238 EVERYDAY LIFE
medieval ways and customs are only of yesterday. One such
glimpse remains clear in my memory. Caught by a heavy rain-
storm high up in the mountains of Aubrac, in the department of
the Cantal in France, I was forced to shelter in a wayside shed;
and, after a few minutes, was seen from the house, and invited to
enter. It was a meagre room, some fourteen feet square, and so
little light entered from a small window that it was difficult at
first to see clearly. The floor was of earth, and on a rude stone
hearth an old woman tended a wood fire and, from time to time,
stirred the soup. Two dark wooden cupboards filled up some of
the little space, and a home-made table of chestnut, a few chairs
and a couple of stools were all the other furniture, save for a
cradle rudely fashioned from a log of wood. The baby, swaddled
in medieval fashion, and but a few days old, lay in it; on its
crying, the mother (who had already risen from childbed) got
up from where she sat on the other side of the fire and hastened
to suckle it. She did not remove the child from the cot, but lifted
the cot itself, with the child in it, to her breast. She and her
mother talked to me while she did so, and explained how they
lived in this remote spot: their little garden grew much of their
food, and the strips of meadow and pasture round about but
barely provided for their cattle on which they depended. From
time to time the son-in-law went down the mountains to the fair
at Marjevols or Espalion, and from the sale of a cow was able to
purchase those necessaries which they were unable to grow or
fashion for themselves at home. It would be useless to press the
likeness to medieval conditions very far; but, at least, nobody
could fail to realise that here life was going on as it had done in
many particulars for countless generations. So too, in the narrow
village street at Salers, or atBesse-en-Chandesseinthe Auvergne,
or pushing our way through the market at Mauriac, and hearing
the raucous cries of the peasants as they bartered and sold, or
the clack of the old wives chattering and gossiping while still
endeavouring to get rid of chickens or vegetables—in such
pkces medieval daily life is once again before our eyes and
imagination.
Readers of The Nun's Priest's Tale will easily recognise how
similar were the conditions in which Chaucer's "poor widow"
lived to those of the Cantal peasants of 1930: