The Physicality of Miracles

 As I've discussed before, miracle stories were very much part of the elite culture of the Middle Ages.  The stories were written by highly educated churchmen, and the doubters in the stories were the uneducated.  These were not superstitious imaginings by the ignorant.

Yet they seem weird to the educated today.  One of the weirdest things is often the physicality.  People are not just healed of afflictions, they are healed dramatically, abruptly, often painfully.  For example, when someone who had been deaf was healed and given hearing, blood routinely poured from their ears.  Someone whose body had been contorted, so for example their legs were bent permanently so that their feet touched their buttocks (a common element in accounts of miracles worked by the Virgin), their legs wouldn't just be straightened but yanked into position so forcefully that the person being healed would scream in pain, and blood would pour from their buttocks as the feet ripped away.

The real miracle, those writing the stories all agreed, was the moral and spiritual regeneration, but physicality got everyone's attention.  Someone quietly mending their evil ways would not inspire others to do the same, but going from so deformed that they had to be carried everywhere to leaping and bounding in delight at their healing certainly got everyone's attention.

 

The Virgin (seen above being crowned Queen of Heaven in a twelfth-century carving) could be counted on to help even the worst sinners, as long as they prayed to her and mended their ways after healing.  In one story, a monk who was supposed to keep track of the hours at night (so that the other monks could be called for the night liturgy) took advantage of being unsupervised all night to row across a little lake to his mistress's house for a quicky.

But one night (you can see where this is going) his boat sank and him with it.  But wait!  Every night before heading out on the lake he'd pray to the Virgin, and again when he got back.  So as the demons arrived to take the drowning man's soul, she fought them off, giving him one last chance.  Meanwhile, back at the monastery, the other monks realized they'd never been called for the night offices, looked for the man who'd been supposed to ring the bell, and realized both he and the boat were missing.  When his body washed up, they were sure he was dead, but surprise! he sat up and related his vision of being saved by the Virgin from the demons.  No more midnight quickies for him! you can be sure.

But suppose the Virgin didn't come through?  Of course one prayed harder, but again physicality played a role.  At one shrine noted for healings by the Virgin, pilgrims who had come to seek her aid would become irritated after a week or two if she didn't respond.  They would strip off every stitch of clothing and crawl on their bellies to her altar, asking people to whip them as they went, to show how penitent they were.  According to the stories, the Virgin always came through after such a clear demonstration.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023


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.

The Stephen-Mathilda wars

 Twelfth-century English royal history usually goes from the sons of William the Conqueror, to Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Becket, to Richard the Lionheart (who is good) and King John (who is bad).  Rarely do history buffs focus on the Stephen-Mathilda wars of 1135-1154, almost twenty years of upheaval, civil war, and betrayal, dense with family politics and strong women.

Never heard of it, you say?  Well, you're about to.

The issue was whether the son of a daughter or the daughter of a son was the most appropriate heir.  Stephen and Mathilda were first cousins, grandchildren of William the Conqueror.  The Conqueror's second and third sons, William Rufus and Henry I, had succeeded him as kings of England (the oldest son, Robert, was duke of Normandy until Henry I defeated his older brother in battle and took Normandy).  Meanwhile the Conqueror's daughter Adela married Stephen, Count of Blois (Blois is on the Loire, in France).  So far so good?

The problem arose when Henry I died without legitimate sons in 1135.  He had had a son, named William like Henry's father and brother, but Young William had died in 1120 in the White Ship debacle, when he and his friends were sailing between France and England, probably DUI, and crashed and sank.  So Henry ended up naming his daughter Mathilda as future King of England and got all his barons to agree to it.

They may have had their fingers crossed behind their backs, because they all hated Mathilda (also sometimes known as Maud in England).  She had earlier been married to the German emperor, Heinrich V, and continued to call herself Empress even after he died and she returned to England.  This was bad enough, but then she married Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, the county right next to Normandy.  The Anglo-Norman barons who had promised to support Mathilda as King of England had serious reservations about Geoffrey Plantagenet.

