Desert Fathers

 I've discussed before how monasticism began in the third century, when Saint Anthony decided to become a hermit and headed out into the desert of Egypt.  Monasticism, that is leading a life separated from society, devoted to prayer and contemplation, quickly developed two main versions:  eremetism, that is being a hermit by yourself, and cenobitism, living in well-disciplined groups.

Saint Anthony was soon joined in the desert by other men, and even a few women, trying to lead a holy life of prayer and privation.  Egypt was a good place to do this, because once you get away from the Nile you're out in the desert and could be miles from anywhere, even though you're only a few hours' walk from town.  And this is important, because if someone is living alone and praying all day, he needs people to bring him food and (if he didn't have the sense to set up by a desert spring) water.

Soon there were a lot of desert fathers, mostly leading solitary lives, though an oasis might support a group.  They were greatly admired for their holiness, their radically simple lives, and indeed became tourist attractions.  Accounts of their lives, their holiness, and their miracles were written up.  People would come and visit them and ask for their wisdom.  Some of the hermits hid in their cells and wouldn't answer the door when pilgrims came by.  Others welcomed pilgrims and sold them sandals or prayer mats woven from palm fronds.

By the fourth and fifth centuries, regular tours of the Egyptian desert fathers were organized out of Jerusalem.  Jerusalem, like the rest of the Roman Empire, was thoroughly Christian at this time.  One surviving traveler's account recounts all the different hermits they visited, the sayings and wisdom of each, and the travelers' various adventures, like being chased for miles by a hippopotamus.

Long after Egypt, along with the Middle East and the rest of north Africa, had become majority-Muslim regions, Christians remembered the desert fathers and read their stories.  Monasteries in western Europe liked to say they were founded "in the desert," meaning not a sandy place but somewhere desolate, wild, deserted by anyone before they showed up.

One particular monastery, Saint Martin's of Tournai (northern end of the French kingdom), had an especial attraction to the desert fathers.  It was an old monastery that had become abandoned during the time of the Vikings.  In the eleventh century, it became simply a parish church in town, served by a small group of canons (priests).  In the twelfth century, the priests read their Bibles and heard about monasteries being founded and decided to become monks, living a much more austere life than did priests:  a strictly vegetarian diet, simplicity in clothing, no personal possessions.

As a parish church, Saint Martin's had been very much part of the community, with people popping into the church to pray or ask for blessing or attend mass or to have a child baptized or a wedding performed or just to chat with the priests.  All this continued after the priests became monks.  As monks, they started to feel that maybe they had not sufficiently distanced themselves from society, especially as people were always talking and laughing and going about their business right outside the church.  But they loved their community and didn't want to drive them away.  Some community members had themselves decided to become monks, bringing a few children with them.

Reading the stories of the desert fathers, the monks had a brilliant idea.  They would head off to Egypt and become desert fathers themselves!  In the dead of the night they packed up all their books and whatever food they had on a wagon, put the little boys on top of the load, and headed out, bound for Egypt.

They didn't get far.  The townspeople discovered their absence the next morning and were distraught.  It was as bad as having Mom and Dad decide that you were so naughty they would run away from home.  Fast riders headed out on every road out of Tournai and soon caught up to the monks.  The bishop was summoned to talk sense into them.

The bishop explained to them that they could be perfectly good monks right there in Tournai, ministering to their parishioners.  For good measure, he threw himself on his face at their feet, telling them he was not worthy to be the bishop of such holy men and boys.  At this point they had no choice but to throw themselves on their faces themselves and swear they would never do it again.

The townspeople were delighted to have their monks back.  The monks indeed never tried running away again, and one has to wonder what would have happened if they actually had managed to make it to Egypt on foot.  But their experience indicates the strong hold the stories of desert fathers continued to have on monks' minds.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Winter in the Middle Ages

 We in the west with good furnaces probably don't appreciate how lucky we are.  It's cold outside, but who cares?  Set the thermostat to a pleasant springtime temperature, the furnace does its thing, and we're comfy warm (this assumes your furnace is working right).  This was of course not the case in the Middle Ages (or for that matter much of the twentieth century, when furnaces were coal-fired and you had to go down to the basement and shovel).

Humans evolved in the nice warm climate of Africa.  But humans like to go places and find new things, so before you know it, off some of them went, heading north.  Neanderthals' skin pigment decided this was stupid, since there was after all an ice age going on, and headed home to Africa, but the Neanderthals stayed.  Hide in caves and hunt woolly mammoths across the glacier, that's the life.  Before too long, Cro-magnons joined them in Europe.  And winter has been a challenge to Caucasians ever since.

For medieval people, the twin challenges were staying warm and having enough to eat.  Staying warm required fire, which meant burning wood, as they did not have gas or oil (and had not started mining coal).  As I have discussed previously, fireplaces really only appeared in the thirteenth century, as a luxury for the rich, so people before then, and lower status people throughout the Middle Ages, would have open fires in the middle of the room.  It's more efficient, because you don't have heat escaping up the chimney, but it's bad for your lungs.

Besides fire, the best way to stay warm is to snuggle up to other mammals.  Medieval peasants, living close to everybody in their family, and with a heat-producing cow right next door, would have been better off than those in a big, cold, drafty castle.  Let's just say that stone is not a good insulator.  Then everybody would have wanted furs and wool blankets to preserve the warmth.

To stay warm of course requires spending minimal time outside.  Fortunately there weren't many farm chores to be done in the winter.  On the other hand, there wasn't a whole lot to do inside either.  Images of winter done in the Middle Ages mostly show people sitting by the fire.  Christmas provided a nice festive high-point, even though it came in what we would call January (those pesky leap years mess up a calendar), as I previously discussed.

The other big challenge was having enough food.  Castles and peasant cottages alike would try to put aside enough food to last the winter, because if there weren't enough beans and wheat and cheese and root vegetables and smoked meat or salted fish in the larder, one would be awfully hungry come spring.  (Try to guess where the word larder comes from....)  The image above is a twelfth-century representation of November, the period in which one essentially stored up fat like a bear getting ready for hibernation (that's what the well-dressed gentleman  is doing, looks like he has a fish and a big chunk of bread).

© 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.

Church of the Sepulchre

 The church of the Sepulchre is one of the holiest spots in Christendom.  This church, located in the old city of Jerusalem, originally built in the fourth century and added to over the centuries, is built over what is believed to have been Jesus's tomb, from which He rose.  It was naturally a holy spot for medieval Europeans, and many churches in the west adopted elements of its style in deliberate imitation.

