance excellente, Bons enseigneurs, gens qui gardent les For when the double silver groats were staked, we had the lead by 45 points to thirty; those who broke their neck and windpipe16 Trying to harm us have had little gain; we have players in excellent shape, good coaches, people who guard the 13 Quoted from Molinet 1, 254–257 for the date of the poem see Dupire 1932, p. 32. 14 Maximilian I who had married Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. 15 Wordplay on gant, ‘glove’ and the French name of the Flemish city of Ghent. 16 Allusion to the fact that the brothers Coppenole were either hanged or beheaded; cf. Molinet, Glossary, p. 1064 . What Literary Works Can Tell Us 371 gaiges wagers 17 Et racacheurs qui n’ont coeur ne bras lentes, and volleyers whose courage and arms are Pour enverser Franchois plains de not slow to give the French braggarts a good langaiges. hiding. Dessus la corde, en mont et en vallee, En plains guillés18 ou en jeus fort estrois, Tant a revers, de bont que de vollee, Prestz de jouer sommes trois contre trois: Nous esperons que verrons les trois roix Prendre l’estoeuf au roialme de France, Pour tapper ens coups si puissans et rois Que Francillons auront griefve souffrance. Franchois, Gantois, Liegois et Brabenchons, Par mal entendre au compte et faultes grandes, Ont contre nous perdus plusseurs parchons,20 Dont maintenant recepvons leurs offrandes; Se les Franchois ont mengie nos vïandes Over the line, serving and receiving, on flat skittle alleys or in very narrow courts, backhand, on the [first] bounce as well as on the volley, we are ready to play, three against three; we hope to see the three kings19 snatching the ball away from the kingdom of France, to hit it there so powerfully and hard that the Frenchies will really suffer. Frenchmen, people from Ghent, Liège and Brabant, by misunderstanding the score and major faults, have lost against us several games Par fin malice, ainsy qu’ilz font tousjours, Pour les ravoir avons les mains friandes: and that is why we now receive their reparations; if the French, by their ignominious perfidy, have eaten up our provisions the way they always have done, then we are itching to get them back: Le coeur fait l’oeuvre et non point les longs jours. the (bold) heart completes the task and not sluggishness. Par cy devant avons eu plusseurs faultes Sans riens gaignier, et sur nos propres thois;21 That is why we had many disadvantages, winning nothing, even in our home courts. Thus it is only proper for us 17 Greimas paraphrases garder les gaiges as ‘demeurer simple spectateurs du combat,’ sitters on the fence, onlookers. 18 Molinet, Glossary, p. 1106 : guillet, plur. guillés, jeu de quilles, i.e., bowling. 19 See above p. 368–369. 20 Subdivisions of a game of jeu de la paume (Molinet, Glossary, p. 1131). 21 Mod. French toits, roofs, meaning here the slanting side roof of an indoor court onto which the serve was made; thus a metonymy for the court itself. 372 Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe Se nous convient retourner sus les haultes to return to the elevated strongholds Fortes maisons de Bourgonne et d’Arthois. roofs of the courts] of Burgundy and Artois. Se nous bouttons avec les quatre dois If we serve with four fingers, while the Le pauch 22 en gand et le main avons saine, thumb is in the glove [while we have Ghent under control], having a healthy hand into the bargain, Tel coup d’estoeuf tapperons en lourdois, we will strike the ball so powerfully that Que l’envoirons dela Paris sus Seine we will send it beyond Paris on the Seine. Franchois ont eust beau jeu longue saison, Mais s’il plaist Dieu, nous arons l’avantaige The French have long had an easy game, but if it please God we will have the advantage at last and win the match, Et gaignerons le jeu, car sans raison for without reason they come to play in Ils vont jouant, sur nostre carpentaige, our own court [lit. carpentry]23 De nos estoeus et en nostre heritaige, and with our balls and in our heritage, Et s’ont promis, affin que ame n’y rue, and have indeed promised (in order that nobody might strike back) De restaurer tout, mais pour tout potaige to restore everything; but instead of paying for the drinks [which the losing Ce n’est que vent: tout vient a riens sur rue. party was obliged to] there is only a gust of wind and nothing comes of it in the street [i.e., when they have left the indoor tennis court]. Franchois expers au fait du jeu d’exés Samblablement ont mattés les Bretons, Mais nous, par force et sans nuls mauvais ghés,24 Au droit du jeu, nos palmes aprestons; Ils ont remy rocq, chevalier, pions, Et retenu la belle roynette, Mais nous avons roix, rocq et champions, Qui l’amenront en nostre maison nette. Prince puissant, rice fleur de noblesse, 22 The French are experienced in the game of chess/excess [see above, p. 368], in the same way they have checkmated the Bretons, but we will, by strength and not by bad tricks, On the right side of the court, get our hands ready. They have restored castle, knight, and pawns, and kept the beautiful little queen; but we have kings, castle and champions to restore her to our stately mansion. Powerful Prince, precious flower Mod. French pouce, thumb. 