The martyrs of Lyon

 Sanctity is constantly redefined.  What is holy to one group of people in one place will not seem holy at all to others in another time or place.  Think about, even today, the difference between the plain interior of a Presbyterian church, where nothing is supposed to interfere with the contemplation of God, and the ornate decoration of a Catholic church, where the decoration is done to glorify God.

 

(The above is a chapel in Peru.  Different Presbyterian and different Catholic churches will of course differ from each other as well.)

 Similarly, the role of saints did not stay the same throughout the Middle Ages.  Saints, present in their relics, ready to help (or punish) the deserving (or the wicked), now seem like a standard feature of medieval Christianity, but it was not always that way.

The martyrs of Lyon are a good example of the evolving role of the saints.  Supposedly in the year 177 AD a whole group of Christians were martyred in Lyon (traditionally forty-eight of them).  Lyon was a major Roman provincial capital in what is now France, over toward the east side, about three-quarters of the way down.  It's still a major French city.

The emperors of the first few centuries AD were noted for trying to stop the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and there are numerous stories of Christians put to death for refusing to give up their faith and subscribe to Roman state paganism by sacrificing to Jove (Jupiter).  The Lyon martyrs all refused to denounce Christianity and were, it was said in the fourth century, put to death.  Enough Christians escaped to tell the sad story.

So much for the original account.  But this story lacked relics, which by the late fifth century were becoming a part of the stories of most saints.  Christianity was now widely tolerated, and the Christians of Lyon had to explain why, when other cities were discovering the remains of their Christian martyrs, they had nothing beyond the memory.  They explained that when their martyrs were killed, the bodies were burned, and their ashes were dumped in the river

A hundred years later, in the sixth century, things had changed again.  Christianity was now the official religion of the Empire, and saints were widely revered, not just as holy people worthy of remembrance but as figures still active in the present.  Now the Christians of Lyon not only said they had the relics of their martyrs, but they had always had them.  The surviving Christians of 177 were said to have gone downstream, miraculously located the water-soaked ashes, and reverently brought them back to be set in a fitting memorial.  And the martyrs, who had been nameless in the original account, now had names.

Some of the names might seem a little odd to us, such as Rhône River (the river into which the ashes were dumped), or Mature, or Maternal, or Bibles, or Fourth, or October.  They could have originally been nicknames or descriptors, but by the sixth century they were the martyrs' names.  A church was erected to honor them, complete with their  ashes.

We may chuckle now over this story, but for the sixth-century Christians of Lyon, in a time when other churches around Gaul were  finding and honoring the remains of their local martyrs, it was important that the (more or less) historically attested martyrs of their own past be properly acknowledged and revered.  After all, they worked miracles!

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

 For more on medieval Christianity, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

 

Brunhilda

 Nobody names their daughter Brunhilda anymore.  Yet the name is familiar, perhaps as the cartoon witch "Broomhilda," or more likely a fat lady opera singer in a winged Viking helmet wailing away in some parody of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen."

 

 

But the real Brunhilda was a formidable personage, a queen of Francia in the early Middle Ages who not only ruled beside her husband but was regent for her son, grandson, and great-grandson over the following decades.  She became a symbol of great cruelty (at least to her enemies) and was said to have been responsible for the deaths of ten Frankish kings and lots of ordinary folks.

Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess, growing up in the sixth century in what is now Spain. At that time Spain was Christian (this predates the rise of Islam), but Arian Christian, that is Arians did not believe in the Trinity.  There was only one God, they believed, and Jesus was divinely inspired but not God Himself.  However, in 567 Brunhilda married Sigibert, king of Burgundy and Austrasia (that is, the eastern part of what's now France, going into Switzerland) and converted to trinitarian (Catholic) Christianity, her new husband's religion.

Marrying a princess was a new experience for the line of Merovingian kings (of which Sigibert was one).  The kings had mostly taken low-born women as their wives and given them little authority, which has proven very irritating to modern historians of medieval women, as we often have very little information on these wives.  But not long after Sigibert married Brunhilda, Sigibert's brother Chilperic decided to marry a princess himself and chose Brunhilda's sister.