The church is noted for having a rotunda, with a dome over it, rather than adopting the standard basilica pattern of most early churches, a long central aisle with side aisles on either side, and a crossing perpendicular to the aisles toward the end opposite the main entrance.  The rotunda encircles the site of the tomb.  This circular style was adopted by Charlemagne's palace chapel at Aachen and in the crypts of many other churches.  For example, the early eleventh-century crypt of St.-Bénigne of Dijon has a circular chapel, as seen here.

 There is a real mix of architectural styles in Jerusalem, even before you get into the modern city which is now Israel's capital.  There are buildings whose roots go back to the Hebrew kings, though mostly those have been built over.  There are plenty of structures from when the Holy Land was part of the Hellenistic world (after Alexander the Great had conquered the area), then  buildings dating from the Roman empire, then Byzantine buildings, then Muslim structures built from the seventh century on, then Crusader structures from the twelfth century, and finally Turkish architecture.  The church complex has been influenced by all of these.

Christians from Europe made pilgrimages to the church of the Sepulchre from the time it was built.  Even when Jerusalem was under Muslim control, it was usually possible to visit the Christian holy sites.  Such a trip would be a trip of a lifetime, with the Sepulchre itself the high point, though all of the Holy Land was thick with places mentioned in the Bible.  It was not a trip to be undertaken lightly, as it would probably take a couple of months just to get there, but some went there several times, usually to try to get out of a particularly bad situation, where volunteering to go on pilgrimage would forestall plans to put one to death for one's crimes.

Originally the area had been a stone quarry back under the Hebrew kings, then, once no longer in use as a quarry, it was used as a cemetery, with burials in little caves cut into the quarry walls.  The emperor Hadrian thought it a great place for a Roman temple.  But when the emperor Constantine made Christianity legitimate in the fourth century, he had this temple torn down.  The local Christian community told him that Jesus's (temporary) burial place had been there, and while tearing down the temple a cave tomb was discovered which has been identified as Jesus's ever since.

The circular rotunda was built over the spot.  Further rebuildings were done in the eleventh century, after the church was partially destroyed by the caliph during a period in which the Muslim rulers of the area decided to get rid of both Christian and Jewish holy sites.  Twelfth-century Crusaders rebuilt again, but the present structure has not been radically changed since.

As one of Christendom's most holy sites, all major Christian groups have claims on the church.  It is currently divided up between Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox denominations.  Part of the difficulty of during further renovations is that everyone has to agree.  There is a ladder against one of the upper windows that has been there for three centuries, because the ladder belongs to one group yet is on the part of the church controlled by another, and they cannot agree on moving it.  (Interestingly, it was briefly moved at one point recently, probably by a workman cleaning windows or the like.  Everyone pretended it hadn't happened.)

The church and its complex stand on a site over an acre in size, including numerous other chapels and buildings.  Archaeologists working at the site are discovering much of the site's history.  The spring 2021 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review summarizes recent findings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval religion and pilgrimage, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Leprosy

 Before the Covid pandemic, people would often try to understand the horrors of the fourteenth-century Black Death by saying it must have been like AIDS.  Actually, no.  Even though AIDS has, over the last 35 years or so, killed a lot more people than have been killed (so far) by Covid, it's not particularly like the Black Death (on which see more here).

The actual Black Death (first outbreak in medieval Europe in 1347) was very infectious and transformed society abruptly, with people going from infection to death in a very short time, whereas AIDS is not very infectious, requiring contact of bodily fluids, and, now that the medical profession has worked out treatments, not a death sentence.  (Well, life is a death sentence, but we're not going into that right now.)

Actually the Black Death was more like Covid-19, in its abrupt appearance, rapid spread, and impact on all of society.  But we're not going to have a third of our population dead in a few years, as in the fourteenth century, and there actually are treatments and vaccines, which they did not have then.  (Note:  there were no "Black Death Deniers" in 1347.)

AIDS is more like leprosy, in that it infected a fairly small proportion of the population, and those infected were avoided both as (potential) spreaders of infection and as people considered morally as well as physically compromised.

But let's talk about leprosy itself.  The disease appears in the Bible, called "unclean" in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament Jesus cleansed lepers.  Now it's not entirely clear if all these people in ancient times actually had what we now call leprosy, or if some might have had some other skin disease, but DNA tests have shown the bacterial disease we now call leprosy has been around for thousands of years.  It is also now called Hansen's disease, after the Norwegian doctor Hansen, who in the late nineteenth century first identified the bacterium that causes it.

As a bacterial disease, it can be cured with modern antibiotics, but there was no cure before the mid-twentieth century, and it is still fairly prevalent in some parts of the world, especially India.  The disease attacks the skin and the nerves, so that the infected person may not notice they have wounds, leading to loss of digits especially.  Someone with discolored skin, missing fingers, and maybe shuffling along half blind was frightening.  (Leprosy often infects the eyes.)

Medieval people both feared and pitied lepers.  Although leprosy was (and is) hard to catch, medieval people didn't want to take chances.  Thus lepers were isolated and were supposed to avoid the general population, ringing a bell if they had to go somewhere, to warn people to get out of their way.  The "unclean" of the Bible gave lepers a moral and social stigma, so they were not just frightening but despicable.  The disease has always spread more easily among those living very close together, especially the poor, and encampments of outcasts were "unclean" in the full sense of the word.

But medieval people also pitied lepers and wanted to be Christ-like and, if not actually cleanse them (heal them completely), at least help them.  Just as many hospitals were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of leper-houses were set up, essentially sanitariums where lepers would live isolated but properly taken care of.  These were called Lazarus houses, due to the belief that Lazarus, who Jesus brings back from the dead in the Bible, had died of leprosy.  (The Bible doesn't actually say he was a leper, but it's a good story.)

Fun fact:  The abbey of Fontevraud had a leper-house associated with it in the twelfth century, called appropriately St.-Lazare.  It has been remodeled into a luxury hotel.  I bet the Americans who stay there have no idea.  The Paris train station St.-Lazare is located on the site of a medieval leper house.