23 There is every likelihood that the noun carpentaige denotes the roof of the gallery, the penthouse in Real Tennis, and does not simply mean ‘building’, ‘residence.’ 24 Ghet, guet, embûche, ‘ambush’ (Molinet, Glossary, p. 1103). What Literary Works Can Tell Us 373 Qui Gand avés attrapet a vos filz, Livrés en jeu de celluy qui nous blesse, Servés25 le roy et l’archiduc son fils;26 Droit est pour nous, j’en suis bien assoufis, of nobility, who did seize Ghent for your sons, given as a stake to him who hurts us, serve the king and his son, the archduke; the right is with us, that is something I am convinced of; Tappés grandz cops, le parchon vaille deux; may you hit magnificent strokes, may the game count for two; Les Franchillons vallent que desconfis; the Frenchies are worth being discomfited; L ‘estoeuf vous quiert et il s’eslonge d’eulx. the ball seeks you, and avoids them. Works Cited Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques (1579) Le second volume des plus excellents bastiments de France. Paris: Gilles Beys; new enlarged ed. Paris: A. Lévy, 1870. Angermann, Norbert, et al., eds. (1980–1999) Lexikon des Mittelalters. 9 vols. Munich: Artemis Verlag. Busetto, Giorgio (1995) Cento scene di vita veneziana. Pietro Longhi e Gabriel Bella alla Querini Stampaglia. Venice: Fondazione Scientifica Querini Stampalia. Chaucer, Geoffrey (1987) The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Cockburn, J. S. (ed.) (1979) Calendar of the Assize Records. Kent Indictments Elizabeth I. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Cornwallis, Sir Charles (1641) A Discourse of the most Illustrious Prince Henry, late Prince of Wales. Written, Anno 1626, bi Sir Charles Cornwallis, Kt., sometimes Treasurer of his Highnesse House. London: printed for John Benson; repr. in Lord Somers and Sir Walter Scott, eds., A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts […], 2nd ed., 13 vols., London 1809–1815, 1, 217–225. De Bondt, Cees (1993) Heeft yemant lust met de bal, of met reket te spelen …?’Tennis in Nederland 1500–1800. Hilversum: Verloren. Dupire, Noël (1932) Jean Molinet, La vie — les œuvres. Paris: Librairie E. Droz. 25 This may well bet he first occurrence of the term servir used for the opening stroke in tennis. 26 Frederick III, who died in 1493, and his son Maximilian I. Who then is the Prince addressed in the first line? It could be Frederick again, and servés could be a summons to the common people to support him and his son. 374 Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe ________ (1939) “Mots rares des Faictz et Dictz de Jean Molinet.” Romania 65, 1–38. Estienne, Henri (1896) La precellence du langage françois, éd. E. Huguet. Paris: Armand Colin; orig. ed. Paris: Mamert Patisson, 1579. Gillmeister, Heiner (1985) “Trousser son sac et ses quills. Petite histoire du jeu de quills” in Kegel und Kugel [exhibition catalogue]. Basel: Schweizerisches Sportmuseum Basel. ________ (1990) Kulturgeschichte des Tennis. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. ________ (1997) Tennis. A Cultural History. London: Leicester University Press. ________ (2002a) Second Service. Kleine Geschichte der englischen Sprache. Sankt Augustin: Asgard Verlag. ________ (2002b) “Les sports et les jeux: origines et diffusion” in: Jean-Marc Silvain and Noureddine Seoudi (eds.), Regards sur le sport. Hommage à Bernard Jeu. Collection UL3 travaux et recherches. Lille: Université Charles de Gaulle, pp. 105–126. Greimas, A. J. (1968) Dictionnaire de l’ancien français jusqu’au milieu de XIVe siècle. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Larousse. Leendertz, Pieter (ed.) (1924–25) Het Geuzenliedboek; Naar de oude drukken Uit de nalatenschap van Dr E. T. Kuiper. 2 vols. Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie. Molinet, Jean (1936–1939) Les faictz et dictz, ed. Noël Dupire. 3 vols. Paris : Société des Anciens Textes Français. Petschar, H. (1995) “Das Schachspiel in der Literatur; Schachbücher, Schachallegorien,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 7. Munich: Lexma Verlag, col. 1428–1430. Syed, Renate (2001) Kanauj, die Maukharis und das Caturanga. Der Ursprung des Schachspiels und sein Weg von Indien nach Persien. Kelkheim/Ts.: Förderkreis Schach-Geschichtsforschung e.V What Literary Works Can Tell Us 375 Figure 19.1: A fifteenth-century tennis-court with its carpentaige, the slanting roof onto which the ball had to be sent by an underarm stroke in order to start a rally. A marker is standing in the doorway, his job being to indicate a chase by means of a wooden tablet on the pitch. On the far left, swinging a purse filled with coppenolles, a fan demonstrates that money was staked in medieval tennis. Strangely enough, the woodcut was designed by the Master of Anne de Bretagne, the “little queen” of Molinet’s poem. Simon Vostre, Hore beate marie virginis secundum Vsum Romanum, Paris, c.1510 (Month of November). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich, Im. mort. 37. On the provenance of this miniature see Wieck, p. 33.