Hay and Straw

 Today most people probably don't know the difference between hay and straw.  We've become such an urban/suburban society that basic farm knowledge is rare.  And yet, a century-plus ago, supposedly a lot of new army recruits were so uneducated they didn't even know the difference between left and right, and hence had trouble marching when they were told (for example) to put their left food forward.  The story goes that therefore the sergeants ended up tying bundles of hay to one foot and straw to the other, because the country bumpkins knew that difference at least.

Urban legend?  Mocking story?  Hard to say.  But there is an old army chant (to be used when marching in step),  "Hay foot, straw foot, belly full of bean soup, left! left!" etc.

Okay, medieval people knew the difference between hay and straw.  Hay is basically tall grass, complete with seed heads.  It is used for animal feed and is quite nourishing. Scything hay was one of the agricultural activities associated with the month of June, as seen in the mosaic below, from the monastery of Tournus. (Note the word Iunius, meaning June, on the left.  Recall that there was no distinction between U and V in the Middle Ages.)

 

Hay could be grown on fields that were too steep or rocky for most crops, because there was no plowing involved, just let the wild grasses grow.  Modern haying, which is done with machines rather than a person standing there with a scythe, requires a relatively smooth surface.  Then as now, there was always a concern of unwanted weeds getting mixed in, because the whole purpose was to produce food good for animals to eat.

Interestingly, poppies, which are now treated as Good and taken as a symbol of veterans, were considered what we would call a Noxious Weed because they'd get into the hay field and grow up all prickly, ready to hurt an animal's mouth when they ate the hay.  Poppies got their positive spin from a poem about the World War I battlefields, where in the years after the fighting, grass and wild weeds like poppies spread over the fields, "In Flanders fields, the poppies grow..."  Medieval people still hated poppies.

 Straw on the other hand is the stalks left after grain (the seedheads) is taken off for human consumption.  The whole plant, stalk and all, would be harvested, then the grain separated out, leaving the stalks.  The stalks would have very minimal nutritional value, unlike hay.  Cows can digest cellulose, but even for them straw is pretty minimal as a food.

But that didn't mean straw was useless.  Even now, straw is routinely spread in stables.  It provides something for animals to stand on other than the bare floor, and it absorbs wastes, meaning that you can muck out a stable more easily by getting out the used straw than trying to clean a bare floor.  Straw is also good for wiping things down, from a sweaty horse to a new-born calf.

Wheat straw was especially valued.  Medieval wheat was tall, 6 or 8 feet, unlike modern wheat, which is only half as tall.  Modern farmers don't want all that stalk, but wheat straw in the Middle Ages was used for thatching roofs, for weaving into baskets, and similar projects.

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

 

Medieval mystery stories

 Medieval literature is the ancestor of much of modern literature.  Fantasy, of course, began in the Middle Ages:  knights and nobles having adventures with a strong admixture of the marvelous or supernatural.  Romance as a literary genre isn't quite as closely tied to its medieval roots, but the twelfth century was as eager as the twentieth to celebrate the power of love.  A lot of stories, like the "Guillaume de Dôle" tale I retold as the novel The Sign of the Rose, involve couples falling in love and marrying.

 

How about the mystery genre?  That has a lot less medieval precedent.  There is  nothing that could be considered a "whodunnit" in medieval literature. no amateur detective trying to figure out who the killer is before the killer can strike again.  Sure, a lot of people ended up dead in medieval literature, but it was usually pretty obvious who the killer was -- often the hero.  (The butler never did it.)

Now a novel in the mystery genre is actually a comedy.  This may sound strange on the face of it, how can something be a comedy that starts out (by the second chapter anyway) with a dead body?  Well, for the Greeks (who invented the categories of comedy and tragedy) a comedy has a happy ending, with problems solved.

A mystery story involves somebody being murdered, but by the end the evil murderer has been identified and caught, and the amateur detective, who doubtless had some scary moments, is triumphant.  Some detective stories are grittier, but the most popular sub-genre is the so-called "cozy" mystery, where there's a dead body but no gory details and lots of nice human interaction and even humor along the way.

Starting in the 1980s, a number of authors decided to rectify the absence of medieval mystery stories by writing some, set in the Middle Ages but using the conventions of the modern mystery story:  a dead body is found, an amateur detective (like a friar) becomes almost accidentally involved, has a few adventures, thinks things through, follows some clues, and emerges with the murderer revealed and brought to justice.

All lots of fun, but obviously improved if the author actually knows some medieval social history.  There's one popular author of medieval mystery stories (who shall remain nameless) who seems to have missed a lot of medieval reality.  In just one story (made into a TV show) our amateur detective hero becomes involved in a case where a noble wedding is held at a monastery (No! a monastery is a place withdrawn from the world, not a party venue); hides from the murderer by blithely dressing up in a dead leper's clothes (No! no medieval person would think this was fine); and visits an abbess who is sitting on her nunnery's front porch, knitting (No! an abbess doesn't just sit outdoors chatting with anyone who comes by, plus knitting wasn't invented yet).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

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.