Leprosy reached the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.  A leper colony was established on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian islands, on a lava beach at the bottom of steep cliffs.  Lepers were rowed to nearby, pushed overboard and told to swim to shore.  A Catholic priest, Damien De Veuster, took care of them until he finally caught leprosy himself and died.  He has now been canonized as Saint Damien.  The lepers were there until the later twentieth century, when they were finally cured, though some stayed on at the colony, which had been their home for so long.  The Molokai tourist bureau offered tourists a chance to ride a donkey down the very steep cliff to visit the lepers.  (And they wonder why their island has no high-rise hotels.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Cider

 One of the treats of fall is cider.  Cider is made from raw apples, pressed to get out the juice, as opposed to apple juice, which is made by cooking up apples and straining out the solids to just have the juice.  Cider was also a favorite fall beverage in medieval Europe.

In fact, because apples then tended to be fairly small and sour by our standards (no Honeycrisp), cider was one of the main ways to get the goodness out of apples.  One crushed the apples, leaving core and peel behind along with the pulverized fruit (which could be then fed to the livestock or used for fertilizer).

 

Apples are not native to the New World, but Europeans brought them over.  The semi-legendary Johnny Appleseed grew up around his family's cider mill in the colonial era, and he thought it a shame that all those seeds went to waste,.  And thus he headed west with lots of seeds, figuring that if he planted them, they'd grow into trees, and as settlers moved west they'd be delighted to discover orchards already planted.  The village of Apple Creek, Ohio, is so named because indeed settlers at the beginning of the nineteenth century found many wild apple trees, attributed to ol' Johnny.

Now planting apple seeds is not necessarily a good way to get good apples.  Every seed is the result of a cross, and some of those crosses are a whole lot better than others.  (A wild apple tree grew in our back yard.  The apples were enormous, so you only needed one or two for a pie, but they were so tart you needed a whole lot of sugar.)  Modern varieties are proliferated strictly by grafting branches of the kind of apple you want onto some other apple tree's root stock.

At any rate, for many years, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, cider was a good way to use "drops," apples that had fallen and were probably bruised, as opposed to the perfect-looking ones that were picked.  These days most cider however is made from picked apples, because of understandable concern that drops might have picked up undesirable germs.  Cider made from drops is required to be pasteurized.

But there is nothing like the taste of good raw cider.  The downside is that it will ferment fairly quickly, especially if it cannot be kept refrigerated, an obvious challenge in the Middle Ages.  (Sometimes commercial cider will have potassium sorbate added to keep it from fermenting.  This is an abomination before the Lord.)  But that was fine!  Medieval people found "hard" cider a refreshing alternative to beer.

(A high school friend decided to secretly make her own hard cider. In those days cider came in glass bottles.  She hid a gallon of raw cider in her clothes closet, the lid screwed on tight.  The result, as they say, was not a pretty sight.)

These days in Britain "cider" means hard cider.  It has been pasteurized to stop the fermentation before the cider turns to vinegar (medieval cooks used cider vinegar is various dishes).  They also have hard pear cider, called perry.  But for Americans fresh (or "sweet") apple cider is a delicious taste of fall.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval jewelry

 Without easy access to African diamond mines, Asian pearl fisheries, and the like (if these even existed then, which they didn't), medieval people had far fewer jewels accessible than do modern westerners, who can walk into a jewelry store and pick something out.  If you like, you can even pay heed to the Diamond Sellers of America (or whatever they're called) and spend six months' salary on an engagement ring.

But medieval people valued jewelry and precious metals just as much as we do, for a combination of their beauty and their rarity.  They had gold and silver but in small amounts, the silver mostly from German mines, and a lot of it old, constantly reused material that went back to the Romans.  Coins were officially silver, though there was always a certain amount of "baser" metal mixed in.  Gold, valued more than silver then as now because it doesn't tarnish, was used for jewelry but rarely for coins.

We tend to think of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, but there are a lot of other jewels out there, a lot of which medieval people valued.  You don't hear as much these days about tourmaline, beryls, chalcedony, peridot, and carbuncles, but these are perfectly good kinds of jewels.  For that matter, carefully cut colored class made a nice jewel equivalent (and still does).

Jewels were worn decoratively by the very rich (as they still are), by both men and women.  Rings were highly valued, both as signs of display and as gifts.  We treat rings today as symbols exchanged between engaged or married couples, but they were also given in the Middle Ages to friends, to faithful followers, and to people who performed a special service.  Jewels could also be made into necklaces, but jeweled rings and brooches were more common, because you needed far fewer stones.

Jewels as signs of prestige of course decorated crowns and diadems.  In the stories, jewels were set into the swords of the elite, but this seems very unlikely.  Every piece of jewelry was of course unique, being hand-crafted from whatever stone or stones the jeweler had to work with.

Both precious metals and precious gems were used to honor God and the saints.  An exceptionally fine Gospel book would be decorated with images using thin layers of gold leaf.  Reliquaries would be decorated with jewels.  As I have discussed before, poverty in emulation of the humility of Christ was considered (potentially) holy, but when it came to glorifying the King of Kings, medieval people didn't hold back.

Reliquaries were embossed with gold and silver, as in this arm reliquary, and precious stones adorned them.  In the post-medieval period, a lot of reliquaries were robbed of their jewels or were melted down for their gold and silver, but we still have some of them in more or less pristine form.

These days churches have gone in a much simpler look, but in the Middle Ages they were meant to take your breath away with their beauty and decoration, including statues, paintings, and jeweled reliquaries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Dune and fantasy

There's a new movie out based on the novel "Dune," by Frank Herbert, so today I'm going to discuss that book's impact on the broader science fiction and fantasy world.  (The movie has the good sense to stick closely to the book and has sought to get the look right, but this post is about the book.  It's number 1 bestseller in the Kindle store on Amazon, so I'm not the only person interested.)

The book was published in 1965, and although it's hard to imagine that it would have had trouble finding a publisher, given that it's sold literally millions of copies world-wide, at the time it seemed too long, too complex, and too weird for the regular SF publishers.  It was published eventually by a small company whose primary business was publishing automobile repair manuals.  But the fans found it and it took off.

Officially it's science fiction.  People are bopping around the galaxy in space ships, and it's supposedly set thousands of years in the future.  (You can tell SF from fantasy because the former has space ships, the latter has wizards and/or dragons.  SF is set in an imagined future, fantasy an imagined past.)  Fantasy as a genre didn't really exist as a genre in the 1960s, but at almost exactly the same time as "Dune" came out, J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" was published in paperback by Ace (it had been published in hardcover a decade earlier.)

