A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Ladies of the court were not reticent. Joan, widowed Countess of Holland, called the Fair Maid of Kent, whom the Black Prince married in 1361, was considered “the fairest lady in all the kingdom of England” and “the most amorous.” She wore daring and extravagant clothes copied from the dresses of the “bonnes amies of the brigands of Languedoc.” At tournaments, to the scandal of the people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and daggers in pouches, riding fine coursers and palfreys, they exhibited a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at the scorn of the crowd.” No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. For some reason a particular immorality was attached to it, perhaps because it altered God’s arrangements. Demons in purgatory were said to punish the practice by sticking “hot burning awls and needles” into every hole from which a hair had been plucked. When a hermit was frightened by a dream about a lady suffering this treatment, an angel comforted him saying, “She had well deserved the pain.” As satirized by Jean de Meung through the mouth of the Duenna in the Roman de la Rose, the concerns of a 13th to 14th century lady were not peculiar to the Middle Age...