The Shield over the Basin

by Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I, Chrétien, who have jointed this tale, had it from a nun of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains at Troyes, an old woman with one eye gone white, who told it to the girls she was teaching to spin; and she told it, as women at the spindle will, from the end first, because a girl will sit still for an end if she is paid it in advance. She began with two knights at a crossroads under four oaks, one lying on his back with his helm off and the other sitting in the road with that one's head in his lap, and a priest coming up the road on a mule, and a lady sitting her palfrey a little way off who would not get down. Then she went back and told how they came there, and told it out of order, and lost a piece one lesson and found it the next. The matter is hers, and her grandmother's before her. I have put the crossroads last, where it can lean on what came first, and if it will not bear the weight, the fault is in my jointing and not in her spinning.

At Ascension King Arthur held court at Caradigan, and after mass, while the young knights were in the meadow below the walls trying horses and the cooks were shouting in the yard, a charcoal-burner came up the forest road leading a bay horse with a knight laid across its saddle. He was black to the elbows, as they are, and he was frightened, and when the squires ran down to take the bridle he would not give it up, because he had been told to bring the horse to Caradigan and had not been told that he might stop.

The knight was Hervi of Montescler, and he was dead, and had been dead two days.

They brought the charcoal-burner into the hall, where he stood on the rushes with his cap in his hands and the whole court looking at his feet, and the king had him given wine, and he told what he had seen. His name was Hamon. He kept a pit in the forest of Lirac, near the place where the Lis road crosses the road to the salt-pans, which the country people call the Four Oaks, because there are four of them, one at each corner, and they are older than anyone's grandfather. He had heard blows from his pit and gone up through the hazels to look. By the time he reached the road one knight was on the ground and the other was getting back on his horse, a big grey, and the shield on the grey's saddle-bow was gold with a black hound on it running. The knight on the ground had asked the other, twice, for a priest. Hamon heard him ask. The knight on the grey looked down at him a while with his ventail up, and then turned the grey's head and rode north at a trot.

So Hamon went to him, and the knight on the ground told him that if he would find him a priest he should have the horse, and if he came back and found him dead he should take the horse and the knight on it to Caradigan to his brother, and not to sell either. The nearest priest was the hermit at the Cold Well, two leagues off. Hamon ran there, and the hermit was gone down to the valley to his sister, who was lying in; and he ran back, and it was evening, and Hervi was dead in the road with his hands put together on his breast as well as a man can put them who has a wound under the arm.

That was all Hamon knew, and he said it twice, the second time worse, and then he wept, though nobody had blamed him.

Lords, you should know what the court said that evening at the tables, because it was a true measure and I will not alter it. It did not say that Hervi had been foully killed. His wound was in front, under the arm where the hauberk laces, and a man struck there was struck by someone facing him; it may be the quarrel was Hervi's, for he was quick, and it may be the knight of the hound had the right of it. Nobody knew. What the court said, at every table, from the king's down to the squires', was the priest. A knight may kill a man fairly in the morning and be a good knight at dinner. A knight who rides away from a man asking for a priest has done a thing that no fairness in the fighting reaches.

Hervi's brother Aufroi was at that court, a young man and not yet of great pris, and that night, in the chapel, with the king and the queen and my lord Gauvain present to hear it, he swore on the relics there that he would find the knight of the black hound and do to him what was owed. He used that word. The queen, they say, looked at him when he used it, as though she would have asked him which debt he meant, and did not ask.

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He rode out the next morning and was four weeks finding nothing. He asked at forges whether they had shod a big grey for a knight with a hound on his shield, and at abbeys whether such a knight had lodged, and of pedlars, and of a boy minding geese, who said he had seen a knight with a dog on his shield and turned out to mean a lion. He crossed the Lis twice. He slept at three abbeys and under a cart. A man looking for one shield finds that the world is full of shields, and that the most of them are red.

