The "feudal revolution"

 A generation ago there was a great debate among medieval historians about what was termed a "feudal revolution" of the year 1000.  It has more or less exhausted the debaters, but it still keeps popping up in discussions of the eleventh century, so I thought I should discuss it.  (Note: medievalists these days all hate the word feudalism, with its plethora of contradictory meanings, but it keeps popping up anyway.)

This is what is called a "historiographic" debate, that is a discussion by historians of what happened and what does it mean, and why so-and-so's argument should have long been dismissed, and somebody-or-other's argument is full of novel insights.  I'm not going to get into the historiography here (naming all the participants of the debate and summarizing their points), but I should note that this is why the discipline of History is a lot more than what happened in what order.

Basically the issue of the "feudal revolution" was the question of whether the changes of the early eleventh century represented a radical break with preceding years or whether there was gradual change.  Although, as I have earlier discussed, nobody at the time thought the world was going to end in the year 1000, that year marks a handy break point between the Carolingian era (eighth through tenth centuries) and the high Middle Ages, the beginning of the Capetian era (Hugh Capet became king of France in 987, replacing the last Carolingian).

 

There is no question that a lot of changes took place in the years just before and after 1000 that seriously affected society.  Especially the economy improved, a slightly warmer and drier climate making possible more reliable crops, and this increase in food production accompanied by the growth of towns, new trade routes, the clearing of forests and marshes for more agricultural land, and demographic growth.

This is also the time the first castles were built--there had long been fortresses, and there had long been palaces, but a castle combined elements of both, an elegant home for a lord that was also defensible.  Knights also appeared for the first time, gaining visibility through the Peace of God councils that urged them not to attack the defenseless.  The lords in their castles, surrounded by their knights, began assessing what were called "banal" dues, requirements that everyone in the region pay them some sort of fee, whether or not they were the lord's tenants.

How big a change was this?  Supporters of a radical break have described the rise of castles and banal lordship as leading to new impositions on peasants, who were supposedly forced to toil even harder than ever for their pitiless overlords.  The problem with this is that, although there are a lot of complaints in the eleventh century that "new and unheard of burdens" were being put on the poor (usually complaints from the poor themselves or their advocates in the monasteries), it had been common for hundreds of years to label anything bad as "new and unheard of."

Medieval people totally believed in tradition and the good old ways.  They were doing new things all the time, but they always had to be explained as not really new or, better yet, returning to the good old ways the way they had been before recent efforts to mess them up.  Thus anything bad was "new," whether it was really new or not.

The gradualist side of the "feudal revolution" debate has assembled a large number of examples of institutions and developments that were underway well before the year 1000.  I myself am fairly firmly on the gradualist side, except for one aspect.  The more determined "no-feudal-revolution"folks want to deny that knights were a new phenomenon around the year 1000.

I'm sorry, knights were new.  You can't be a knight without a horse and affordable horseshoes, which they just didn't have before the late tenth century.  Efforts to claim that Roman legions were just like knights or that any mention of a sword or shield must equate with knighthood are, shall we saw, unconvincing.  Chivalry, the complex set of ideas of how knights should behave, was a late eleventh-century development, not something to be equated with ancient Roman stoicism.

But in one way I think the "revolutionaries" are right, and that is that things changed a lot for the peasants in the eleventh century.  But not in the way they think.  My own analysis of the documents suggests that the eleventh century was not a disaster for peasants but rather a time when the improving economy made life substantially better for the peasants, the ones after all who grew the food.

See how fun historiography can be?

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Communion

 Right now the sacrament of communion (Eucharist) is in the news, because the American Catholic bishops are deciding whether President Biden, a Catholic, should be denied communion because of his position on a woman's right to choose.  So I'll blog about communion.

Its origins of course are clear in the New Testament, which is why it's found, in one version or another, in all Christian denominations.  The Last Supper, the evening before the Crucifixion, Jesus is recorded as saying, "This is my body," while picking up a piece of bread, and, "This is my blood," in relation to wine, urging his followers to eat and drink in memory of him.