For reasons that, after 1450 years, aren't exactly clear, Chilperic soon tired of his Visigothic bride, and he and his mistress Fredegund decided to kill her. Fredegund, who had started life as a slave, was now crowned queen of Neustria (basically western France).  Brunhilda was distraught over her sister's murder for reasons that are quite clear, and she and Fredegund immediately became sworn enemies.  Their rivalry went on for decades.

The next forty or fifty years of Brunhilda's life were filled with plots, treachery, betrayals, and murders that put A Game of Thrones to shame. You can read all the thrilling details in the Historia by the sixth-century author Gregory of Tours.  She did manage to outlive Fredegund as well as establishing a number of monasteries (and having a few bishops killed).  But in her early 70s she was finally captured by her enemies and put to death by being dragged and pulled apart by wild horses.  (The Merovingians, like the Romans before them, thought "cruel and unusual punishment" was a swell idea.)

But Brunhilda was not forgotten.  Memory of her lingered for six centuries, until around 1200 she appeared in two different though clearly related epic tales, the Volsung Saga of Scandinavia and the Nibelungenlied of Germany.  In the first she was a daughter of Odin, served as a Valkyrie, and she had an affair with Siegfried the Dragonslayer (notice the Sig-) before he married someone else.  In the latter she was queen of Iceland and a real athlete, whom Siegfried defeated in a sporting competition before she married someone else.  Soon Attila the Hun appears (let's just say it's complicated).  In both versions of the story Brunhilda was responsible for lots of betrayals and dead bodies.  Wagner loved it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

Boys learning Latin

 Medieval literacy required knowledge of Latin.  Being able to read Latin was one thing (hey, even I can do it!), but anyone in the church, and for that matter many in government or commerce, would have to be able to carry out a conversation in Latin and to write it.

 Thus there were handbooks created to help those who did not know Latin learn it.  It was easier for those whose native language was one of the so-called Romance Languages (Old French, Old Spanish, Old Italian, and so on), because until the eighth or ninth century they assumed they were in fact speaking Latin.  A refresher on case endings and verb conjugations was going to be necessary.  It was a bigger challenge for those speaking a Germanic language, including Anglo-Saxon, because the vocabulary was different as well as things like noun declensions.

We have a very interesting handbook put together by a man named Aelfric Bata, intended to help boys in Anglo-Saxon England learn Latin.  It was built around handy phrases that the boys might use.  Presumably, as in modern language training, these were phrases that were meant to be memorized, then modified in use as appropriate.

Many of us in first-year French (or whatever) learned to say such scintillating phrases as, "My pen is blue," or "Where is the restaurant?" or even "I am happy to meet you."  More darkly, some modern phrase books teach us how to say things like, "I have injured my arm/ my foot/ my head," or "Please call an ambulance." 

Aelfric Bata's phrase book provides a window into what an Anglo-Saxon teacher thought his boys might need to say.  The book begins, "Master, please teach us boys how to speak Latin correctly."  The boys continue, "We don't want to seem silly or shameful when we speak."  They even ask to be beaten if they don't learn properly, which seems like an editorial emendation.

This opener suggests the boys were already speaking Latin pretty well, but there was lots to come.  Some of the dialogues suggest a rather strange scene.  "Do you have something to say to me?  Well, plowman, what do you say?  What kind of work do you do?  Have you had something to eat?  Have you had something to drink? Do you have any comrades?  Is this person one of your comrades?"  (For starters, why would a novice monk assume a plowman would converse in Latin?  And where did the comrades come from?  Did they bring lunch?)

Interestingly, if the answer to one of the questions was Yes, Aelfric Bata represented it as "etiam," which literally means "indeed."  By the twelfth century on the Continent Yes in Latin was "sic," meaning "so it is."  Fun fact:  classical Latin has no word for Yes.

A section that was meant to teach verb tenses (present, past, future, and so on) has a desperate note.  "I am doing nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I will do nothing wrong, God willing."

