Setting Adrift in Mediæval Law and Literature

Abstract

Midway in his canticus the woeful Troilus laments: “Al sterelees within a boot am I.” This might seem to be nothing more than a felicitous phrase aptly suited to describe the plight of the unhappy lover. But in the Man of Law's Tale Constance actually experienced the dreadful circumstances which gave rise to a metaphor. We remember that the old soldaness, after killing her son and his Christian partisans, caused the Roman bride to be put on a ship without a rudder, and bade her learn navigation back to Italy. What treasure Constance had brought to Syria was put into the boat with her, as well as a considerable supply of victuals and clothes. For a number of years thereafter Constance tossed about on the sea, preserved from harm and death by Him who saved Daniel and Jonah, until her ship stuck fast on the shore of Northumberland, where she was found by the constable of a castle who came down to search the wreck. Soon after Constance's marriage to King Ælla of Northumberland, the monarch was called away to fight his enemies. Ælla's mother, like the old soldaness of Syria, hated her son's wife and plotted her destruction. When Constance's child was born the old queen contrived that the message to Ælla announcing the news should report the birth of a monster, with the suggestion that Constance was an evil fairy; and for the king's reply she substituted a command that the young woman and her offspring should be placed in the ship in which she had been found originally,—that is, a ship without rudder in the beginning, and now, apparently, a wreck,—that she should be pushed out from shore and charged never to return. The salient facts in these two episodes, which we may call Constance I and Constance II, are: Expulsion by sea in an unseaworthy boat, setting adrift in the same kind of boat by reason of a serious indictment, and safe-conduct or protection by a mysterious or divine power.