Courtship

 Courtship, as the name implies, is something that is done at court.  We are talking here not about a law court but about a king's or great lord's court, where he (or she) would gather all their powerful men and women around them.  Now in fact a law court and an aristocratic court were essentially the same thing in the Middle Ages, as the great lords were the law-givers, but let's focus on courtship for now.

At its most basic courtship meant making a case to a powerful person that one's position should be supported.  There might be only a small difference between asking for a grant of property as a favor (in return, of course though probably unsaid explicitly, for loyalty) and asking for a favorable ruling in a legal case.  All great lords were surrounded by petitioners, and the lords' wives often in effect had their own courts, with petitioners of their own.  Someone who feared a duke might not look kindly on their petition would start with the duchess, in the hope that if he could persuade her, she might persuade her husband.

In a broader sense, "courtship" applies to men seeking the affection and favor of women.  Women were petitioned for their love in the same way that a petitioner might ask a count for the revenue from a toll bridge.  We in fact still use the term courtship in that way, asking for a woman's love, even though the idea of sweet-talking a great lord into making one gifts has fallen by the wayside.  As scholars have recently demonstrated, women, especially aristocratic women, had a great deal of authority in the Middle Ages, so such courting made sense.

At a great lord's court a number of young people might be assembled, some hoping to rise in the world through association with the powerful, some there as hostages for a parent's good behavior.  With few responsibilities day to day, these young men and women enjoyed hunting and hawking, playing games like chess, and especially having romantic entanglements.  As a student of mine once said, like college without the muss and fuss of going to class.

The women gave every sign of having had a blast.  They could act coy, or allow an embrace, or give way to jealousy, or have secret trysts, or gossip mercilessly.  Because the men were asking for anything from a sweet smile to a kiss to a whole lot more, they were in a subservient position, the humble petitioner, making gifts in the hopes of winning that smile (or something more).  Women at the court of Champagne in the twelfth century made up a whole lot of arbitrary rules for the men to follow (which has led some scholars who ought to know better to suggest that there were clear mandates for "courtly love" throughout the Middle Ages).

Financial transactions as a part of romance may seem odd to us today, but not to the wealthy who now routinely draw up pre-nuptial agreements.  Not just among the well to do young people at court, but among all of medieval society, marriage arrangements involved discussions about money.  There was the dowry to decide on, what the bride would bring to the marriage, and the dower, what would be settled on her if her husband died.  Potential inheritance and very cost of the wedding required discussion.  So a man of whatever status looking for a wife would engage in courtship that might begin with a gift of something like a ring or a puppy to engage the woman's affection but quickly became much more financially serious.

Such courting was not restricted to men looking for a wife.  The duchess being "courted" so that she would persuade her husband to grant someone a toll bridge would receive gifts and asked for her "love" as well as her agreement, such love not being actually romantic, though it used the same language, but rather something closer to a friendly business deal.

The single women found in many late medieval cities, running businesses or working in crafts and trades, would also be courted, by men looking not necessarily for a wife but for female companionship, of a variety of possible sorts.  The poverty in which many of these women lived could be alleviated by allowing men to court them -- as well as providing entertainment and friendship.  The January 2024 issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum has a good article about late medieval single women being courted in cities.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval women, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

The Cerne Abbas Giant

On a hillside above the English village of Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, there is an outline of a gigantic figure.  He is naked and carrying a huge club.  The outline is done with white chalk, the rock underlying the region.  Little ditches dug into the soil are filled with pieces of chalk.  An informative sign erected along the highway below the hillside explains that the giant is 180 feet tall and goes on to give the dimensions of his club and several other aspects, though on one point the sign is strangely silent.

Understandably, people have long wondered who might have created this figure and what he is supposed to represent.  Most commonly he is considered to be a depiction of the Roman demigod Hercules, who too was often pictured naked and carrying a large, knotted club.  Hercules was usually seen holding a lion skin, and although the Cerne Abbas giant certainly has no lion skin, his outstretched left hand might have been draped with something in the past.

Incidentally, Christian Europe was perfectly comfortable with a pagan figure like Hercules, who was treated like a myth or fable.  The throne in Rome on which Emperor Charles the Bald sat in 875, after being crowned emperor by the pope, was decorated with ivory plates depicting the life and deeds of Hercules.

The question of whether the giant might once have been holding a lion skin gets to a fundamental issue, that there is nothing permanent about this giant.  Unlike a statue, which once carved stays (relatively) the same, the giant is chalk lines surrounded by grass.  Grass likes to grow over gaps, as anyone who sets stepping-stones into a lawn knows.  Because the giant is on a hillside, it is easy for silt to wash down over the chalk  The local people have long gone out every few years to clear away grass and renew the chalk lines, usually by adding more bits of chalk.  Over the years lines can move or, if not renewed, disappear.