And then there were the boys at play.  There were dialogues about baseball (or "rounders," a pre-baseball version of a game with bat, ball, and runnng the bases), batter-up, run faster, you're out, and the like.  There were also phrases like, "Watch out! The teacher's coming back!"  Sounds like Aelfric Bata was having some fun here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

The Starlight Raven

 As well as a medievalist, I'm a fantasy writer, whose fantasy ranges from pretty-close-to-real-medieval-settings (other than the introduction of magic and zero effort to place the story among real historical events) to what might be termed medieval-adjacent.  In the latter category is the series that begins with The Starlight Raven.

 

It's medieval-adjacent in that the setting looks vaguely how Europe would have looked in the Middle Ages, cities widely spaced with mostly farming villages in between, lots of woodland, castles here and there, cathedrals with bishops, knights who fight with lance and sword, heating provided by fireplaces, and countries ruled by kings.  It's lacking a lot of what we think of as defining the modern world, including no New World (no Americas), no Protestant Reformation, no guns, and rather minimal industrialization, and that run by magic.

On the other hand, in many ways the setting is nineteenth-century.  They don't have electricity, but they do have magic-run telephones (land lines) and magic-run printing presses.  Houses have running water.  There is sort-of universal education for young people.  I'm a historian.  If I'm anachronistic, I do it on purpose.

Like all good fantasy, it's actually about themes that are important today, semi-concealed in a story that includes wizards and dragons.  It's about growing up, about finding your own identity.  It's about being a teenager, somewhere between needing a hug when you're frightened or have messed up, and wanting to do everything independently.  It's especially about coming to terms with gender expectations and not accepting that girl-stuff and boy-stuff have to be totally separate.

The series is a "next generation" series, following on the Royal Wizard of Yurt series, which began with A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel.  However, it can be read on its own without reading the previous series.  There are currently three more novels in the series after The Starlight Raven, with more on the way.

Click here for the link to the US Amazon sales page.  It's available as both an ebook and a paperback.

Here's the opening to whet your appetite:

_________________________________

Of course I knew my mother was a witch.

She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.

But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.

That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.

But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Villard de Honnecourt

 Much of what we know about medieval building techniques is due to the so-called sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt.  We know very little about Villard himself, other than his name, and the fact that he lived in northern France in the thirteenth century.  But his sketchbook (perhaps better called a "portfolio"), is packed full of drawings of details of the buildings going up around him.  It also includes images of people, animals, siege engines (catapults and trebuchets) and an idea for a perpetual motion machine.

The image above shows a detailed rendering of a clock tower.

The portfolio is divided into several sections, sculpture, architectural features, masonry, and so on.  However, it is clear that some pages that were originally part of it are missing.  Architectural historians now think that the missing section was on carpentry.  Nonetheless, the parts that we do have include so much detail on how pieces of wood can be used and how they are attached together that it seems likely that Villard himself was primarily a carpenter.

The portfolio is a great boon to historians of medieval architecture, because we basically now have 800 year old buildings that have had 800 years of rebuilding and "improvement," so that it's almost an archeological exercise to figure out all the original details.  But Villard gave us, for example, the layout/floor plan of Cambrai cathedral while it was still being built, so we know exactly what the original architect intended.

Modern builders can also learn thirteenth-century techniques from the portfolio.  There are a number of sketches of Reims cathedral, which was brand new at the time.  The detailed drawings would have been a boon to the builders restoring the cathedral after it was gutted during World War I.

Other aspects of the portfolio pique our interest for different reasons.  He included a drawing of a lion (with a sketch of a porcupine off to the side).

In the caption Villard notes that he has drawn the lion "from life."  Okay, we ask, where did someone hanging out in northern France see a lion?  One has to assume it was in a cage, or Villard, standing right in front of it with his parchment and pen, wouldn't have been able to do a nice drawing.  Most likely this lion had been captured in Africa (maybe as a cub?) and sent along the trade routes until it ended up with some rich person, who kept it as a curiosity.  There were plenty of heraldic lions in the Middle Ages, used as signs of boldness and strength, but they didn't look as concerned as this lion seems to (and I'm not at all sure lions have eyebrows).

