Countess Judith of Flanders

 When authors decide to write historical fiction about a strong woman of the pre-modern period, they tend to go for the old favorites.  How many novels have you seen about Anne Boleyn, for example?  Or for the medieval period, Eleanor of Aquitaine?

But there were lots of interesting, strong medieval women who are worth studying for what they reveal about medieval society who would also make the great basis for historical fiction but who have been undeservedly ignored.  One of them was Judith of Flanders.

Judith was a Carolingian, oldest child of the king Charles the Bald of France and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne.  Like all people of the upper nobility, marriage for her was not based on things we take for granted, like love and shared values and compatibility.  Instead, as I have discussed earlier, politics played a major role in such marriages, which could strengthen alliances or resolve disputes.

Judith was first betrothed in 855, when she was probably twelve or thirteen, to the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelwulf of Wessex, who was about fifty at the time and was a widower.  Æthelwulf, as a good Christian king, was on his way to Rome on pilgrimage and stopped at the royal Frankish court.  There the marriage was arranged.  By this time the consent of both the future husband and wife was required for a valid marriage, but a young princess, who had been brought up knowing she was going to be married to someone rich and powerful who her parents wanted to make an alliance with, was not about to raise objections.

In this case, both King Charles and King Æthelwulf wanted to work against the Vikings, who were harassing both England and the French coast.  A marriage of the princess with the widowed Anglo-Saxon king was intended to ensure that alliance would last.

It is important to note that Judith's parents were not simply disposing of her.  When Æthenwulf returned from Rome a year later and they were formally married, Judith underwent a very elaborate, formal ritual marking her as queen of Wessex.  Anglo-Saxon queens had never had any particular crowning rituals, but King Charles wanted the best for his girl.  Lacking any Anglo-Saxon precedents, the Frankish bishops created a brand new ritual just for her.  (It may have been inspired in part by Anglo-Saxon rituals for the crowning of kings.)

When Judith got to England, her new husband gave her a wealthy dower.  This was money and property that would be hers even after he was gone.  In her status as queen, she sat next to her husband in council and witnessed his documents, something the wives of Anglo-Saxon kings had not done before.  Many at court thought this a little disturbing, but there was nothing they could do about it.  There was also nothing they could do about it when Æthelwulf died only about a year and half after his marriage (858), and Judith promptly married her step-son, Æthelbald, born to Æthelwulf's first wife.

However, this marriage lasted no longer than her first one, and in 860 Judith was widowed for the second time.  The English were probably starting to suspect a pattern.  (Æthelbald was succeeded by his brother Alfred, one of the most successful Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who united all of England against the Vikings, but that's a story for another day.)  Judith quickly sold all her dower property and headed back to France as a wealthy woman.  She was still only in her teens and had had no children.

Her father Charles was probably concerned that a rich Carolingian princess would become the prey of fortune hunters.  While he tried to decide on who to marry her to next, or whether it might be better for her to become a nun (and while he tried to deal with issues like rebellious nobles), he sent her to the royal palace of Senlis, where she was carefully guarded.  Her younger brother Louis, the future King Louis II of France, was also living at Senlis at the time.

The guarding was inadequate.  Judith by this time had a mind of her own.  She decided to remarry, this time choosing her own husband, and she chose Baldwin, young count of Flanders.  Flanders (now part of Belgium, the Dutch-speaking half, then part of the French kingdom) was at the time a fairly small and unimportant county, but Baldwin had ambitions.  He came to Senlis in 862 to negotiate with Judith's brother Louis over some territorial issues, and there he met the young dowager queen.

Did he abduct Judith?  Or did she willingly elope with him?  Did Louis help the couple?  The Flemish in later centuries had all sorts of stories about their elopement.  At any rate, there is no indication that she objected.  Judith now is usually taken as a good example of a noble woman with the ability and determination to shape her own life, though in earlier accounts she was often portrayed as a disobedient daughter or, alternately, as a helpless maiden carried off by a rapacious count.  There was even a strain in English history of Judith as a sex-mad slut who lured her step-son into an incestuous coupling.

King Charles at any rate was furious with his daughter, with Baldwin, and with his son Louis.  (It didn't help that Louis and his brothers decided on a brief rebellion against their father at this point.)  Charles had the archbishop of Reims excommunicate Judith and Baldwin, saying that he was a rapist and she was no better than she ought to be.  The pair fled to the court of her cousin Lothar II, king of the "middle kingdom" between France and Germany, who helped them persuade the pope to lift the excommunication.  (Lothar was officially king of Italy, part of the middle kingdom.)  Charles grudgingly agreed to a formal wedding ceremony in 863.

With this marriage, the next generations of counts of Flanders gained Carolingian ancestry, of which they were intensely proud.  (Judith did have children with Baldwin, in spite of having no Anglo-Saxon offspring.)  Flanders became a wealthy county, especially with the growth of trade in the twelfth century, as the area imported raw wool from England and spun it into cloth for the Champagne trade fairs.  When Charles the Good of Flanders was murdered in 1124, as I previously discussed, there was a great deal of competition for this rich county.