At the end of the fourth week, on a Thursday, in country he did not know, the sky went the colour of a slate roof at none, and a hail came down out of it the size of beans, so thick that his horse turned its tail to it and would not go on; and he got down and led it, with the hail rattling on his helm like dried peas in a pan, toward the only thing he could see, which was a light on a hill. I do not say God threw that hail for him. I say it fell, and that it fell there, and that it drove him to one gate and not another, and you may make of that what a man makes of weather.

The castle was called Roche-Brune, and the lord of it came down to the gate himself with a torch, a big man, grey in the beard, who walked a little lame on his left side, and he had the gate opened wide for a stranger in the hail without asking a thing, which was well done and the custom of that country. His squire took Aufroi's horse and Aufroi's sword, as is right at a gate, and hung the sword on a peg in the gatehouse among the swords of the household. And the lord, whose name was Gormant, did his guest the honour of unlacing his helm with his own hands in the doorway of the hall, and lifted it off, and stood holding it under his arm while his lady came with the basin.

Her name was Ermesent, and she was a tall woman with a long face and very steady hands, and she brought the basin herself, which is a great courtesy, and a maid behind her with the towel; and she set it on the stand by the hearth and poured the water warm from the ewer over the guest's hands, and Aufroi bent over the basin to wash, and the water ran over his wrists, warm, smelling of the bay leaves she had put in it, and he looked up from it to thank her and saw, on the wall above the basin, where any guest who washed at that stand must look whether he would or no, a shield.

It was gold, with a black hound running on it, and the paint on the hound's head was new, brighter than the rest, where someone had painted it over after a blow had taken it off.

The water went on running over his hands, because she went on pouring.

Behind him Gormant stood with the helm, and he saw where his guest was looking, and he saw his guest's hands stop in the water; and he did what a host does when his guest has washed, which was to ask his name.

Aufroi told him, and whose brother he was.

I will tell you what Gormant did then, and I will not tell you what he was thinking, because the nun did not know and nor do I. He set the helm down on the bench by the door very carefully, as a man sets down a cup that is full to the brim. He unbuckled his own sword belt, which he was wearing in his own hall as lords do, and he crossed to the wall and hung it on the peg under the shield, so that the sword hung beneath the hound. Then he came and sat down at the board beside his guest, on the side of his guest's right hand, where a man can be reached most easily, and took up the knife and carved for him.

They ate. There was a heron, and white bread, and a cheese from the hills, and a wine that had come a long way and was the better for the journey. Gormant carved and Aufroi ate what he was given, and the lady poured for both of them and filled her husband's cup no fuller than the guest's, and the household at the low tables, who did not know anything, talked of the hail.

Lords, you will ask me why Aufroi did not get up from that board and do what he had sworn. He had no sword; it hung in the gatehouse. But if he had had it at his side I tell you it would have made no difference, because he had taken that man's water on his hands and let that man take the helm off his head, and he was eating that man's bread, carved by that man's knife, and a knight who strikes his host at the host's own board is a thing for which no court has a name, since no court has ever needed one. And Gormant knew it, and that was why he sat on the right hand. He could have sat anywhere.

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They gave him the chamber over the gate, with a good bed. He lay in it and did not sleep, and some time after matins there was a light under the door, and the lady Ermesent came in with a candle and her maid behind her, and stood at the foot of the bed.

She asked him a boon.

He granted it before she had said what it was. That was the custom of that court, and the knights of it did so always, because to ask a lady what she wants before you grant it is to bargain with her like a fishwife; and I tell you plainly that I have seen what comes of the custom in more than one tale and do not like it, and that I would not alter it in this one by a word. He granted it lying in her husband's bed, under her husband's roof, and she knew what she was doing when she asked it there.

The boon was this: that he would not fight her lord at the gate of Roche-Brune when he rode out, nor anywhere on Roche-Brune's land, but at the Four Oaks in the forest of Lirac, and nowhere else; and that she might ride there with them.

He said that it was granted.

She turned to go, and at the door she turned back and said one thing more. She said that it was she who had had the shield hung above the basin, at Ascension, when her lord came home with the hound's head broken. He had wanted it put away in the armoury. Then she went out with the candle and the maid, and the chamber was dark, and she did not come back.

