Sweet Middle Ages

I heard on the radio the other day that the average American eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day.  That includes actual sugar, plus all the corn syrup in soft drinks, store cookies, etc., and it's certainly startling. I think I have just discovered the Mystery Reason why many Americans are packing a wee bit more weight than they'd prefer….

Medieval Europe did not have sugar, not cane sugar, not beet sugar, certainly not corn syrup, because corn (maize) is a New World plant.  Sugar cane was found occasionally in the Middle East, and Crusaders were quite excited about it, but it wouldn't grow in Europe's climate and was too expensive to import.  (The image below is cut sugar cane.)

Yet medieval people, like most modern people (yes, I know, there are exceptions), liked things that were sweet.  This is indeed genetic.  Our ancestors roaming across the veldt of Africa, rarely getting enough to eat, knew that something sweet contained calories.  Well, they didn't know about calories specifically, but they knew feeling well-fed.  Evolution favors those who get enough calories to live and pass on their genes.  ("It's not my fault I'm a bit plump," one can say, "it's all those semi-starved ancestors forcing me to finish off the chocolate cake.")

Medieval people certainly had fruit, which can seem very sweet if one has never had actual sugar.  Orchards grew apples, plums, and pears.  People appreciated wild berries, especially strawberries.  Modern California strawberries are easily 10 times as big as wild berries--and, interestingly, not as sweet!

But the principal sweetener was honey.  A manor would generally have a beehive, carefully tended.  A feast would not be complete without a sweet dessert, such as milk pudding with honey and raisins.  Peasants would not normally keep bees, but they could hope to find wild honey in the woods.

The European honey bee, the same one used for honey in the Middle Ages, is used today to pollinate fruit crops in the US and to make most of our honey.  The bees are however threatened by "colony collapse," a disorder that kills off entire hives and is not well understood.  This could be a disaster not just for those who like honey in their tea (tea is not medieval, by the way) but for commercial orchards.

One distinct advantage of having less sugar in their diet was that medieval people's teeth had far fewer cavities than do modern people's.  (Click here for more on the medieval diet.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

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

Gay and straight in the Middle Ages

In the modern era, we consider gay and straight to be separate categories.  This distinction would have made little sense in antiquity.  In ancient Greece, a powerful and influential man would often become the patron of a young man, teaching him about the world and having sex with him.  This did not keep the powerful man from having a wife and often having a liaison with a slave girl or two as well.  Greek gods (like Zeus) were happy to have sex with anyone, male or female.

The Romans, following the Greeks, were fairly open to what we would consider swinging both ways, at least among youths.  A mature man, however, was supposed to rein in his passions, keeping a strict control over his body.  Marriage, it was normally assumed, was between men and women, but the emperor Nero did marry another man.  The joke in Rome, where Nero was widely reviled, was that it was too bad his father had not chosen a similar (male) "bride," for then he would never have been born.

Ancient Judaism, in contrast to paganism, taught that men were supposed to be sexually active only with women.  The category of "gay" did not exist among the ancient Hebrews.  (For that matter, neither did the category "bachelor."  There were just men who were married and men who weren't married yet.)  There did however exist what we would call gay sex, which was forbidden--strongly enough that one assumes it must have been going on.

Medieval Christianity did not worry too much about whether someone was gay.  In part this was the influence of the New Testament, where Jesus has nothing at all to say about gay sex.  And the Christians had quietly dispensed with major chunks of Jewish law anyway, including circumcision, taking multiple wives, prohibitions on eating pork or having a meat and milk dish, or even celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday.

In addition, the medieval church had much more to worry about than someone's sexual orientation.  It has hard enough persuading people that they needed to baptize their children and avoid heresy and stop stealing the church's possessions.  Add to this the constant low-level tension between monasteries and bishops and concerns like the Crusades and self-proclaimed prophets of the end of the world, and you can see why it was not a priority.