So they turned instead to her cousin Stephen, son of Adela and Stephen of Blois (see above, I hope you're taking notes).  Young Stephen thought becoming King of England was a swell plan, and the wars were on.  The barons loved the Stephen-Mathilda wars.  They changed sides multiple times, getting rewards and grants and promises every time they did.  But even they thought things were getting a little too chaotic after a while.

(Interestingly, in official lists of Kings of England, Stephen is always listed rather than Mathilda.  Personally I disagree, but I'm not making official lists.)

As both Stephen and Mathilda got older, the question arose as to who would succeed either one.  Stephen thought his oldest son, Eustace, ought to be king after him.  But no one liked this plan (which is why you've heard even less about King Eustace than about the Stephen-Mathilda wars, as Eustace was never crowned).  Stephen had married Mathilda, countess of Boulogne, in France (another Mathilda! it seems like about half the women at the time were named Mathilda), and the French did not want Boulogne, an important port, attached to the English crown.  For that matter, neither did the pope.

As it turned out, Eustace died before his father, and when King Stephen was dying in 1154 he decided to make amends with his cousins.  At this point both Empress Mathilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet had died, leaving a son, Henry, count of Anjou.  Stephen officially named Henry his heir as King of England, and young Henry Plantagenet succeeded as Henry II (1154-1189).  He was father of both Richard the Lionheart and King John.

Interestingly, although we tend to assume that a king's oldest son will succeed as king, Richard the Lionheart, sixth of the Anglo-Norman kings, is the first example of the oldest surviving son succeeding (and he'd actually had a couple of older brothers who predeceased their father).  Starting with the Conqueror, who succeeded by conquest, the succession went next to a second son, then to a younger brother, then to a nephew (Stephen), then to a first cousin once removed (Henry II), and finally to the oldest surviving son.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023
For more on medieval political history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Wealthy Judges

 There is concern right now in the US about justices taking generous gifts or having sources of income that seem questionable.  This is nothing new.  Judges in the late Middle Ages could get wealthy too in ways that might not seem entirely ethical.

English judges, appointed by the crown, had a variety of sources of income available to them, enough that they might make a couple hundred pounds a year, at a time when five pounds a year was considered a good salary for a low-status person.  So where did it all come from?

First and probably most essentially, they received an official salary.  They also received an annual allowance to pay for their official robes, which could be very elaborate.  This seems appropriate.  But it could get complicated.  the crown would issue them what was basically a check, a royal order ("writ") to the chancery to pay the judge a certain amount of money when the check was presented.  These checks were not always cashed right away; for one thing, sometimes there wasn't much money in the treasury.  It appears that some judges would present their check and get paid, then come back with the same check six months later and get paid again.  The chancery was supposed to keep the check and mark it as cancelled, but it didn't always work that way.

Then there were writs and fines.  In civil cases, whenever someone filed a case against someone, the judge would issue a writ, and the complaintant would pay the judge for it.  In criminal cases, when someone was found guilty and had to pay a fine, part of the fine went to the judge.  Those arguing a case before a judge would also pay for his meals.

Then there were gifts.  There were no rules against judges receiving gifts, and wealthy neighbors might want to be friends with a judge even if they had no legal cases before him at the moment.  These not surprisingly could become actual bribes, when the wealthy would assure that a judge saw a case in a particular way.  Even the king would frequently make gifts to favored judges.  Gifts might be money, food, oak trees, deer, precious stones, and all sorts of other good things.

But the single biggest source of revenue for judges was from the church.  The late medieval church in England was wealthy and paid its bishops and abbots well.  All judges made sure to be appointed to high office in the church.  Until well into the fourteenth century all judges were ordained priests, so they could certainly hold church office.  (Look even today at a judge's robes.  They look a whole lot like a priest's vestments, don't they.  There's a reason for that.)

And all judges were pluralists.  That meant they held multiple church offices, such as being a bishop, plus an abbot, plus the dean of an important urban church, for example.  How could they serve all these while being judges? you ask.  Well, obviously they couldn't, especially not serve all the different churches from which they derived income.  So they appointed vicars.  A vicar (a representative, same root as vice as in vice president) might make a few pounds a year.  English parish priests are still termed vicars.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, judges began being regularly appointed without being priests, due in part to England's quarrels with the papacy.  Judges now probably made no more than half as much as their predecessors had earlier.