And let's not forget his perpetual motion machine, where a series of mallets would theoretically keep a wheel turning indefinitely once it was given a push.  (In fact it would not have worked in the thirteenth century any better than it would now.)

The portfolio is available in facsimile with commentary by Carl F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Ashgate, 2009).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

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

Religious Women

 There were many ways for women to show their religiosity in the Middle Ages. The most obvious of course was by becoming a nun, entering a monastery for women.  Although such nunneries became common in the late Middle Ages, when a large proportion of the nuns had entered the cloister as girls, for much of the Middle Ages such houses were far outnumbered by male monasteries.

In the early and high Middle Ages, most of the nuns did not enter as girls but rather as mature women.  Men too did not always enter as boys; the Cistercian order, for example, was made up primarily of monks who had converted as young men, and many an elderly man decided to improve his chances at heaven by spending his final year or two as a monk.  But there were a whole lot of nuns who had entered the house in middle age, not old age, usually because they were widowed--a common event when women tended to marry much older men.

It was these experienced middle-aged women who tended to become abbess.  At the double-monasteries of the early Middle Ages and of twelfth-century houses like Fontevraud, where a male house and a female house had a single head, the head was always a middle-aged woman.

But how else could a woman be religious?  Nunneries usually followed the same Benedictine Rule as male monasteries, but just as there were houses of male canons, who lived more or less like monks but who also served as priests for their community, there were some houses for canonesses.  Although of course they did not serve as priests, they might take care of people at a hospital.  (Even today, nurses in Britain are called Sister, a reminder of this old function.)

Canonesses lived in a cloistered setting, like nuns, but one could still be a religious woman outside the cloister.  In medieval cities, from the thirteenth century onward, there grew up forms of the religious life for women where the women continued to live in their own houses and do their normal activities but still practice a more contemplative life.  They might have a rule formally endorsed by a bishop and practice chastity as well as meeting regularly for prayer.

But some of these lay sisterhoods did not bother with a formal rule.  They followed a life that combined religiosity in both a public and private setting but took no vows.  From their point of view, they were living like the original apostles as described in the Book of Acts in the Bible.  The Beguines, found primarily in cities of Flanders, sought to help their fellow citizens through good works as well as trying to be fair and honest in their own commercial dealings.  They met regularly to encourage each other and to pray together.

The danger was that, without vows or formal oversight from the church hierarchy, they were considered (at least by the church hierarchy) to be in danger of slipping into heresy.  Some of them did, making up their own versions of religious doctrine--which of course they believed was true Christianity (the bishops disagreed).  Some got into serious trouble and ended up shipped off to real nunneries.  Some were allowed to continue as long as they kept quiet about it.

And then there were the recluses, women who set themselves up in a tiny house build on the outside of a church.  They would of course need the approval of the priest or bishop.  This practice was more frequent before nunneries became common.  The woman in essence was a hermit in her cell, except that she was usually in the middle of town or village, not out in the woods, where everyone agreed (even including the women) females ought not to be by themselves.  Most of these recluses had enough food to live on donated by the pious and regularly attended Mass in the adjoining church.  But in an extreme version the recluse might be walled up in her cell and not leave at all.

These recluses are often referred to as "anchorites" by British historians, although no anchor was involved, and there is no medieval cognate for the term.

Some of ways medieval women showed their religiosity must have been very hard on their bodies.  But as Peter Abelard pointed out in the early twelfth century,  because women's bodies were weaker than men's, their virtue was so much greater in enduring physical privation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Ethiopian Miracles of the Virgin

 Ethiopia, in eastern Africa, has been Christian for longer than most of Europe.  The area was never part of the Roman Empire, but missionaries presumably made their way down there from Egypt, which was in the Empire and became Christian early.