One could certainly be horrified at gay sex, but because it was not a clearly "bad" category, medieval men were much more openly affectionate with each other than are modern men who are afraid of being seen as gay.  (My own grandfather stopped hugging his grandsons when they got to be about ten, saying, "We don't want to start to like it.")

Men routinely wrote each other letters, intended to be read out in public, saying how they longed to embrace and kiss each other.  Richard the Lionheart and King Philip II of France became close friends, eating from the same dish and sleeping in the same bed.  Richard's father, Henry II of England, thought this was wonderful when he heard about it, establishing good international relations, even though he had just sentenced some "catamites" for scandalous behavior.

The one place that really worried about gay sex was the monastery.  But here the problem was not gay sex per se but rather sex itself.  In an all-male community, straight sex wasn't even an option and thus not worth worrying about.

Interestingly, no one in antiquity or the Middle Ages worried too much one way or the other about lesbians.  Presumably they existed then, but affectionate closeness between women was accepted as normal.  One may note that the same is true of modern society.

Click here for more about sex in the Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval sex and sexuality, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval swords

Modern movies that are set (theoretically) in the Middle Ages often show people fighting with long, thin fencing foils.  But these are nothing like real medieval swords--and contrary to many other movies, you cannot "fence" with a medieval sword.  They were too heavy.  They were meant for cutting and whacking.

The basic sword was long, reaching from where it hung on one's belt down to mid-calf or lower.  It was sharpened on both sides of the blade.  The handle was usually made as an integral piece of metal with the blade.  Because you didn't want your hand sliding down, there would be cross-pieces, the hilt.  This meant that the sword overall was in the shape of a cross, which seemed extremely significant to those at the time who tried (not entirely successfully) to make knighthood something inherently Christian.

As part of their knighthood training, boys would learn to fight with swords, starting with wooden swords, working up to blunted weapons, and finally being allowed to use sharp blades.  In a battle between knights, they would start by trying to knock each other off their horses with their lances, then, when they were unhorsed, they would draw their swords and start raining blows on each other.  One defended against sword blows with a shield, not by using one's own sword as a fencing foil.  One could theoretically lay about with a sword from on horseback, but it was dangerous--especially for the horse.

Because medieval blacksmiths did not have furnaces hot enough to melt iron, they had to make a fire as hot as they could with charcoal and bellows, to soften the metal enough to be worked.  To make a sword, the iron would be repeatedly heated in the fire, folded and pounded.  In essence, they were making carbon steel.  Especially fine blades were made in parts of the Middle East.  ("Damascus steel" was renowned in the west.)

Swords were very expensive and greatly prized.  We have few medieval swords, because they would be in use until they totally wore out.  They do however show up in medieval art, and in the early Middle Ages a few would be put in the tombs of the most powerful.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint

Saints were a major part of medieval Christianity, as I have discussed previously.  In writing stories set in a fantasy version of the real Middle Ages, I have therefore included saints.

The modern person may assume that saints were gentle and kind.  They could be, but medieval saints could also be frightening to malefactors, or even to those to whom they were well-intentioned.  In The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint, I used many motifs from real medieval saints' lives and miracle stories.

For example, my fictional Saint Eusebius has a backstory of how he came to die for the faith.  In his case, he was eaten by a dragon (this is, after all, a fantasy story), and the dragon miraculously choked to death on him, thus saving the people of the countryside, and leaving only his big toe.  This of course became the relic of the Holy Toe.

In the story, the Holy Toe is served by a hermit, who has several apprentice hermits living a short distance away.  This motif reflects a common medieval dilemma--a hermit would be so renowned for his holiness, his austere life in total isolation from society, that many people would want to go join him.

Eusebius shows his crankiness in one case by diverting a river so that the grave of a noted reprobate will be cut off from the rest of a cemetery full of good, decent dead people.  This is based on a real medieval miracle story.

