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200 - What way of life the count led during peacetime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
Summary
Having heard how the count conducted himself in wartime, let us see how he lived in peacetime and then we will cease to talk further about him. On this matter, it is important you should know that his way of life in continually maintaining his estate was as follows. Both in time of peace and of war he was always accompanied by thirty squires, with fine horses and full suits of armour, dressed in fine clothes and maintained in such a manner that there was no lord in the kingdom whose men were better equipped. He disciplined these and the others who lived with him so well that he did not allow any of them to inflict harm or damage. In the places in which most often he used to stay, his men did not lodge in the town nor did he allow them to bring women along with them, except those who were married [who could bring their wives]. The men lodged in the castles in chambers and beds that the count ordered to be prepared, in order to prevent them from doing by night, through some unhappy circumstance, anything that they ought not to do. Nor did he allow any layman, and much less any priest, to live openly in mortal sin. When such people knew that he was coming to the place where they lived in that manner, they quickly made off elsewhere until he left. By mild-mannered persuasion he got men to marry their concubines, so that he fulfilled well in his house and lands the saying of Saint Augustine to his brother monks, ‘Si non castus, tamen cautus.’ If certain married women behaved badly, and he knew for sure that their husbands knew about it and consented to it, he banished them from his lands against the will of their husbands, saying that, because of the sins of the women, and theirs, since they consented to their conduct, he did not want God to vent His rage where he happened to be.
His land was very well governed, as regards justice, it being strictly forbidden for men to be in conflict with one another nor do one another harm.
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- Information
- The Chronicles of Fernão LopesVolume 4. The Chronicle of King João i of Portugal, Part II, pp. 439 - 441Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023