Indeed, there has often been assumed to be a long connection between Ethiopia and Judea/Israel.  The Song of Solomon (love poems supposedly written by King Solomon, father of David, now usually interpreted as expressing Christ's love for His church), speak about his beloved as black and comely, and this is often said to indicate that she was from Ethiopia.  Did the queen of Sheba move to the Middle East from Ethiopia?  Hard to say.

Because Ethiopia was predominantly Christian in the Middle Ages, it had saints and miracle stories, just as Europe did.  And, again like Europe, the most common miracle stories involved the Virgin.  She was Mom, the one who would always love you no matter how bad you were.  God would judge you for your crimes, and Jesus was too awe inspiring to approach for everyday issues (he saved your soul and everyone else's, the church said, isn't that enough of a miracle?) but Mary was right there, even edging out the Holy Ghost as the "real" third member of the Trinity.

Ethiopia's stories of the Virgin, like those in Europe, may seem weird to the modern eye, because someone is very bad yet, because they pray to her, they are saved.  In Europe, for example, one of the most common stories was of a knight on his way to a tournament who stopped to pray to the Virgin and prayed so hard he lost track of time, but no problem! the Virgin put on his armor, rode his horse, and won the tournament.  Because she was wearing his armor, everyone thought it was him, and he won the prize.  In another, a monk rowed across the lake every night to visit his mistress, but he always prayed to the Virgin before going, so when his boat sprang a leak and he drowned, she interceded with God to save his soul.  Mom always will love you!

One of the most common Ethiopian stories, retold and illustrated multiple times, involved a rich lord who was also a cannibal.  (A little dig at the powerful there.)  After eating all his friends and family, he set off to find more people to eat, taking a water skin with him.  Soon he met a dying leper, who begged for a drink.  No way, said the cannibal.  The leper begged in the name of God, in the name of Christ.  No luck.  But then he begged in the name of the Virgin, and the cannibal relented and gave the leper a little water as he finished expiring.  Shortly thereafter, the cannibal too died (not clear why, but let's not spoil the story worrying about it, I doubt that he got sick from eating a dead leper).  The devil was all set to seize his soul, but the Virgin intervened, and he was saved.  Better pay attention when someone asks for something in her name!

Since both Ethiopian and European miracle stories can seem weird to us, maybe our role as historians is to stop trying to make the past fit our idea of what religion and society should properly be like and instead try to understand people for their own sake.

Wendy Belcher of Princeton University is leading a team studying Ethiopian miracles of the Virgin.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Snakes

 It's Saint Patrick's day! One of the most enduring stories about this late-Roman saint is that he drove the snakes out of Ireland.  But as I noted in an earlier post about good old Saint Paddy, there actually were no snakes for him to drive out.  Pretty much all living things in what is now Ireland, including snakes, had been wiped out by the glaciers, back thousands of years ago, and as the glaciers retreated and plants and animals again reached the British Isles the snakes never made it across the Irish Sea.

Of course for medieval people it was good not to have snakes.  Europe doesn't have all the poisonous snakes found in the Americas (and don't get me started on Australia), but they do have the adder, which while not as serious if it bites you as a rattlesnake, is in fact poisonous, and people can die from the bite.  Great Britain (the island with England, Scotland, and Wales on it) does have adders, even if Ireland doesn't.  So does the European continent (I once almost stepped on an adder in France.  It was cool about it.)

The ancient Hebrews weren't fond of snakes either.  The story of Adam and Eve, where they are tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge after God told them explicitly not to, has a snake as a tempter.  The book of Genesis describes the snake as the most sneaky and cunning of all the creatures.

It's not quite clear what the snake's purpose was in tempting Eve, but he certainly paid for it.  God cursed all three of them, telling Adam he'd only get food by hard labor in the fields, Eve that she'd bear her children in pain, and the snake that he'd have to go on his belly in the dust.  Interestingly, the implication is that up until then snakes had had feet.  However, medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Adam and Eve story always have the snake with no feet (though sometimes it has a human face).

The line between snakes and dragons in medieval imagery was rather fluid.  Both were a sort of serpent, though dragons would usually have limbs as well as long snaky tails.