A key feature of the plot is that two different groups of people want the saint's relics (the Holy Toe) for their own, both claiming that the saint has appeared in visions to them.  Again, this was a real medieval concern, wanting to have the relics of a saint near one in order to be sure of his favor.  There were many medieval stories of "holy thefts," people stealing a saint's relics and bringing them home when the saint was clearly not being properly revered or respected where he was (as evidenced of course by visions).

Click here if you're interested in seeing more of the Cranky Saint.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Tournaments

Tournaments, mock battles, first appeared at the end of the eleventh century/beginning of the twelfth.  Because by that time it was fairly well understood (at least in the abstract) that Christians should not kill Christians (as discussed in a previous post), the knights who had been trained their whole lives as warriors wanted a chance to demonstrate their skill.  Church leaders would have preferred them to go off on Crusade, but the knights did not necessarily want to go off on a long and dangerous trip, where they would likely come home broke if they came home at all.

Of course, one could be killed in a tournament, even though that was not the purpose.  The swords did not have edges, but they still made fine blunt instruments.  And falling from a galloping horse is an excellent way to break one's neck.  Because the church believed that a tournament brought out all of the worst vices--pride and anger as well as potentially manslaughter--whole tournaments might be put under excommunication.  Someone killed in a tournament was not supposed to be buried in the churchyard but rather at the crossroads with a stake through his heart, the same as a suicide.

Twelfth-century knights were not deterred nor inspired to go on Crusade instead.  If one went on Crusade, one was either trying to find salvation or else to join in the general excitement when a duke announced he was off to Jerusalem.

It was possible for an excellent tournament fighter to make his living on the circuit.  William Marshall, who was companion to one of the sons of Henry II of England and later regent of England after the death of King John, got his start fighting in tournaments.  Losers forfeited their horse and armor to the winner, who generally allowed the loser to buy them back.

Although the modern view of tournaments is two knights with long lances galloping at each other in a ritualistic way, in practice twelfth-century tournaments could be a lot more chaotic.  As well as jousts, the face-offs between two knights, there was the mêlée, a free-for-all that could take off cross-country and go on all day.  At one point the knights from Flanders were late for a tournament and announced that they would just sit and watch.  However, as the mêlée was winding down, and all the other knights were exhausted, the Flemish knights donned their armor, mounted up, and quickly captured everyone in sight.  This was universally agreed to be a fine trick.

At many big tournaments, there would be a sort of pre-tournament the night before, to weed out the weaker fighters.  This "bohort" was typically fought in regular clothes, not armor, and involved poking more than striking.  It was a sign of ostentatious wealth to wear very fine clothing to the bohort and have them ripped to shreds.

Women did not participate directly in tournaments.  But they certainly were spectators, cheering on their favorites, often determining who was the winner, the one who had fought the best.  The knights of course wanted to impress the ladies (adding lust to the list of vices a tournament could excite).

With the invention of gunpowder, the fighting skills honed in tournaments no longer played much of a role in real battles.  Nonetheless, tournaments continued to be popular.  They could become extremely elaborate, requiring knights to prove noble ancestry several generations back in order to take part.  As armor became heavier and heavier and the warhorses thus larger, the knights had to be winched up into the saddle and strapped in place.  The late medieval church decided there was no problem with tournaments, even though people were still killed in them--including the heir to the French throne in the sixteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Violence in the Middle Ages

Medieval society was violent--but not anarchical.  Efforts were constantly being made, some more successful than others, to rein in violence.  When you have a number of muscular, well-trained fighting men carrying swords, it was, not surprisingly, a constant concern.

In the modern US, we tend as a society to fear those of lower socio-economic status.  Poorer parts of town are considered dangerous.  In the Middle Ages, in contrast, the powerful, the wealthy, the elite were considered the most frightening.  On the other hand, poor people's only defense against dangerous warriors was found in other wealthy and powerful men.

The reason villages grew up around castles was because the villagers saw them as sources of protection.  A lord would certainly defend his own peasants, even if he ran roughshod over someone else's peasants' fields (or even the peasants themselves).