(Ace was taking advantage of a loophole in the then copyright laws, and the situation was messy for a while, but we won't talk about that now.)

Nobody quite knew at first what to do with "Lord of the Rings."  One eminent reviewer called it "super science fiction."  But fans loved it, and the genre took off as well as the books.

But modern fantasy is not just the heir of "Lord of the Rings."  It's also the heir of "Dune."  Standard in an awful lot of fantasy these days is a prophecy about a Chosen One, visions, clashes between noble ruling Houses, abrupt betrayals, multi-generational secret plans, free people roaming in the wild lands beyond civilization, and a young person trying to make his or her own way in a dangerous world s/he doesn't even fully understand.  This is all right there in "Dune."  Pretty much none of it is in "Lord of the Rings."

Although Frodo was shown as a youth in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, in the books he's middle aged.  The epic battles are far smaller in the books than the movies.  There are no political clashes between ruling houses in Tolkien's world, almost no prophecies, no wild and free people (orcs don't count, because they're bad).  It's about a quest to destroy an artifact of absolute power.  It's set in a more or less medieval world, though they have a number of New World plants, including potatoes and tobacco.

In "Dune," projectile weapons and computers were banned centuries ago, so although they have a lot of advanced technology, they still fight with knives and swords, increasing the medieval feel.

George Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, which begins with "A Game of Thrones," has a lot of the "Dune" tropes, including the wild and free people north of the Wall (plus Dothraki), betrayals, sword fights, clashes between noble Houses, epic battles, and young people trying to find their way.  But it's unabashedly fantasy, not science fiction.  Also unabashed fantasy is Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, that follows "Dune" with a secret society of women with mystic powers who are trying to find The One who was prophesied.

"Dune" of course also heavily influenced science fiction.  The field decided it was fine to have long, complicated books, not just paperbacks less than 150 pages long.  "Dune" also influenced movies long before a decent movie was made of it.  Think about Star Wars, beginning on a desert planet (like Arrakis in "Dune"), a young person who discovers he has mystic powers, fighting with swords (though they are called light sabers).  But Star Wars had alien sentient species, whereas "Dune," like modern fantasy, is all humans all the time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For my own version of fantasy with clashing noble houses, young people finding their way in a dangerous world, betrayals, and dragons (plus some Norse legend), see Shadow of the Wanderers, available both as an ebook and a paperback from Amazon and other on-line sellers.

American Medievalism

 I have blogged before about medievalism, the desire to re-create some aspects of medieval society and culture in the modern world.  A lot of make-quality-crafts-by-hand is explicitly inspired by medieval craftsmen, as of course is the Society for Creative Anachronism, to say nothing of fantasy stories set in a vaguely medieval world.

 

But why is America such a center of medievalism?  What we normally think of as medieval society took place in Europe, three thousand miles (or more) from the American east coast.  Medieval Europe was mostly made up of kingdoms, whereas the U.S. was founded on the premise of We Do Not Have A King.  During the Middle Ages no Europeans (other than the occasional Viking settler) knew the Americas even existed.  Europeans first reached the Americas to stay in 1492, one of the dates often chosen as the end of the Middle Ages.

So why this fascination with medieval Europe by a society so far from it politically, spatially, and temporally?  A big part of it is doubtless a highly romanticized view of a time when (supposedly) love and honor counted, people could make individual decisions without being forced into sameness, when people understood and appreciated their place in society, when objects were lovingly made by hand rather than being cranked out cheaply in a factory, when there were lots of colorful outfits and cool swords and handsome horses.

(You will notice that it is rare to imagine oneself being a peasant.  We all have decided we're knights and princesses.)

But even at the founding of the U.S. there was an attempt to invoke the Middle Ages as a model.  It was seen as a time of at least potential democracy, with things like the Magna Carta and the origins of Parliament, rather than the absolute monarchs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The "manly" knight was considered far better than the dandies of contemporary royal courts.  The cramped (and stinky) cities of  eighteenth-century Europe were compared unfavorably with the supposedly wide-open rural landscape of medieval Europe--just like North America! (supposedly)

One of the chief manifestations of modern American medievalism is the spread of the Renaissance Faire.  Interestingly, it was originally going to be called a Medieval Faire, but sponsors thought the term "medieval" meant oppression and darkness, so the name was quickly changed.  But it never was about the Renaissance.

In spite of its name and often a vaguely Elizabethan look to some of the outfits the performers wear, it is really a celebration of medieval society.  None of the things that marked the real Renaissance appear, such as classical Latin, or gorgeous paintings inspired by Bible stories or by classical mythology, or gunpowder (though one can shoot at an archery range).  One doesn't even get to mimic going into quarantine from the Black Death.  It's true that tournaments featuring riders galloping at each other continued during the Renaissance, but the reenactors you see at a Renaissance Faire are usually wearing lighter weight medieval armor rather than the heavy plate of the sixteenth century (such as seen below).

Medieval scholars are of two minds about all this.  On the one hand, it seems excellent to us that people are seeing the Middle Ages as in some ways admirable, rather than dismissing the era we love to study as dark and backwards and superstitious and disgusting.  On the other hand, we are disturbed when white supremacists try to claim that the Middle Ages is their ideal society (listen up, guys, it was not a utopia of all-white all-Christian people).

There is a new book about American medievalism, called The United States of Medievalism (published by the University of Toronto), edited by Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein.  It is a discussion of all the manifestations of medieval style in American culture, from churches meant to look Gothic to things like Cinderella's Castle in Disney World.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For real medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval gunpowder

Gunpowder, as I have noted before, came into use in Europe in the fourteenth century, radically changing the face of medieval warfare when it began to be used in cannons.  Cavalry charges, which had been in use since the late eleventh century, were much less effective now that cannon fire could decimate their ranks.  Castles, which had been nearly impossible to capture since the early twelfth century, could be taken if enough cannons shot against their walls.  Sieges which had taken months if they succeeded at all, due to having to starve out the defenders, could now be wrapped up in a week or two by taking out a few major walls.

So what was this gunpowder they were using?  The formulation had been worked out originally in China (for use in fireworks, not warfare), and consisted then, as it does now, of a mix of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), carbon (charcoal), and sulfur.  The saltpeter provides a rush of oxygen, the carbon and sulfur the fuel.  Between them, when exposed to fire or a sufficient spark, the result is explosive combustion.  A stone ball put down the barrel of the cannon would shoot out with devastating force (and a great deal of loud booming and black smoke).