What did the judges do with all their money? While priests, they couldn't have family, though there might be a few young people around the place....  Essentially judges paid for their entourage, for houses, food, travel, and general display, plus of course paying the vicars.  Some judges bought up land which passed to family members (brothers and nephews) on their death.  Once judges were no longer priests, they did have families to support and to whom they could leave their wealth.  Some judges set up accounts at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge from which faculty and students could take out loans (at interest, of course).

Prof. Ryan Rowberry of Georgia State has been doing a great deal of excellent archival work figuring out how late medieval judges were paid.  The above is based on his findings.

It's interesting to note that historical fiction set in the Middle Ages usually involves big political events and family drama, while medieval-themed fantasy often focuses on heroes trying to defeat the enemy, heavily influenced by medieval epics.  Nobody writes either historical fiction or fantasy about judges being pluralists and getting bribes.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Indie Book Covers

 There's an old saying, "You can't judge a book from its cover."  It means that glancing at something's exterior won't necessarily tell you all the complicated and interesting things within, and many an excellent book (among other things for which the book is a metaphor) may have a nondescript exterior.

But this saying does not apply to indie book publishing.  In a bookstore full of traditionally published books, someone may wander around, be intrigued by a title or a cover, or go to their favorite part of the store and see (for example) a new book on the US Civil War they haven't seen before, and pick it up.  Some of the titles they see will jog a memory of seeing that book reviewed favorably by (for example) the New York Times, or seeing it on a best-seller list.  The cover image isn't all that important.

This is why you will often see these days a traditionally published book that doesn't even have a cover image, just the title in interesting script on a solid cover background, or at most maybe a tree or an abstract shape.

Things are different for indie books.  There is no physical bookstore where someone may wander, looking at a finite number of books, selected by the staff as worthy of buying and reading.  Instead one is on an on-line bookstore, along with literally millions and millions of other books (including traditionally published ones), knowing perfectly well that a lot of the books are not worth buying.  (The advantage of indie publishing is anyone can publish. The disadvantage of indie publishing....)

So the cover becomes very important.  A well done cover serves a lot of purposes.  If interesting and intriguing, it can catch the potential buyer's eye.  If professionally done, it is a marker that the author cared enough about her book to try to do everything right, including (one hopes), story, editing, and formatting.  The style and content of the cover tell the genre:  a passionate-looking couple for romance, rockets or planets for science fiction, a pastoral scene with a church for a book of religious musings, and so on.

The cover's whole purpose in life is to make the potential reader look at the book's description and read the first few pages, then, one hopes, push the Buy button.  The cover is not strictly an illustration of any particular scene in the book, but it should convey something of the flavor of the book.

For example, A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, has a great cover by Tom Kidd.  It indicates without a doubt that this is fantasy, but the wizard hero's rueful expression, pile of books, and lack of swords indicates that this is not epic fantasy and has a good touch of humor (the title helps).

 

Tom Kidd read the whole book before he started painting the cover, but often the artists whom indie authors get to do their covers will just take suggestions from the author as to what the cover might show, in a simpler illustration.  Dane of EBook Launch did a very nice cover for me of The Starlight Raven without actually reading the book.  A young woman suggests the book is for and about teens (which it is), and in the front there's a raven with stars in its feathers.

In other cases, I've bought covers from graphic artists who put interesting covers together from stock photos, then I added my own title and author name to this "pre-made" cover.  Such was the case with Shadow of the Wanderers.  This one, the potential reader should be able to tell at once, is epic fantasy with a strong Norse component.

 

And sometimes I've used my own photographs. A picture of a staircase in the ruined castle of Fleckenstein, in Alsace, is on the cover of my (non-fiction) Positively Medieval.  I like it because it is very clearly authentically medieval, old and worn by many feet over the centuries, and because it seems to draw the reader into the book.