Now in fact snakes play an important role in the ecology.  Water snakes eat frogs and small fish, and land snakes eat insects, mice, and rats (depending on the kind of snake and how big it is).  When you have an animal without predators, it can multiply to the point of causing serious harm to the environment.  (Hmm.  Humans don't have natural predators other than each other.  Let's not talk about that right now.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

Performative Acts

 Recently a number of medieval scholars have started examining what are called performative acts, that is not simply that someone did something or other, but that they "performed" it, that is acted in a certain way to underscore what they were doing.  These days a lot of communication is done via text or email or phone call, where you don't see the other person, but medieval communication was more likely to be done face to face.

Now of course we still have performative acts.  People do them instinctively even if they are not thinking through their performance.  Mom coming into the room where she just heard a disturbing crash stands with her arms firmly folded.  The professor steps up to the lectern and gazes sternly out across the students until they stop talking.  The president signs an executive order, waves it back and forth so everyone can see his signature, and hands the signing pen to someone nearby, as (one assumes) a precious souvenir.

Medieval oaths of allegiance were full of performative acts.  One did not simply swear an oath, or (as we do now) raise one's right hand while swearing it.  (Think about it. Why does raising your hand make it more significant? But it does.)  One went down on one's knees and raised one's hands to the person to whom one was swearing allegiance.  This is the basic act of swearing homage, as a knight or noble would do to a lord.  But it doesn't stop there.  The lord would reach down, take the hands, draw the person up, and kiss them on the cheek.  This would be done very publicly.  Everyone would remember it and would understand the symbolism of the person swearing homage both being subservient to and the equal of the lord.

Peasants as well as aristocrats could take part in performances.  In some parts of western France in the eleventh century, a serf was expected to come on hands and knees before his or her lord with a penny balanced on their head.  The value of the penny was trivial.  What was important was the public ceremony.  In some cases the peasant might even have a rope looped the neck, in case the imagery was not clear enough.

Oaths of allegiance among aristocrats were not one-time events.  Chronicles often tell us that, at Easter or other important times, the king might "wear his crown" and have all his men repeat their oaths of allegiance.  Wearing the crown itself was a performative act, as kings did not usually walk around wearing something heavy, valuable, and awkward on their heads.  When they put it on they were signaling their position and authority.

Even property transfers were often performative.  Someone giving land to a monastery would generally place something on the altar, a book, a staff, even a handful of dirt.  Although scholars once considered such acts a sign of a primitive, illiterate society, in fact the public act, which dozens would witness, is only known about today because it was recorded in writing.  The physical action emphasized the spoken and written words and gave the witnesses something striking to remember.

Although the physical act is usually what we think of by a performative act, documents could play a part.  A big piece of parchment with seals dangling from it could be waved around as its own performative act.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

The Donkey Playing a Harp

 The donkey playing a harp.  Or, if you prefer, the ass playing a lyre.  It's an image you'll find carved on Romanesque churches (eleventh-twelfth centuries) all over western Europe.  What could this possibly mean? you ask.

The image above is from Compostela, in northern Spain, but there are plenty of others.

But where did such a curious image come from?  It goes back to someone named Phaedrus. But even before we get to Phaedrus, remember Aesop's Fables?  You must have been exposed to them at some point.  Short little stories, usually involving animals, with a moral to the story.  Well, Phaedrus, who lived in Rome in the first century AD but may have been a Greek slave, translated Aesop from Greek into Latin and added some fables of his own.  Later generations seem to have added a few bonus fables to the collection.

And there in the Phaedrus material is the donkey playing a harp.  It's a pretty minimal fable.  A donkey sees a harp lying in a field, tries to play it with his hoof, and does sound a lovely note though he's incapable of playing a tune.  Too bad, he thinks.  If someone who knew what he was doing had tried to play the harp, I would have enjoyed it.  There follows some lame moral about the right person coming along at the right time.