Knights and nobles were trained to be fighters.  From the twelfth century on, nobles defined themselves in part by their military prowess.  A touchy sense of honor, where every insult had to be met with violence, was a constant issue.

Of course, this violence was not unmitigated.  For one thing, it is much harder to kill someone from a distance with a sword than with a gun, so until gunpowder was invented in the fourteenth century, fighting had to be up-close.  (Nobles used bows for hunting, but not for attacking each other.)

Also, "peace" was considered an extremely important value.  If two knights insulted each other and then sprang at each other, their friends were supposed to pull them apart, not egg them on.  Everyone knew all too well that a fight with knives and swords would turn deadly all too fast.

At exactly the same time as knights and castles first appeared in France, in the years around 1000, bishops started holding Peace of God councils.  They would bring knights together and make them swear mighty oaths, on relics, not to harm the harmless--churchmen, women, merchants, peasants.  This was reasonably successful, at least in getting the knights to consider that killing the weak was wrong and might even send them to hell.

Two generations later, the bishops followed up on their initial success by establishing the Truce of God, where they persuaded knights that they shouldn't even kill each other on Sundays, great saints' feast days, Advent, or Lent.  This was not nearly as effective, but it certainly made the knights think.  By the twelfth century, everyone more or less agreed (whether or not they always acted on it) that Christians should not kill Christians.

Churchmen instead urged the knights to go on Crusade, to use their warrior skills to kill Muslims.  The knights themselves preferred tournaments, mock battles where people (theoretically) were not killed, but they were able to show off their prowess.

There were of course psychopaths in the Middle Ages, just as there are now, people who enjoyed inflicting pain and suffering.  The chroniclers always described such acts of violence as "unheard of," indicating that they were far from the norm.

See more here on medieval conflict resolution.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Privacy in the Middle Ages

In the modern US, we treat privacy as a serious right.  Although it is not protected in so many words in the Constitution, several key Supreme Court decisions have been based on the inherent right to privacy as fundamental to American law.  (Of course, this is all undercut by the modern tendency to blab all of one's activities and feelings on Facebook.)

Medieval people had no such assumptions about privacy.  In a medieval village or a castle, a community of people living close together, it was assumed that everyone knew everyone else's business, perhaps even better than they did.

Even sex was not nearly as private as we think it should be.  In a castle or manor house, the lord and lady's bed was in the middle of the great hall, and the servants slept on pallets in the hall around them.  (The bed at least had curtains.)  A newly-married couple would be tucked into bed together, and although the bridal party would retreat at least partially, they would find it both hilarious and appropriate to shout "helpful" suggestions through the curtains or under the door and "inspire" the couple with naughty songs under the window.

One has probably heard the phrase, "In springtime, a young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love."  In spring, a young man for the first time in months had a chance to get a young woman off by herself, in woods or field, away from all the relatives.

One has also probably heard, "Each man's house is his castle," with the vague suggestion that people are entitled to privacy in their houses "just like" medieval lords were private in their castles.  But this phrase was only coined well after the end of the Middle Ages, based on a thorough misunderstanding of medieval law.  Any medieval lord who defied the king would find the king (and the law) had no concern for or indeed knowledge of any inherent privacy rights.  Such a lord's defense would reside in high walls, not in some legal principle.

For that matter, the distinction between public and private which we make for rulers--a president cannot treat the taxes that have been collected as personally his--is also a fairly modern distinction.  Until about 1200, the royal treasury, what we would think of as "public" funds, was kept under the king's bed, and he decided how it should be spent.

Religion, which we also tend to think of as a private matter, was also an issue for one's neighbors in the Middle Ages.  Someone who had done serious damage to the Church or who had fallen into heresy would be excommunicated, literally cut off from the community, because it was feared that the normal sharing of everything, including religious ideas, would infect the others.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.