There are a number of recipes that still survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, showing the various ways that gunpowder's ingredients were combined or had additives mixed in.  These are being studied by Dr. Dawn Riegner, a professor of chemistry at West Point.  Different recipes used different proportions for the main ingredients, as well as such add-ins as brandy, camphor, vinegar, quicklime, and varnish.  Dr. Riegner and her team are trying to measure which combinations would have worked best, by taking them out to the firing range and testing them.

(Don't imagine college professors are all quiet and stolid--blowing things up can be fun!)

One of their interesting discoveries is that from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century the various recipes burned progressively less hot, though with continued explosive power.  This made them at least marginally safer for the gunners loading and firing the cannons--exploding cannons were one of the downsides of relying on cannon fire in a battle (and there were as yet no handheld guns--no one wants their hand blown off).

 

Dangerous cannons continued to be a problem, however.  King James II of Scotland was killed in 1460 when he stood too close to a cannon while it was being fired, and it exploded.  (This was during the long wars between Scotland and England.)  The young king (he was only 29 when he died) had always loved artillery.  He had married a niece of the duke of Burgundy a decade earlier and had received a cannon from the duke as a wedding present.  This huge cannon, nicknamed Mons Meg (or Monstrous Margaret) (see above), was installed in Edinburgh castle, where it still is today.  Tourists can climb on it or have their picture taken with it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

The Peasant Bodo

 Peasants keep appearing in this blog, for the excellent reason that they were by far the bulk of the medieval population, maybe 90%.  Today I want to discuss one particular peasant, named Bodo, who has become (and he'd be shocked to learn it), the "Standard Medieval Peasant."  I am discussing him because he provides a good starting point for pointing how how unfounded are many of the sweeping assumptions modern folks have about medieval people.

Bodo was a real person.  He lived in the early decades of the ninth century on a manor belonging to the Parisian monastery of St.-Germain-des-Prés.  He is known because the monastery did an inventory of all its manors, including this one (located outside of Paris), listing the tenants by name and detailing how much each owed in rent.  Bodo was required to work a certain number of days a week on the fields belonging to the big manor house.

The monastery's records about Bodo are extremely skimpy, not much more than this, though noting he had a wife, Ermentrudis, and three (unnamed) children.  In 1924 the historian Eileen Power wrote a book, Medieval People, designed  to give ordinary people more of a role in accounts of the Middle Ages--at the time most historians were focused on institutions, great men, and the rise of the nation state.

This was laudable of course, but she made some great leaps in fleshing out Bodo's story.  She described Bodo's manor as looking like what Charlemagne had, two generations earlier, said he wanted a royal manor to look.  (One must wonder if a monastery had the same idealized vision as a king, much less whether any of Charlemagne's manors ever looked the way he envisioned.)  She added in detail from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, plus even some manorial rolls from the end of the Middle Ages.  She also gave Bodo and his wife three named children as well as an ox.

The real problem with this "artist's conception" of Bodo is that he has become the standard version of every medieval peasant.  Because Power did not describe any peasants from later centuries, Bodo has come to stand for every medieval peasant, giving a timeless quality to descriptions of peasant life.  Every popular account of "life in the Middle Ages" includes something like the image below, with a castle or manor house, a grouping of peasant houses and a church, and the fields stretching off in all directions.  Although not in this particular image, it's also common to show a barefooted peasant with an ox.  (It's Bodo!)

(Actually I think I see Bodo over near the left, leading his ox, who is bringing a cartload of, I assume, food to the castle/manor house.)

 

The problem is that Bodo and his manor are typical only of great ninth-century manors with their tenants.  Especially as the economy improved and new lands were cleared for agriculture in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, due to peasant initiative, this "typical" arrangement became less and less typical.

 Most peasant villages had neither a castle or a manor house.  Many of the peasants might be tenants of a monastery or a secular lord, but he (or she or they in the case of a monastery) lived some distance away.  And a lot of peasants were what is called allodists, that is they owned their property outright rather than being tenants.

Even the tenants owed much less in labor dues by the twelfth century than they had in the ninth century.  Peasants had been able to negotiate their way out of them, usually for a monetary payment.  The landlord found it easier to hire workers than to try to force unwilling peasants to work.  These payments were fixed in perpetuity, which meant that the amount the peasants had to pay declined in value, while wages for hired labor went up.  "Works for us!" said the peasants.  Bodo would have been jealous.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

"Unheard of" violence

 Medieval Europe was violent, which should not be surprising, given that pretty much all societies are if a lot of people live close to each other (including ours).  It of course didn't help that macho swagger among the well-to-do required walking around with a sword on one's hip.

But violence was neither considered normal nor acceptable in the high Middle Ages.  In fact, the most common characterization of violent acts in twelfth-century chronicles was that they were "unheard of," inaudita.  That is, when describing some act of violence a chronicler would want readers to know that such acts were unusual, in fact so unusual that no one had ever heard of such things before.

This made for excellent rhetoric.  In refusing to accept violence as normal, the chroniclers were telling their contemporaries that it was never acceptable.  Now in fact they did recognize some violence as acceptable.  Self-defense was fine, and so was protecting the weak, generally characterized as women, churchmen, and the poor.  But in all these cases the other guy, the bad guy, had started it.

Attacks by the powerful against the weak, bullying writ large, were especially "unheard of."  Chroniclers would really emphasize all the horrible things the malefactor had done to peasants or artisans or churchmen or women, justifying their brutal slaying in retaliation.  Unfortunately some modern scholars seem to have missed the inaudita, arguing that such attacks on the weak must have been everyday events, or they wouldn't keep showing up in the chronicles.

Epics and sagas from the Middle Ages are sometimes read as glorifying violence. And they do have a lot of people whacking away at each other.  But these stories always end up demonstrating that violence is not the answer.  When the hero ends up dead and everyone else in the story is grief-stricken, that's usually an indication that the author is saying that violence is a bad idea.  A lot of epic authors tried to work their moral in delicately, portraying all the great deeds of knightly violence (against other knights only, however) to draw in their audience before showing them that peace-making was the better way.

