Note IV — Casal des Plains and Casal des Bains
I have ventured, in defiance of the printed text of the Estoire, to follow the writer of the Itinerarium in giving to Richard’s lurking-place on the night of January 2-3, 1192, the name of Casal of the Baths. “Casellum Balneorum” occurs in the Itinerarium twice. In p. 298 we read that while the host lay between Lydda and Ramlah “pluviae a sedibus nostris nos exturbabant, intantum ut rex Jerosolimorum et gens nostra infra S. Georgium ad hospitandum se transferrent et in Ramulam, comes vero de S. Paulo ad Casellum Balneorum.” The last eight words are not represented at all in the Estoire. In pp. 306, 307, of the Itinerarium we are told: “Tertia post Circumcisionem Domini die, cum exercitus noster ad progrediendum” [from Lydda and Ramlah to Beit Nuba] “se sollicitus expediret, deformium multitudo Turcorum qui eadem nocte praeterita juxta Casellum de Planis in insidiis delituerant inter frutecta prosiliit diluculo in viam observandam per quam noster transiturus erat exercitus.... Rex quippe Ricardus, cui prius innotuerat de praedictis Turcorum insidiis, propterea quaque eadem nocte ad Casellum Balneorum consederat in insidiis, ut videlicet insidiantibus insidiaret, mane progrediens,” etc. In the Estoire the corresponding passage runs thus: “Tier jor d’an noef, la matinee, Esteit une ovre destinee; Sarazins, les laides genz brunes, Sor le Casal des Plains as dunes Le seir devant ja se bucherent, E tote nuit illoc guaiterent Desqu’al matin que il saillirent Al chemin de l’ost.... Le rei d’Engletere aveit, Qui cel embuchement saveit, Por ço al Casal des Plains geu,” etc. (ll. 7717-24, 7729-31).
It has been suggested that the “Casellum Balneorum” of Itin., 298, may represent Amwas (= “Fountains”), otherwise called Nicopolis (see Stubbs’s note to Itin., l.c.). This identification is possible; but it seems very unlikely that a small fraction of the host should, for no apparent reason, put itself so nearly into the lion’s mouth by going to camp eight or nine miles in advance of the rest, and less than two miles from the encampment of Saladin, which at that time was at Natroun. Moreover, in a later passage common to Estoire (l. 9846) and Itinerarium (369) we find “la fontaine d’Esmals,” “ad fontem Emaus,” in a context which plainly shows that these names stand for Amwas-Nicopolis; but in p. 307 of Itinerarium the context seems to preclude an identification of Casellum Balneorum with Emaus = Amwas, and to point to some place much further north or north-west; and later commentators have found such a place, bearing a name which translates the Latin one more exactly than Amwas, in Umm-el-Hummum, near Mirabel. On the other hand, the extant text of the Estoire, as we have seen, has nothing at all answering to “Castellum Balneorum”; it makes the Turkish ambush and the king spend the night of January 2-3 at, or close to, one and the same place, the Casal of the Plains. Whence, then, did the Latin writer get his “Casal of the Baths”? He can hardly have invented it for himself. If his work be really a translation of that of Ambrose, he must either have made it from a copy which had Bains, not Plains, in l. 7731, or he must have had some other source of information which made him deliberately substitute “Baths” for “Plains” in his rendering of that line. The substitution cannot be explained as a misreading on his part, since “Casal des Plains” in l. 7720 is correctly represented in his text by “Casellum de Planis.” That he knew, from a source other than the Estoire, something about the Casal of the Baths is clear from his earlier mention of that place, in p. 298. A different theory as to the relation between the two books suggests that that source may have been personal knowledge. However this may be, his second mention of “Casellum Balneorum” certainly makes the passage in which it occurs far more intelligible than the corresponding passage in the existing text of the Estoire. Ambrose’s story, as it stands there, is scarcely credible. The Turks and the king lie in wait for one another all night, the former “on the sandhills above the Casal of the Plains,” the latter at the Casal of the Plains itself, yet neither party catches the other till, evidently to the utter surprise of the Turks, they meet before the camp at Ramlah or Lydda, to which they must, if this version of the affair be correct, have ridden at almost the same time, parallel with and in close proximity to each other for about eight miles, and almost from one and the same starting-point! Surely, by the light—whencesoever derived—of the Latin version, we can see that either Ambrose himself or the scribe of the extant MS. of his work has erroneously written Plains instead of Bains in l. 7731; a mistake which might very easily be made, owing to the occurrence of “Plains” only eleven lines above, and the absence of any mention of Casal des Bains elsewhere in the poem.