Now of course this could be interpreted in lots of different ways, including the fairly simple idea of his followers getting together for a meal in which they would share what they had and talk and remember.  But the version that came to dominate western theology was the doctrine that bread and wine could become the literal flesh and blood of Christ (while still looking and seeming in every respect like bread and wine).

This got early Christians accused of being cannibals, and throughout the Middle Ages there were miracle stories about bleeding communion wafers.  But the theological decision, confirmed at the 1215 Lateran Council, was that the bread and wine underwent "transubstantiation" when consecrated during the Mass, changing their substance to the actual crucified body and blood of Christ (while continuing to look and taste like bread and wine), so that Christians could partake in Christ's sacrifice.

It was considered important, as the same council confirmed, that all Christians should take communion at least once a year.  (Priests and monks might do so daily.)  But there was concern that regular folks might dribble the wine on the floor, or even try to chug the whole chalice, neither of which was appropriate.  So it was decided that for ordinary people just the wafer (bread) would do, because after all a person's body has blood in it, so "the body" would already include blood.

Not everyone agreed with this by any means.  A heresy grew up (which, like all good heresies, considered itself true Christianity and everyone else heretics), called the Utraquists.  This odd word comes from the Latin utraque, meaning "both," because they wanted to be able to receive communion in "both kinds," both bread and wine.  This religious heresy got wrapped up with the efforts of Bohemians in the late Middle Ages to free themselves from the Holy Roman Empire and the emperor's betrayal of John Hus, the Utraquists' leader, burned at the stake in 1415 at the Council of Constance.

In more recent years, the Catholic church has gone back since the 1960s to allowing ordinary folk to sip the wine.  Some Protestant congregations substitute grape juice; those that stick with wine have allowed everyone to have wine since the Protestant Reformation.  (And in medieval Scandinavia, where  wine was hard to get, beer was often treated as an acceptable substitute.)  There has been concern however that Catholic parishioners might drop the bread, so it was common until recently for them just to open their mouth and have a bit of wafer placed on their tongue by a priest.

But back to Joe Biden.  The Catholic bishops are still in the drafting stage, and their official comments so far do not specifically refer to the president.  Besides, whether or not he could receive communion would be up to his local bishop (who supports him), rather than the bishops collectively.  (This is different from the Middle Ages, when bishops all tried to act collectively.)

But I guess if he were refused communion he would be excommunicated.  That's what the word means, to be cast out of the community of the church, and it's extremely serious, what one might call the "nuclear option."  Now in fact the American Catholic bishops are not going to really excommunicate him, which would entail telling all Catholics not to associate with him, and any church to lock its doors and cover the altars with black cloths if he tried to get in.  Someone who dies excommunicate goes straight to hell.  But someone who has committed a sin for which they have yet to perform confession and penance is not supposed to take communion (although they can go to church), which is what the bishops are advocating.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Hours of Prayer

 All the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) stress the importance of prayer.  The Jewish Bible talks about praying multiple times a day.  One of the most important Christian texts of the New Testaments is the Lord's Prayer, that Jesus taught his disciples.  Followers of Islam are expected to pray five times a day; it is one of the Five Pillars of the faith.

Although in majority-Muslim countries it is common to hear the call to prayer coming at regular intervals, with everyone expected to stop what they are doing for a few minutes of prayer, the intervals are not nearly so set for Jews and Christians.  Still, many Christian households have regular morning and evening prayers (as referred to in the hymn often sung in church, "Sweet Hour of Prayer"), and there are Jewish prayers that attend the Sabbath.

Medieval monks had not just five but eight specified hours of prayer.  These were the times that all the monks were expected to be in church, performing the liturgy, singing the psalms.  If they were away from the monastery they were still expected to stop what they were doing for an interval of prayer.  These times were called the "canonical hours."

 

(This is the monastery of Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy.)

Churches, including cathedral churches, parish churches, basilicas and other churches without monks would also ring the bells for these canonical hours, even if there were no formal services associated with them.

The first one in the morning was Prime (you already guessed that, didn't you), coming at the first hour of the day, that is right after sunrise.  This were followed by Terce, halfway to midday, Sext, at midday, None halfway from midday to sunset, Vespers at sunset, and Compline as it was getting dark.  You will note that until you get to Vespers it's all measured in hours from sunrise, one, three, six, and nine.