Self-publishing is free, but the serious indie author has got to assume that she'll be paying for a good cover at some point.  Without that almost subliminal hint that the right cover can give the potential reader, the book may never be bought and read.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023
 

The "Three Orders" and medieval historians

 If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that it is simply false that medieval society was tidily divided into three orders.  The idea of "orders of society" had long been around, because medieval people (like us) liked to create categories, but these were theoretical rather than official.  For example, one theory was that society's three groups were cloistered virgins (monks and nuns), secular clergy (priests and bishops), and lay people.  Or perhaps there were just two, the unchaste and the virgins (these two could become three if married people became a third category).  Or maybe the two divisions of society were the powerful and the weak.  Or simply men and women.

The division of society into "those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor" was proposed in the early eleventh century and then ignored until the creation of the French Estates General in the fourteenth century, where the Estates were churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy townspeople (wait, you say, what happened to peasants? well they didn't count).

It shows you how little influence the "three orders" had that England's Parliament, established slightly earlier, had only two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.  The Lords included both church leaders and secular nobles, whereas the knights of the shire, who would have been in the "second estate" in France, were instead part of the Commons with the wealthy townspeople.  (And you note there arr still no peasants.)

(Parliament then and now meets in Westminster, near the church where King Charles III will soon be crowned.)

So even though there was no tidy division into three orders in the Middle Ages, there's always been a sense that there were different statuses in society.  Church men and women had different lives than powerful lay people, who in turn were different from townspeople or from peasants.

Interestingly, historians who study the Middle Ages loosely follow the eleventh-century theory about society's divisions in choosing what to study.  Given a choice of three groups, most historians choose only one, or at most two.  That is, someone might study the nobility and the church but pay little attention to peasants (or townspeople).  Or, as is the case with the many French historians who write regional monographs, one might study nobles and peasants but essentially ignore the church.  Interestingly, scholars essentially never study both peasants and the church, although some have focused their research on urban areas and included both urban churches and townspeople.

And of course even one of these groups provides plenty of opportunity for study.  Within the church there are monks, nuns, priests, friars, bishops, popes, and various hangers-on.  And the study of religion and religious ideas goes well beyond the study of people within the church.  Knights and nobles can be studied for their families, for their role in politics, for ideas of chivalry, for medieval warfare.  The "everybody else" group included 80-90% of the population, everything from desperately poor laborers to wealthy merchants, so there's lots there to study.  And women can be treated as a separate group within all of these.

If "society was divided into three orders" was as simple as high school textbooks might lead you to believe, medieval historians wouldn't still be writing exciting new books and I wouldn't have a blog with over 500 posts and no end in sight.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

 

Memory and Forgetting

 Like modern people, medieval people worried about forgetting important things.  Such important things included wars, the deaths of kings, disease outbreaks, healings by saints, the foundation of monasteries, and pious gifts.  Like modern people, medieval people wanted important things written down.

Writing has a real advantage over stories and accounts passed orally in that it doesn't change, and people not yet born when you die may read something you wrote and know what you were thinking.  An important event in the past, one that people had stopped talking about, if recorded in writing can be remembered once again.  A written record from the time can also help resolve arguments in the future about whether something really happened.

Memory was especially important at monasteries, because they were officially undying bodies.  A gift of property made in the seventh century should still belong to the monks in the twelfth century.  Similarly, a particularly holy or at least effective abbot (or bishop) deserved to be remembered as a model for later generations to seek to emulate.  Thus it was important to get as many memories in writing as possible.

The problem of course was that these written records could be lost.  Before the eighth century those in the West preferred to write on papyrus, rather than on parchment (sheep skin), and papyrus disintegrates if not kept dry.  We have extremely few surviving original documents from the beginning of the Middle Ages, even though there is plenty of evidence of widespread literacy and record-keeping then, even notaries and public archives where important documents could be stored.  Most of what we know about these centuries from written evidence comes from copies made later, when delicate records were copied onto parchment.

Parchment however does not mean that a record is now preserved forever.  Since there was only the one copy, it could become lost, nibbled by mice, burned in a fire, have ink spilled on it, stolen, become too faded to read.  And this was during the Middle Ages.  The early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth-century wars of religion to the upheavals of the French Revolution to the twentieth century's world wars, have destroyed far more.