These days in the US one tends to fear the poor.  One is told not to go into "certain" neighborhoods.  This idea was upside down in the Middle Ages.  Then the violent people one feared were the elite.  Let's face it, a lot more damage can be done with a sword than a simple club.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval knights and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other online bookstores.  Also available in paperback

Medieval vegetarianism

 Medieval people ate a largely vegetarian diet.  Unlike modern vegetarians in the West, who usually choose vegetarianism primarily because they think it wrong to kill and eat animals, or else because they believe a vegetarian diet is healthier, medieval people for the most part did not have nearly as easy access to meat as we do.

Raising meat for food is always going to be more expensive than raising vegetables or grains, because you have to grow the food for the animals first, and a lot of the calories in that animal feed are going to be spent in having the animal grow and run around before you can eat it.  Hunting animals that feed themselves in the wild solves part of this problem, but over-hunting can quickly reduce the number of potential game animals.

Hence for most medieval people for most of the time one's principal foods were bread and vegetables.  In a recent post I discussed the fruits and vegetables medieval people grew.  There were a lot of them, although of course the emphasis was on those that could be dried and stored (like peas and beans) or that would keep for a long time anyway (like onions and turnips).  Lettuce could be eaten all summer long, but forget having a salad in the winter.  The same was true of most fruits, though some, like apples, will keep at least a little while.  They did not of course have the New World vegetables we now take for granted, most notably potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and winter squash.

 Between the turnips, the radishes, the beans, the zucchini, the leeks, and the sauerkraut, there was at least some variety in the vegetables to be eaten.  I've read that the single most common vegetable eaten in the US now is the potato, and that mostly eaten as French fries.

Still, medieval people liked their meat.  Because most of the population was not vegetarian out of principle but rather because meat was hard to get, they ate it whenever they could.  Indeed, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, they were given meat broth.  The wealthy ate meat when they could get it, putting restrictions on hunting to keep the peasants from getting all the wild animals.  Everyone ate pork in the fall, when the pigs, who had been running wild for months, were rounded up and slaughtered.

Even if mostly vegetarian, medieval people were not vegans.  They were happy to have milk, butter, and especially cheese.  Eggs were also fine.  The most determinedly vegetarian people were monks and nuns, who gave up meat along with other pleasures of the flesh, in order to focus more on spiritual matters.  They were still generally fine with eggs and cheese, and, depending on the monastic order, they might have fish once a week.  If someone in the monastery was sick, they got beef broth.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval social history, see my book Positively Medieval, available either as an ebook or a paperback, from Amazon and other book sellers.

Descended from Charlemagne

 It has been suggested that everyone with European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne.

You remember Charlemagne.  He was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in the year 800, the first independent western Roman emperor since the late fifth century--although there continued to be emperors in Byzantium (basically modern-day Turkey) who were considered Roman emperors until the fifteenth century.

Charlemagne's empire is sometimes called the Holy Roman Empire to keep it separate from the empire of antiquity, and the European Union considers him (in some sense) their founder.  He had France, western Germany, and, he thought, Italy, though Italy tended to disagree.  France claims him as theirs, as the nineteenth-century statue shown below seeks to "prove," whereas the Germans call him theirs.  (The Italians figure you can have him.)

 

So how did we get to where everybody in the west is considered to be descended from him?  Well, all of Europe's royalty were.  He had multiple wives, multiple concubines, and multiple children, including a whole lot of daughters.  As long as one counts (as one should!) one's descendants through the female as well as male line, and the illegitimate as well as legitimate line, it is clear that his descent quickly spread throughout Europe's leading families.  Those who were kings of France, Germany, and Italy in the tenth century were all descended via women from Charlemagne.  So are all of today's European royalty, including King Juan Carlos of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England.

It was considered appropriate in the Middle Ages (as is still the case) for great nobles to marry great nobles.  (The reason Prince Charles married Diana Spencer was because she was of noble ancestry, descended from an illegitimate child of King Charles II.)  Although the actual medieval kings and queens quickly became too closely related to keep on marrying each other, due to prohibitions on consanguinity, there were plenty of rising lords for them to marry.  The great counts and dukes then quickly passed royal blood to their children, who in turn passed it to their children, often offspring of lesser lords.

You can see that in the 1200 years since Charlemagne there has been plenty of opportunity for his descendants to spread out.  If someone has multiple children, and they have multiple children, one can come up with a whole lot of descendants very quickly.  There was a proud announcement in our paper the other day of a couple welcoming the birth of their 100th great-grandchild.  And this is far from the record, even for a couple, much less for someone with many wives and/or concubines.

Cystic fibrosis, which has a strong genetic component, seems to have originated about 1200 years ago in the European population.  Did it begin with a mutation in Charlemagne's genes?  Intriguing thought.  The leading families of Europe can trace their family trees with excellent documentation right back to the eighth century.  The rest of us can just imagine a lot of those entries in the family tree.

Before anyone reading this blog becomes too excited about having imperial blood, let's think about how ancestry works.  You've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on.  Just mathematically by the time you get back to the late Middle Ages you have more European ancestors than there were people in Europe then.  Okay, all of us have ancestors who may pop up on more than one line of descent.  And we all have to take a deep breath and recognize that the majority of our European ancestors were peasants.  But it's pretty clear that everyone is related to everyone.

And if you've had your "DNA done" you'll find that you have maybe 1 or 2% of something you had no idea about.  (Where did that Middle Eastern or South Asian descent come from?  I thought we were lily-white!)  And even the nationality or ethnic group that's responsible for your last name may only be a minority of your DNA.  So we may all be "blood of kings" (as well of course "blood of peasants").  Pro tip:  If you're visiting Charlemagne's palace in Aachen, don't announce that you are the returning heir.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Exotic Birds

 The wealthy in the Middle Ages liked luxury goods—as of course do the wealthy in the modern world.  Something unusual, rare, exotic, and gorgeous, which also cost a whole lot, was both something to enjoy and something to show off to other people.

Rare and unusual animals were real luxury items, both because they were expensive and because the proper care and feeding were complicated and expensive.  Both Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century and the emperor Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century had elephants, given to them as gifts from distant rulers in the Middle East/North Africa--who of course would have had to obtain them from sub-Saharan Africa, making them even more of a novelty.

Frederick II also had a cockatoo.  Wait, you say, I thought cockatoos were native to Australia, and Australia was totally cut off from the rest of the world until centuries later.  So how did he get it?  Was it really a cockatoo?