The fables of Phaedrus became well known in the west, along with the image of the donkey trying to play the harp with his hoof, unsuccessfully I'm sure.  The image became a "marvel," something weird and outside of people's normal experience.  The donkey and his harp always appears around the edges of major carvings, usually along with images of strange creatures such as showed up in medieval travelers' tales, like centaurs, or griffins, or mermaids, or people with the head of a dog, or the people who lived down near the south pole who were upside down, needing strong toes to hang onto the earth and keep from falling off.  (The Compostela carvings include some of these.)

This is an indication that medieval churches were more than just places to contemplate the saints and one's own salvation.  They were educational centers, centers of ideas, places to marvel at all the amazing things in the world.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

Medieval and Modern Romance

 I have posted before about medieval romance and epic, the two main fictional forms of literature in the Middle Ages, written in the vernacular rather than Latin from the eleventh or twelfth century on.  These were not always distinct categories, but in general an epic focused primarily on knightly deeds and often ended with a lot of dead bodies, whereas a romance focused more on interpersonal relationships and generally had a happy ending.

There could be plenty of variation. Stories of King Arthur, for example,  could be epic, great struggles against the foe, or a romance, because of the focus on personal betrayal and adultery, which while involving love and other interpersonal relationships did not lead to a happy ending.

Today romance has become more formulaic.  Many have commented that Hallmark Channel original movies, for example, all have the same basic plot.  Young woman from a big city/small town moves to a small town/big city for a Reason.  The Reason is what makes the different ones different from each other (such as they are).  Around Christmas, the Reason is always Christmas-themed.

In the small town/big city, our heroine runs into an old flame/a new handsome guy.  Sparks fly!  After a few bumpy bits, they are happy together, at least for now if not necessarily Ever After.  Time for the closing credits!

Writers of romance books follow pretty much the same formula.  They add originality through the back story of the characters (the TV movies don't have much time for that), have interesting settings (maybe the heroine is from a sheep farm in Montana and moves to a pineapple farm in Hawaii), and may put in such variations as having the heroine be divorced or a widow or more mature.  The bumpy bits can be more complicated, though from the time the heroine and hero meet (or reconnect), even though they aren't yet sure they will end up together (the reader is sure), you won't catch them smooching anyone else.

Contemporary romance, such stories set in the modern era, is the single biggest-selling genre of books in the US.  Some readers just gobble them up, reading maybe one a day.  (They tend to be on the short side, and it's not as if you have to read slowly to follow all the plot twists.)  These stories do especially well through Kindle Unlimited, where readers can borrow and read an unlimited number of Amazon's ebooks a month for only about $12, which is great for voracious readers who will probably not want to read a particular book a second time.

Medieval romance was neither so formulaic nor so focused on the heroine.  One very popular romance was "Guillaume de Dole, ou le Roman de la Rose."  Here the hero, the (fictional) King Conrad, is the chief focus.

The story begins with a swirl of love-making, in which he fully partakes.  But then he hears of the beautiful Lénore and her brother, Guillaume, a great tournament fighter.  He invites Guillaume to fight on his side in the tournament and decides to marry Lénore, even though he's never met her.

Here come the bumpy bits!  Those at court are unhappy and slander Lénore, ending the king's plans.  Now she finally becomes the center of the story and figures out a ruse to trick the slanderers and win the king's heart.  All ends happily.

I've rewritten this story for modern readers, calling it The Sign of the Rose.  (For sale on Amazon and other on-line retailers, ebook or paperback.)

Now I had to add quite a bit to the original story, starting with having the king meet Lénore before he falls in love with her, rather than just doing so from second-hand accounts.  Because the original "Guillaume de Dole" is quite short, I added several subplots, including a possible other suitor for Lénore, and Guillaume's activities at the royal court as more than a tournament fighter.  I also worked in more motivation for the slanderers and expanded the details of the happy ending.

So it doesn't match the modern romance-formula.  As a result, I think those who love reading romance have never really taken it up (it's only ranked 6 thousand and something on Amazon among ebooks of historical romance).  Those who like my wizard stories haven't been sure what to make of a story remarkably short on wizards.  But I like it just fine.