And even copying was an issue.  Late Roman cursive, such as used in a lot of papyrus documents, was nothing like the Caroline book-hands used in the ninth through eleventh centuries, the great age of document copying.  Scribes must have looked at what was in front of them and made their best guesses as to what the words were.

Sometimes even when they could read what was written it still didn't make sense.  There were a lot of changes during the eighth century as Europe began recovering from the population loss of the sixth and seventh centuries (on which see more here), as new population centers started being established, often in different places than the late Roman ones, and as Latin was being replaced by the earliest versions of today's European languages.  Scribes of the ninth century and later could barely recognize their monastery in its earliest records, where places had different names, people lived in different places, and rules and customs were different.

Similarly, holy figures of late antiquity behaved differently than their successors half a millennium later.  Tenth- and eleventh-century monks and cathedral priests were shocked to find an abbot or bishop who had been married, or whose version of  proper behavior included dressing in rags and going barefoot.  The "life" of an early holy bishop might have to be rewritten so that the wife who appeared with him was actually a "bride of Christ" or perhaps someone to whom he had been unwillingly betrothed by his parents before entering the church.

If something was just too weird it could be deliberately forgotten.  All it took was an early, disintegrating document not to be copied for it to be lost forever.  But the past itself could not be dismissed.  After all, tradition legitimates.  "We have always done this" or "We have always been here" are still powerful.  Thus past events could not all be swept away.  Rather they had to be reconfigured into what historians call a "useful past," one which gave legitimacy to the present.  Medieval scribes explained that the past valued the same things they valued, even while hoping that no one would change the memory of the great deeds and people they recorded for their own posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Guédelon castle

 In the Puisaye region of French Burgundy, they are building a thirteenth-century castle. Its name is Guédelon.

 The project began in 1995 as an attempt to build a castle using medieval techniques.  Nearly thirty years later, they hope they are close to finishing, and they have learned a tremendous amount in the process about how castles were built in the thirteenth century.  The builders call this "experimental archaeology."

The process began with studying real castles.  Although all medieval castles have been modified over the centuries (and many are now in ruins), close analysis can show how (one simple example) walls were built with careful stonework for the inner and outer sides, and an inside filled with rubble.  A lot of medieval buildings still have builders' marks on stones or beams, giving additional clues to their construction.

Added to this are medieval manuscripts which portray castles and other buildings under construction.  There are even a few handbooks from the late Middle Ages giving cryptic instructions.  The modern French builders' guilds, the ones who repair old buildings, have retained a lot of useful information over the centuries.

But in essence the builders at Guédelon are reverse engineering a castle, trying something and seeing if it works to produce something that looks real.  Any thought someone might have had in 1995 when they started, that the simple folk of the thirteenth century would not have had the sophistication of modern builders, was quickly dispelled.  Medieval builders didn't have our machines, but they knew exactly what they were doing and what would work.

Timbers (mostly oak) are cut with medieval style axes and saws, and stones are chiseled and shaped with medieval style chisels.  The sandstone from which most of the castle is being built is locally quarried, and the limestone, used for fancy vaulting and decorative carvings, comes from just a short distance away.  Most of the oakwood is from nearby.  This reflects what real thirteenth-century builders would have had to do, get as much local as they could because of the enormous transportation costs of heavy materials in a pre-truck world.

Over the last quarter century, a lot of people interested in historical reconstruction have come to learn and work at Guédelon. The builders reconstructing Notre Dame in Paris, after the fire, are trying to restore the timbers and roof to something like the thirteenth-century original, and many of the workers had been trained in medieval techniques at Guédelon.

Guédelon welcomes visitors.  You can visit during the summer months, for only 14 euros each (less for children).  They are eager for people to see their work and to teach them about medieval techniques.  I would guess that once the castle is finished they will be able to rent it out as a movie set, because it will (of course) look like a thirteenth-century castle looked in the thirteenth century.  European movies set in the Middle Ages often use real castles as a backdrop, but they have to shoot carefully (or use CG special effects) to avoid the ruined bits (Hollywood movies tend to go in for the unconvincing stage set).

The project has an extensive website (in French and English) giving the story of how they decided to build a medieval castle in the twenty-first century and illustrating construction methods, available here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.