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In the morning Gormant was in the yard, armed, on the big grey, with the hound on his arm, and Aufroi's horse saddled beside it, and Aufroi's sword handed to him at the gate by the same squire, and the lady on her palfrey; and they rode out of the gate together, the three of them, and once they were past the bounds of Roche-Brune neither man owed the other anything but what had been owed since Ascension.

It is two days from Roche-Brune to the Four Oaks. They lay the night between in a hut of hurdles that shepherds had left, with the horses hobbled outside, and the lady slept within, and the two knights sat without, by a fire of thorn; and when it came to sleeping Gormant said he would take the first watch, and laid his sword across his knees, and Aufroi lay down by the fire with his back to him and slept. Then in the second half of the night Aufroi watched with his sword across his knees, and Gormant slept with his back to him. I put it to you that it is a harder thing to sleep with your back to a man you mean to kill, or who means to kill you, than to fight him, and that both of them did it, and that neither of them so much as looked round. The nun said they both snored. I believe her. She had it from her grandmother, and her grandmother's people had been in that country.

They came to the Four Oaks at tierce on the second day. Hamon was there, because his pit was there, and when he saw the grey horse and the gold shield coming up the Lis road he dropped his rake and would have run into the hazels, but Aufroi called him by name and he stopped.

Gormant got down off the grey. He asked Hamon to show him where. Hamon looked at Aufroi, and Aufroi said nothing, and Hamon went into the middle of the crossroads and stood a little to the north side of it, by the wheel-ruts, and pointed at the ground, where the grass had come up again through the dust and there was nothing to see. Gormant went and stood on the place. He stood there as long as a man takes to say his Credo, or longer, with his helm on, and nobody could see his face; and then he walked back to the grey and got up into the saddle, heavily, on his lame side, and took his lance from Hamon, and rode to the far side of the crossroads, and turned.

The lady sat her palfrey under the westernmost oak and watched.

They ran at each other twice with lances, and the first time both broke and the second time Aufroi's lance went in over the rim of the gold shield and through the mail at the shoulder and carried Gormant out over the grey's crupper onto the road. Then they fought on foot with swords, a long while, longer than I will tell, because a fight told blow by blow is a fight the hearer has stopped listening to; and Gormant was the stronger man and the better swordsman and he was hurt and lame, and Aufroi was young and whole, and at the end of it Gormant's helm was beaten loose on its laces and Aufroi struck him under the arm, where the hauberk laces, in the same place, and Gormant went down on his back in the dust at the north side of the crossroads and did not get up.

Aufroi stood over him with the sword.

Gormant got his helm off. He did not ask for mercy. He looked up at Aufroi and asked him, once, for a priest.

Now you see what was owed, lords, and so did Aufroi, and so did the lady under the oak, who had arranged it so. He had sworn on the relics at Caradigan to do to the knight of the hound what was owed, and here it was, the very measure of it, to the place and to the wound and to the word: to look at him a while, and turn his horse's head, and ride north at a trot. Nobody in that court would have called it anything but justice. It was justice. I do not say it was not.

Gormant saw him look at the horse, and told him to go, since it was owed.

Aufroi said that it was owed, and put up his sword, and did not go.

He sent Hamon running to the Cold Well for the hermit, two leagues, and called after him to bring the man if he had to carry him. Then he unlaced his own helm and threw it in the road and sat down in the dust at the north side of the crossroads, where his brother had lain, and took Gormant's head into his lap, and held it there, and pressed the heel of his hand against the wound under the arm to keep the blood in, as well as a man can who has nothing to stop it with but his hand; and the lady sat her palfrey under the westernmost oak and did not get down, though her husband was lying in the road, and did not call out to either of them, and did not weep that anyone saw. Whether she would not get down because she had brought him there to be measured and would not stand between him and the measure, or because she could not, the nun did not say, and I have not supplied it.

So they waited, in the heat of the day, with the flies coming, and toward none a man on a mule came up the Lis road from the valley, at the pace a mule goes, which nobody in this world has ever yet been able to hurry.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christiānō Trecēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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