There.  Wouldn't Judith make a better subject for historical fiction than another book starring Anne Boleyn?

For more on Judith and how she has been portrayed over the centuries, see the new book edited by Steven Vanderputten, Judith of West Francia (Brepols, 2024).

 
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on medieval kings and queens, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval German and Latin

 Many of western Europe's languages are derived from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, plus the regional variations like Sicilian, Occitan, and Provençal.  But many are Germanic, derived from the language (or languages) Germanic peoples spoke as they wandered west into the Roman Empire and its outskirts.  The dividing line between Latin-derived and Germanic languages is roughly the Rhine river, which also formed the eastern boundary of the Empire.

(I'm leaving aside here languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which come from a very different tradition, as well as English, which in its modern form is a mix of French/Latin and German vocabulary, and I'm not discussing today the Nordic languages, which are a different version of Germanic.)

In the early Middle Ages, in the area that had been part of the Roman Empire (excluding Britain), everyone assumed they were speaking Latin.  But as time went on the spoken language simplified, dropping Latin's case endings in favor of more use of prepositions, and using what we now consider the normal subject-verb-object sentence structure, rather than the classical Latin version where the verb often ended up in the final spot.  Pronunciation also varied, so Latin "quatuor" (meaning 4) began to be pronounced more like "katre" (as in modern French).

The different "romance" languages (those derived from Latin) all evolved in different directions, depending on region.  In Italy, where different regions had already developed different versions of their language before Rome conquered the whole peninsula, the different versions of what one might call Old Italian were as different as between, say, Spanish and Portuguese.

In the ninth century, Latin, real Latin, became a learned language.  It was after all the language of the Bible in the West, so it was important to get it right.  People studied the vocabulary, declensions, and verb forms and tried to write and speak using them.  In the monasteries and, from the twelfth century on, in the universities, Latin was the normal spoken language.  It was used for all legal documents until the thirteenth century, when occasionally a legal document would be written in the vernacular, though Latin persisted through the end of the Middle Ages.  Sentence structure however was usually that of the romance languages, and new words were added for things where there was no classical Latin term (like the mould-board plow).

Also in the ninth century, those in regions where Germanic languages predominated started trying to write down their language.  In Anglo-Saxon England, King Alfred had law codes and even parts of the Bible put into Anglo-Saxon, so everyone could understand them.  The priests and learned folks in ninth-century England knew that their spoken language was very different from Latin, so they adhered more closely to real Latin than did many of their counterparts on the Continent, who were doing mix-and-match with Latin and (for example) Old French.  The Carolingian court welcomed Anglo-Saxon scholars to improve their Latinity.

Meanwhile, over east of the Rhine, as the area was finishing being Christianized, it was important to have good Latin, but it was also important to be able to write down the local language.  There were multiple versions of German in various regions, as is the case even today, where the Bavarian dialect is not the German taught in schools, and Dutch (Flemish) and Letzburgh (the vernacular language of Luxembourg) differ again.  Those trying to write down Germanic languages had to deal with the various sounds, like -th- or -w- which have no appropriate letters in the Latin alphabet.

Even today we use T plus H for a sound that doesn't sound like T plus H, and W is made up of two U's put together (think of the name of the letter -- ever notice that before?).  A Merovingian king had tried, three centuries earlier, to come up with new letters for sounds not used in Latin, and been mocked for not speaking pure Latin where you wouldn't need such letters.  Anglo-Saxon England, less dismissive, came up with the "thorn" for the -th- sound, unfortunately not now used.

The ninth-century German priests trying to write Old German also had the problem that since spoken German varied from place to place, written German would too, unless they could figure out the "correct" spelling -- which one was it?

Most modern languages are relatively easy to pronounce if you see a word written out.  Spanish and Italian have direct correlations between letter and letter-sound.  French has a lot of letters that are not pronounced, but if you see a word written out you can say it, if you know some French.

Not modern English!  Spelling and pronunciation are unrelated.  Why do "frown" and "blown" not rhyme?  Why are the present and past tenses of "read' spelled the same but pronounced differently?  Why is the -g- treated differently in "finger" and "ringer"?  Why are "sew" and "sow" pronounced the same, except when "sow" means a female pig, when it's pronounced differently?  No one knows.  And don't get me started on the six pronunciations of -ough- : "though, thought, through, rough, cough, bough" (oh, aw, oo, uff, off, ow).  Don't bother having a first-grader try to "sound it out."  Just teach them the dang word with its pronunciation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval language and other aspects of medieval history and culture, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.

 

Stave Churches

 We think of medieval churches as made of stone, as indeed most of them were.  But stone churches always needed wood as well.  The scaffolding that was required when the church was being built, as the rows of stone blocks rose higher and higher, was of course made of wood.  And the rafters of the church, which held up the roof, were wooden.  As the fire at Notre Dame six years ago showed, if those centuries-old timbers caught fire the church itself would suffer serious damage.

Some churches were however made primarily of wood, most notably the Scandinavian stave churches.  There are over two dozen in Norway dating from the Middle Ages and one in Sweden.  The term "stave" refers to the vertical posts, one at each corner of the main, central part of the church, which supported the weight of the rest of the building materials.