Compline was time for bed, but monks did not sleep through the night.  Deep in the night (midnight) they rose for Nocturns, the night office, followed by Lauds as dawn was starting to lighten the sky.

It is difficult to say exactly how these canonical hours would correspond to our clocks, because until the late Middle Ages hours were not a set length.  That is, it was always assumed that there were twelve hours of day and twelve of night year round, so the hours had to be shorter or longer.  (See more here on medieval ideas of time.)

This meant that in the summer they really had to hustle to get both night offices (Nocturns and Lauds) in, plus get the monks enough sleep.  In practice a nap during the day was allowed.  In the winter, the monks would often not bother going back to bed between the Night Office and Lauds, or between Lauds and Prime, if they'd already had enough sleep since Compline.

The one big meal of the day was at None, what we would call the middle of the afternoon.  Since they'd been up and working since the sun first rose, they were plenty hungry.  My own thought is that the term "noon meal" (the meal at None) slowly crept its way back toward midday, and with it the definition of "noon."  (See more here on medieval meal times.)

During the summer, monks (at least at less austere monasteries) might have a little snack earlier, and there would often be some soup (origin of the word supper) between Vespers and Compline.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

 

The Vatican

 Because the Vatican seems sort of medieval—after all, the pope is guarded by guards wearing outfits inspired by those of Swiss mercenaries of the sixteenth century—it's easy to lose track of how young it is.  It's one of western Europe's newest countries, having been founded on this day (June 7) in 1929.  It's also the world's smallest sovereign state, only 121 acres (roughly 1 square kilometer), with a population of under 1000.

Above you can see a modern Swiss Guard at the Vatican.

So wait, you say, hasn't the pope been in Rome since the first century?  Well, there's been a bishop in Rome since the early church, second century for sure, and he's been called the pope since the sixth century, a term derived from the word Father (papa) and originally shared with other bishops.  (Click here for more on the early papacy.)  But the Vatican as a country is recent.

The early popes essentially took over the governance of the city of Rome once the emperors were no longer there.  During the Middle Ages, the popes claimed with greater or lesser verisimilitude to control most of Italy, or at least the central parts.  The kings of Germany, who claimed to be Holy Roman Emperors, sort of agreed, as did the Normans who decided that they were kings of Sicily and southern Italy in the twelfth century.  This of course did not reduce the amount of wars in which the papal territories were frequently involved.

The Vatican palace, the heart (now) of the Vatican City State, is located close to Saint Peter's basilica.  But the medieval popes did not live at the Vatican.  Rather, they lived at the Lateran palace, which is no longer within the borders of the Vatican State.  After the popes lived in Avignon, in southern France, for most of the fourteenth century, they returned to Rome and decided to make the Vatican palace their principal residence, handy to Saint Peter's.

This is the famous "Pieta" of Michelangelo, one of the many works of art in the basilica of Saint Peter's, rebuilt in the sixteenth century to replace the old church.

Italy was one of the last of western Europe's countries to become a single country.  Because in the Middle Ages it had been claimed in part by the popes (the so-called Papal States covered much of the middle of Italy), the king of Germany, and the king of Sicily, there was no sense that the whole peninsula was one country.  The individual city states, like Venice, had no interest in being subject to other powers.

But at the end of the nineteenth century Italy officially became a kingdom, sort of unified by 1870.  It took a while to work out all the details, to get Venice for example to agree that they were not an independent republic anymore.  Under the fascist government of Mussolini, the pope was allowed to have his very own country of the Vatican, as noted above.  (San Marino is also still an independent country within Italy.  It's bigger than the Vatican, but not by much.)  After the end of World War II and the end of fascism in Italy, Italy became a democracy.  It still has people who claim to be the righteous king.  They live in Paris.

The Vatican is officially an elective monarchy, with the pope the head of state.  Starting in 1929, the Vatican started issuing its own stamps, and some Italians will tell you that your letter will have a much better chance of making it where it's going if mailed at the Vatican.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

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