Yes, it was really a cockatoo.  He wrote a book, which we still have, about birds.  Most of it was about training hawks (the art of falconry), but he also described other birds, and there are several very detailed descriptions and drawings of his cockatoo.

Although cockatoos are most commonly found in Australia, they are also found in Indonesia and parts of the Philippines.  So the emperor's bird almost certainly started life in southeast Asia.  Then, as now, wild-caught chicks were raised in captivity, so they would be used to humans (they do not breed well in captivity—trade in wild-caught chicks in some areas today threatens the wild population).

It would have then passed through many hands before ending up in the emperor's court in Sicily, being bought and sold for increasing sums of money as it traveled across the Indian Ocean or across central Asia, on the spice routes, and fetched up in the Middle East.  There it was acquired by the Egyptian ruler (referred to as the Sultan of Babylon in the Sicilian records), who made a gift of it to Frederick.  He was also the source of Frederick's elephant.  Being able to give someone a rare luxury item was even more of an opportunity to increase one's prestige than just owning it.

Although this is the only cockatoo we know about in the thirteenth century, medieval wealthy people sometimes had other exotic birds, especially parrots.  These were African parrots, and they too reached Europe via a long, complicated road.

Another cockatoo shows up in a Renaissance painting, done by the artist Mantegna and commissioned by the Gonzaga family that ruled Mantua in the fifteenth century.  The main picture shows the duke kneeling at the feet of the Madonna, and up at the top are all sorts of decorative motifs, including an extremely lifelike cockatoo.  Although there is no written record of either Mantegna or the Gonzaga family acquiring the bird, the inventory of the artist's possessions does include a large and extremely elaborate birdcage, which could have been the bird's home.  Was he given it in partial payment for the painting?

The cockatoos in medieval Europe are an indication that Europe was never completely cut off from the rest of the world.  Trade continued to tie different areas together, and both spices and exotic birds were considered worth the expense.

An article in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, July 5 2021, discusses the original identification of the cockatoo in Mantegna's painting.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval fruits and vegetables

 In a medieval-style fantasy or historical fiction about the Middle Ages, the people always seem to eat a lot of stew, which tends to be characterized as "brown."  The elite are shown eating meat (generally whole haunches) cooked over an open fire.  But what about the fruits and vegetables?

When I first started this blog two of my earliest posts (still popular favorites!) were on what medieval people did or did not eat.  More recently I discussed a ninth-century garden.  But today I want to focus on what went into a medieval vegetarian diet, which is what peasants ate almost all the time, what monks and nuns ate all the time unless they were sick, and what the elites ate much of the time.

Bread was the basic staple for everybody.  Most of it was made from wheat, essentially the same winter wheat still grown today, but one could also make bread from barley or oats or rye or spelt (a close relative of wheat). Grains could also be made into porridge.  Barley could also be made into beer, the standard drink for everybody.  Ninth-century inventories of monastic property always indicated the grain fields right up front.  Grain of course can be stored without refrigeration and will last quite well if the mice and rats don't get into it.

Storage in a pre-modern era was vital.  Dried peas and lentils and chickpeas and beans would last as well as grain (the beans were like the beans now made into bean soup or baked beans, not green beans, which they didn't have).  Root vegetables would be harvested in the fall and, if kept dry, would last much of the winter.  Here onions were universal, along with onion-relatives like leeks, garlic, shallots, and chives.  Medieval people also ate beets, turnips, and parsnips.

 Root vegetables are not nearly as popular in the modern West as they were in the Middle Ages, now that we have refrigeration plus the ability to get fresh vegetables year round.  Modern Germans are in fact averse to turnips, which Germans ate a whole lot of during the privations of World War II (because they were available) and are now considered cow food.

Some vegetables just could not be stored, like lettuce, but medieval people still grew and ate it in the spring and summer.  Cabbage is leafy but stores fairly well, especially if made into sauerkraut.  They also had summer squash (like zucchini), which will last a certain amount of time without refrigeration, though not the winter squashes (like pumpkin) of the New World.  Celery, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers were popular in the right season.

(You will notice an absence of such New World foods as potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and avocados.  Plus no chocolate!  Maybe there's a reason one hears reference to the Dark Ages....)

A big hearty dish of lentils and turnips can be pretty bland.  Salt helps, but salt was expensive—it was all sea salt from salt panning along the coast, with few exceptions.  Spices like black pepper were very expensive because they were imported from Asia, so most people could not afford them.  But they did grow a wide variety of herbs, which could be dried and kept fairly indefinitely.  These included parsley, sage, rosemary (do we hear a Simon & Garfunkel song coming on?), fenugreek, coriander, and caraway.

Among fruits, the most important were wine grapes, grown wherever the climate was suitable and some places where it really was not, because wine was both the preferred drink of the well-to-do and required for the liturgy (though in Scandinavia beer was often substituted for the communion wine).

 A good sized manor would have an orchard with a number of fruit trees.  They grew a wide variety of apples (no Fuji or Honeycrisp or Granny Smith—ninth-century apple varieties included "gozmaringa" and "geroldinga," now unknown), pears, peaches, plums, quinces, mulberries, and cherries.  An orchard would also have nut trees, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and chestnuts.  Wild fruits (especially berries) and wild nuts could supplement what was cultivated.  We now preserve fruit by boiling it up with sugar to make jam, but this doesn't work nearly as well with honey, their only sweetener (and they didn't have a lot of it), so most fruit was eaten fresh.

Medieval people were primarily vegetarians but not vegans.  That is, eggs, butter, and milk (usually made into cheese because it lasts a lot better) and fish were considered fine even for austere monks.  Chicken could count as "not red meat," but everyone liked red meat when they could get it.

A good discussion of medieval food is found in the article, "Nutrition and the Early Medieval Diet" by Kathy L. Pearson, in the journal Speculum (journal of the Medieval Academy of America), vol. 72 (January 1997).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

The Knight of the Short Nose

"Count Guillaume is the biggest, boldest knight in southern France. So why does he keep needing a woman to get him out of trouble? A rollicking (semi) epic tale. Adventure, humor, a touch of romance, and occasional sword fights."