One thing I think "Guillaume de Dole" illustrates is that medieval romance was intended for a male readership as well as a female one.  Modern romances are overwhelmingly bought and read by women, and the authors also are usually women (or men writing under a female pen name).  After all, finding the right person through all the bumpy bits has never been an issue only for women.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Rois fainéants

 The Merovingians have always held an ambiguous position in medieval history.  On the one hand they are considered the founders of France, because, after all, the Merovingian dynasty ruled the Franks, the people who essentially gave France its name, "land of the Franks," rather than Gaul, which is what the Romans had called it.

On the other hand, they are often derided as "do-nothing kings," rois fainéants, which if said in French in a sneering tone really sounds bad.  And not only did they "do nothing," the account goes, they were barbarians! ethnic Germans, part of the supposed fall of Rome (on which see more here).

So how do we reconcile this image, the glorious founders of France, those who first adopted Christianity, with the concept of crude barbarians who were probably half pagan as well as murderers, to say nothing of being weaklings who sat around not doing anything?  Well, we don't.  Let's break it down.

Clovis, considered first king of France (481-511), did indeed adopt Christianity, doubtless urged on by his Christian wife. He also surely realized that getting along with the bishops, who were major political figures in Gaul at the time, would be a whole lot easier if he were Christian.  Saint Remigius, bishop of Reims, baptized him, as commemorated in the ivory carving seen below, dating to somewhat later.  Clovis is seen here sitting in a baptismal font.  Note the dove coming down with an ampoule of holy oil (used to consecrate kings).

 

The bishops of Reims never forgot this glorious moment.  From the tenth century or so on, most French kings were crowned at Reims, in honor to Clovis and tradition.  If one visits the thirteenth-century cathedral of Reims today (well worth a visit), one can see a plaque marking the spot where the baptism supposedly happened.

The Merovingians were a lively bunch.  Clovis's descendants all had it firmly in their minds that anyone descended from him ought to be king, and if Brother stood in the way, well, that was too bad for Brother.  Accounts from the sixth and seventh centuries are full of murders, poisonings, people hustled off to join a monastery whether they wanted to or not, people sent off on pilgrimage whether they wanted to go or not, betrayals, plots, and lots of wicked women.  Someone should make a mini-series out of it.  It would put Game of Thrones to shame.

And yet abruptly the accounts change.  According to Einhard, writing in Charlemagne's court in the early ninth century, two generations after the Merovingian dynasty ended in 751, these active, blood-thirsty kings, who often had multiple wives and concubines (and who founded and supported monasteries), were instead rois fainéants, weaklings who were cognitively impaired and had lost all their wealth on top of it.

Einhard describes them as having long hair and dangly beards, sitting on the throne with no idea what was going on, repeating whatever they were told to say by the mayor of the palace, that is the head of palace activities (we would say "chief of staff").  By a bizarre coincidence, Charlemagne's ancestors were mayors of the palace.

The Merovingian kings, Einhard continued, were driven around in ox carts, like peasants, because they were too feeble to ride a horse.  All they had was a single manor to call their own.  If it weren't for the kindly mayors of the palace, he indicated, they would have perished long since.  And it was almost an act of mercy, he suggested, for Pippin, Charlemagne's father, last mayor of the palace, to depose the last Merovingian king and make himself king instead.

For almost 1200 years historians have believed Einhard.

All of a sudden his creating the image of weakling kings makes a lot more sense.  The Merovingians had been kings of the Franks for three centuries before 751, appreciably longer than the US has existed.  The dynasty of Pippin and Charlemagne, the Carolingians, had to find a justification for deposing them.  Indeed, during the two generations between Pippin taking the throne and Einhard writing about it, royal accounts did not mention the Merovingians at all.  The deposition was too horrible to talk about.  Although Einhard claimed the pope approved the deposition, papal accounts from the 750s record nothing of the kind.

It was a lot better to suggest a confused old man (the last Merovingian) being "put out of his misery" by being sent to a monastery, and the mayor of the palace patriotically stepping up to be crowned because somebody had to do it, than to admit that the Carolingians were usurpers who had staged a coup.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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