These staves were made from entire trunks of an evergreen tree (a special northern species of pine).  An appropriately tall, straight tree would be chosen, its branches cut off, and its bark girdled.  It would now be dead, but it was left standing for several years.  This was believed to make the sap inside set up, making the wood very hard and resistant to rot and insect damage.

The staves were set on horizontal "sills," made from the same hardened wood, and clapboard siding was attached.  The churches were several stories tall, with very steep roofs that would shed Norwegian winter snow.  They were decorated with carvings on the rafter ends, the same way that stone churches might have gargoyles.

The result was something that to the modern eye looks fantastical, like something out of a fairy-tale, but they are treated by the local congregation as just their church (note the cemetery adjoining the church).

Because these churches do not look like the churches built in much of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, they are now often labeled "pagan."  This seems very unfair, as the earliest examples date from the end of the twelfth century, roughly 200 years after the region adopted Christianity.  (Remember, centuries were just as long in the Middle Ages as they are now.  We're talking about a time span comparable to the distance from us back to Thomas Jefferson as president.)

Movies and TV shows about the Vikings often give them "pagan temples" that look like stave churches, even though there is a grand total of zero evidence that Vikings ever worshiped Odin in anything that looked even vaguely like a stave church.  The carpentry skills that produced excellent long ships for the Vikings, however, carried over into the skills needed to build a stave church, and some of the techniques for the churches' clapboard siding are very similar to those used in ship construction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.

Christian Ethiopians in Rome

 As I discussed in an earlier post, Ethiopia was predominantly Christian during the Middle Ages, with its own stories, for example, of miracles of the Virgin, stories that like their counterparts in Europe were intended to show that no matter how big a sinner you were, there was always hope for salvation.

Ethiopia had been Christian since at least the fourth century, when priests from Egypt became established there. (You'll recall that Egypt was a major center of Christianity in the first centuries AD.)  The Ethiopians indeed considered their attachment to the Judeo-Christian tradition to go back even further, to the days of King Solomon.  The "Song of Songs," a book in the Old Testament, has the king address his beloved, "You are black but you are comely."  Both Ethiopians and Europeans interpreted this as meaning the queen of Sheba, black as were the people of the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia).

Okay, the Song of Songs is supposed to be about Christ's love for His church, according to medieval theologians, not some king crooning to his mistress, but they would have been the first to tell you that a Bible text had meaning on more than one level.  At any rate, the kings of Ethiopia, from at least the thirteenth century, asserted descent both from the Solomon-Sheba alliance and from those who had brought Christianity to the Horn of Africa in the fourth century.  They also said that Sheba's son had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia from Jerusalem, but we aren't going to talk about that now.

In the early days of the church, before the rise of Islam, Ethiopia had sent bishops to ecumenical councils.  They attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which addressed some of the issues of the nature of Christ that seemed still to be up in the air after the Council of Nicaea over a century earlier.  Christ was both human and divine, but was He both fully, or half and half?  The council settled on "one person, two natures," fully human and fully divine at the same time, accepted by both the Latin west and Greek orthodoxy.  The Ethiopians, along with some other Christian churches, held out for one person, one (blended) nature.  (Yes, most of us today would be scratching our heads over why this was a big deal, but trust me, it was.) Other differences also persisted, such as whether to celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday or Sunday. Also the Chalcedonian version of the church finished dropping any thought that Christians needed to follow Old Testament requirements of circumcision, which the non-Chalcedonian churches continued to follow.

Throughout the Middle Ages, although there wasn't much contact between western (Latin) Christendom and Ethiopia, once the Mediterranean basin became predominantly Muslim, they knew each other were there.  Pilgrims from Ethiopia periodically visited sites holy to early Christianity, even if in areas (like Egypt or the Sinai) now predominantly Muslim.  There were plenty of stories in Europe about "Prester John," a black priest (prester) who was sort-of-like-a-pope of some fabulous African land.

At the end of the Middle Ages, pilgrims from Ethiopia showed up in Rome.  They wanted to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul who, being in the New Testament, were as important to them as they were to western Christendom.  They settled in the church of San Stefano Maggiore, an old church, located near Saint Peter's basilica, that had been in some disrepair for centuries and had most recently been used to house priests.  San Stefano became the Ethiopian guest house.

Ethiopian pilgrims continued to visit Rome and stay in San Stefano for the next two centuries, through the late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation.  Some stayed only a short time.  Others lived there their entire lives.  They learned about the Latin version of Christianity, and a few converted to it.  They explained their version to the Roman priests.  These priests thought to draw these strange people they thought of as "Indians" (that is from some distant marvelous land) into their version of Catholicism, and simultaneously became disturbed at what they considered heretical beliefs and practices.  The pope, facing the split in western Christendom from the Reformation, tried to figure out how these Ethiopians could be on his side.

The Ethiopians' extensive writings on their experiences in Rome ended up in the library of the Vatican.  Samantha Kelly, who (unlike most of us) can read their language, has very recently published a book on these Ethiopian pilgrims, called Translating Faith, Harvard University Press 2025.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025