I've got a new book!  It's called The Knight of the Short Nose.  As I mentioned earlier, I originally posted the story on Kindle-Vella, where people can read it one episode at a time on their phones (first three episodes are free, plus you can get "free tokens" to "unlock" later episodes).  Now I've also made the book available on Amazon (you can "borrow" it if you're a Kindle Unlimited member), either as an ebook or a paperback.

Here's the Amazon link.  Also available on Kobo, B&N/Nook, and Apple Books.  It also remains on Vella for those who enjoy serials (19 episodes await you).

 

The cover artist is RL Sather.  I've used a lot of her covers.  She specializes in medieval-style fantasy, which works for me!  This one may be my favorite of hers.

This book isn't, strictly speaking, fantasy, because there are no wizards or magic.  It's a loose retelling of a twelfth-century epic, that was written both to glorify and to mock chivalrous deeds.  That aspect I've most definitely kept.

The epic (actually a series of epics) was based on a real eighth-ninth-century Count William of Gellone, who was a rough contemporary of Charlemagne.  In the twelfth century, the epics made him more or less a contemporary of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and heir.  They also filled their story with a variety of real eleventh- and twelfth-century people, none of whom were contemporary of course with the original (real) Count William.

So I've taken this twelfth-century William of Orange epic cycle, which sort of tells about the ninth century while actually commenting on its own contemporary society, and retold it for a twenty-first century audience.  Take some humor and stir.  "Alternate history" at its finest.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

Archives

 Historians love and rely on archives.  An archive is a storage facility for documents, and there are hundreds and hundreds of archives in the US and around the world.  In these days of digital imaging, it is no longer always necessary to travel to an archive (and the dangers of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are to some extent mitigated), but most documents have never been digitized and may well never will be.

A local historical society may accumulate such things as minutes of the city council meetings, or old newspapers, or photographs, or the diary of a Civil War soldier found in someone's attic.  The archives of presidential libraries may include books a president read, with his marginal notes, along with correspondence, signed bills, videos of press conferences, etc.

As a medievalist who works especially on France, my favored archives are the archives départementales.  Where the US is divided into states, France is divided into "departments" for administrative purposes.  There were originally 89 of them, but a few more have been added for the heavily-populated Paris region.  They go back to the French Revolution, when they were created to replace the old counties and duchies (defined by aristocracies).  Every department has its own archives, set up in the early nineteenth century and intended to preserve the region's history and "patrimony" as it is called.

Because France officially went atheistic during the Revolution, church archives were broken up and an awful lot lost.  But when the departmental archives were established, everything that could be found was taken there.  So you have confirmations of a church's possessions from the ninth century, charters of donation from the twelfth century, seventeenth-century parish records recording births and deaths, and so much more.

The documents I myself work on are mostly from the twelfth century, handwritten on parchment (sheep skin).  There is something extremely satisfying about holding in one's hand a piece of parchment someone used to record something important nine centuries ago, to see where he or she was getting tired and sloppy, or made a mistake and corrected it by scraping the ink off the parchment, or carefully stretched the words in a line out to fill the width of the parchment, or decided to write some capital letters very big, and so on.  I'll be sitting there in the archives looking at my documents while other folks there are looking for great-great-grandpa in the parish records.

But where were all these documents before the French Revolution?  Churches all had their own archives.  Some were very careful and systematic, organizing them in boxes by topic, writing brief summaries on the back.  Others were fairly sloppy, just piling everything up in a big pile in a back room.  Monasteries, which were undying entities, tended to be better at preserving their archives than bishoprics.  When a new bishop came into office, he usually brought in a new staff, who might or might not have the slightest interest in the records of what his predecessor had done.  A lot of documents were lost well before the Revolution, to careless storage, rats (who may nibble on parchment), mildew, and the destructive Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most documents found in the archives are entirely authentic.  But medieval scribes might sometimes feel compelled to "improve" the record by creating a few documents that really should have been there.  The people they were most likely to fool were their own successors, who might be startled to discover, a generation later, that they had legal title to some property they hadn't realized they had, and that a king centuries earlier had confirmed it to them in perpetuity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Medieval Roofs

 Medieval buildings, just like modern buildings, needed roofs.  Medieval people didn't have asphalt shingles or roll roofing or roofing tar, but they still had plenty of options.

Near the Mediterranean, the most common roof was clay tiles, as seen above in a modern building.  This is the kind of roofing the Romans had used, and indeed which is still found in southern Europe and in places like San Diego and Texas in the US.  Basically clay rectangles were shaped by being curved over someone's thigh, then fired.  These curved ceramic tiles were slightly wider at one end than the other (look at the shape of your own thigh and you'll see what I mean), so they could be overlapped on a sloped roof, causing rain to run off.  The style for modern roof tiles is the same (though they are no longer shaped over someone's thigh).

Wooden shingles could be used instead of clay tiles, and so could slate tiles (which were rectangular, not curved--you can now buy asphalt roof shingles that are supposed to look like slate).  In both cases, getting the overlap right was the key to a watertight roof.  A broken slate tile or rooted wooden shingle could be delicately removed and a new replacement worked in.  Those are slate roofing tiles you see above.

Wooden shingles then, as now, have the danger of catching fire.  Northern cities therefore intermittently tried to get everyone to use slate.  A lot of western Europe away from the Mediterranean still uses slate.  Alternately, one could make roofing tiles out of lead.  These worked just as well as slate, in fact better because it was easier to shape the lead, but lead has the distinct problem that it will melt, which slate won't.  A castle under siege could melt some of its roof tiles to pour on the attacking army, which seems like an advantage, but Notre Dame of Paris, whose lead roof had long protected it, had those lead tiles melt and spew toxic lead dust into the surrounding neighborhoods when the church caught fire.

Then there was thatch.  A thatched roof had the distinct advantage that it was fairly cheap and lighter than shingles or tiles, requiring less sturdy beams.  It was made from reeds or straw, tied together in bundles and fastened to the wooden roof beams.  It was very common in the Middle Ages, and it was also used in Inca-era Peru.  Houses are still being thatched in parts of England and Ireland (often to give an Olde Tyme look), though thatch is rarer on the Continent.  Making a good thatched roof is a skilled trade, but if done right, a thatched roof could last a generation.  A thatched British pub is shown below.

Of course with thatch you have to put up with critters building nests in your roof.  The biggest danger is fire, because thatch will burn just as readily as a wooden roof.  A problem now, thatchers will tell you, is that due to acid rain the reeds are more fragile than they used to be, so a roof won't last as long.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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