After all, the people working on the lines wouldn't be able to see the big picture, being too close to it.  A vague shape intended to depict a lion skin, hanging from the left arm, might have seemed like a mistake, something to quietly ignore.  The so called White Horse of Uffington, another hillside depiction done in chalk (not far from the giant though done far earlier), seems to have moved considerably over the years, based on old drawings; it might not even have been originally intended as a horse.

 

But when was the Cerne Abbas giant originally created?  Dates have been suggested ranging from the Stone Age to the seventeenth century, when churchwarden accounts note a payment of three shillings "for repair of the giant."  Most recently however it has been argued that the giant was from the Anglo-Saxon era, the early Middle Ages.  Hercules was a well known personage in medieval art, so a gigantic masculine figure might have been made to look like him, even if not specifically intended to show a Roman demigod.

The most recent arguments, in an article in the new (January 2024) issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum, written by Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos, propose that the giant, visible from far away and projecting a strong manly aura, marked a place where armies would gather. Archaeology of the layers of chalk added over the years suggests that the giant was originally created around the time the Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Vikings.

An intriguing reinterpretation of the giant seems to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  An abbey located at Cerne (why it is called Cerne Abbas) claimed to have the relics of Saint Eadwold, a holy man supposedly from an Anglo-Saxon royal family who became a hermit.  The monks appear to have sought to depict the giant on the hillside above their abbey as their saint—a saint whose pilgrim staff sprouted buds and twigs when he found his appropriate hermitage site—though even scantily clad hermits usually did not get as naked as Hercules.

One final note:  The most recent scholarship dispenses with the notion that the giant was a depiction of a pagan god named Helith (who is mentioned nowhere else).  A sixteenth-century antiquarian, reading a thirteenth-century rather confused account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons five centuries earlier, said that in ancient Dorset a god named Helith was worshiped.  In the eighteenth century it was suddenly announced that the giant was this god.  This is all very implausible.

I myself have always been struck by the tradition established locally, from Anglo-Saxon times through Normans and Tudors and all the changes that have affected England over the last millennium and a half, to go out regularly and tend to the chalk images.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Anglo-Saxons and medieval monasteries, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in print.

Villages

 We tend to think of medieval villages as small and compact, stone houses close together, with a castle and a church at the center.

Now in fact plenty of medieval villages were built with all the houses close together, along narrow streets, and preferentially built in stone from the late Middle Ages on.  A compact village made sense if one didn't want to waste good agricultural land with buildings and yards, and it provided at least some measure of protection against potential attackers, especially if it had a wall.

Most villages had twisty streets, such as seen above, because the streets just were the openings between the houses, but starting in the twelfth century there were also planned villages, where the streets were laid out in a gridwork pattern (and were still very narrow, forget getting a car down most of them).

But how about the church and the castle?  The church was much more likely to be there than the castle.  Starting in the twelfth century, bishops made a conscious effort to establish parish churches outside of the cities, so that the rural population would have readier access to the sacraments.  A village would get a church and a parish priest, who was usually of peasant stock himself.

 

But castles were a lot more expensive to build than a little parish church, so the idea of a castle in every village would not make sense.  Even more importantly, a castellan lord would normally have multiple villages in his territory, and it really was not worth having multiple castles close together.  (There are plenty of places, especially in southwest France, where multiple castles face each other, but these would have been built on the borders of the territories of rival lords.)  A village located in a strategic place (like a mountain pass) would probably have a castle, but in such a case the castle probably came first, and the village grew up around it.  (See more here on the problem of trying to see every village as coming with a standard castle or manor house.)

Villages were by definition devoted to agriculture.  For a compact village, the surrounding fields were usually divided up among the inhabitants, and they went out every morning to tend their fields.  This worked well in areas of rich soil, where the villagers shared in purchasing and (from the twelfth century on) in using a heavy mould-board plow.

But how about areas with poorer soil, where the lighter-weight aratum plow continued to be used? Here a "village" might not be compact but rather spread out.  It would still function as a village, often having a mayor and certainly having a social sense of identity, but each house and barn would be separated from the next, each being surrounded by its own fields.

Historians used to wonder why some parts of France (especially the southern parts) had the spread-out form of village structure, rather than the compact form, and there was a great deal of speculation about whether the difference marked areas where the original Celtic population remained in the majority versus those areas dominated by the (Germanic) Franks.  But village structure had nothing to do with ethnic identity.  It was based instead on agricultural techniques (and the mould-board plow became common only centuries after the Franks had settled in France).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on peasants and medieval agriculture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.