Medieval Fashion

 Fashion has been important throughout human history, at least for those who could afford it.  By wearing clothes that are the latest fashion, one establishes oneself as the leading influencer, the person all others must copy.  The well to do of the Middle Ages were just as eager to dress fashionably as is a modern teenager who would (she claims) rather die than go to school dressed grossly out of fashion.

In the Middle Ages of course, just as now, the latest fashions were often mocked.  (Don't get me started on jeans, bought new, that come with big holes already worn in the front.)  In the English royal court at the end of the eleventh century, long, pointed toes on shoes were fashionable for men.  Churchmen roundly attacked them as being "girlie" and a sign of weakness, which did not keep men from wearing longer and longer points, until one day they were suddenly unfashionable.

(Court jesters are often depicted with toes on their shoes so long they have to be spiraled around.  They wore them after everyone else had given them up, proving they were fools.)

As well as establishing that one is "in the know," fashion can mark your identification with a certain group.  The white wigs of the eighteenth century (think of pictures you've seen of George Washington or Mozart) were supposed to show that one was wise, like an old person.  Jeans came into college students' wardrobes in the 1960s as a way to show solidarity with workers.  (Workers who would have thrown out jeans once they had big holes in the front, but that's a different story.)

And fashion is a way to flaunt one's wealth, to show off that one has enough money to buy new clothes whenever the fashions change, to stop wearing perfectly serviceable clothes just because they're out of style, and to employ servants to keep the delicate white bits clean and free of stains.  In the court of Louis XIV, when the French aristocracy flocked to Versailles, clothing was the single biggest expense for members of the court.

In the late Middle Ages, there was a major fashion trend in women's hats.  The tall, pointed hats that one sees in many images, hats often with trailing veils, were completely impractical, and that was the point.  No one would wear a hat like that to work in the fields or brew beer.  One wore a hat like to prove one was a person of leisure.

 

And then in the early modern period there was a great fashion in enormous lace collars.  They were expensive, delicate, and extremely hard to keep clean, all the things that marked the wearer as a person of wealth.  (They were also ridiculous, but that's half the point.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Pork and Sauerkraut

 My husband makes a very good winter-time dish, pork and sauerkraut, which could also have been made in the Middle Ages.  It takes him a couple of hours to make.  Onions, apples, sauerkraut, and caraway seeds are fried up together with pork loin, then it's baked with some citrus juice (one could substitute white wine, though we don't).  These are all ingredients readily available in the Middle Ages, except for the juice (medieval people would have used wine).  Though it takes a while to make, mostly because of the time to slice everything up, he knows that by making a double batch we can have it again with no more effort than reheating.

Okay, but let's think about what he is not doing.  He's not planting, tending, harvesting, and drying the onions.  He's not tending the apple trees and picking the apples, going over them carefully before storing them.  He doesn't plant, tend, and harvest cabbage, chop it and mix it with salt, and let it ripen into sauerkraut, instead just opening a jar.  He doesn't slaughter the pig or cut it up.  He doesn't even harvest the caraway seeds.

So if you added up how much time all those things take, maybe rather than thinking of it as a 2-hour supper we might think of it as a 6-week supper.  And we aren't even including how long it would take to gather the wood for the cooking fire.

Somebody certainly does all those things so that he can go to the grocery store and get nicely trimmed pork loin, apples and onions, and a jar of sauerkraut, plus juice and a little jar of caraway seeds.  If they're working all day in the sauerkraut factory, how do they ever have time to do anything other than eat sauerkraut for supper?

Now in fact it's not as amazing as it may seem.  Part of it is the increase in what the economists call worker productivity, how much each worker can produce in an hour, which has been increasing steadily for over two centuries, largely due to machines that do a lot of the labor.  Part of it is also division of labor, where people who are just doing one thing can do it more efficiently than those who do that thing occasionally.

Now in fact in most pre-modern societies, including parts of the Third World today, people basically spend a major part of their waking hours involved in food:  finding it, cultivating it, harvesting it, storing it, cooking it.  Ha, ha, you say, reaching for a bag of chips and a tall cool one, I spend much of my day involved with food too.

But it's different.  We don't have to think about food because we know it will be there when we want it.  Our relationship with food, for most people in the modern West, is that we have too much of it and "need to cut down."  We're all living like high medieval aristocrats, not having to work to get our food, just making sure the "little people" are producing it, even eating more than we need.

An ordinary grocery store would have been beyond the dreams of avarice for even wealthy medieval people.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Violent Overthrow of the Government

Today seemed like a good day to blog about the violent overthrow of the government in the Middle Ages.

Now of course this was not an everyday event.  Most governments carried on perfectly peacefully.  New mayors were elected, new counts came to power, new kings inherited without any sign of violence.  Pippin the Short, first Carolingian king, took the throne in 751 after (apparently) persuading his Merovingian predecessor to go off and be a monk.  (Were there threats if he didn't go peacefully? maybe.)  Boso became the first (and almost the only) Bosonid king of Burgundy in 879 by persuading the local bishops and counts to elect him, after his Carolingian predecessor had died (a death in which Boso played no role).

But violence often was involved.  The Scandinavian kingdoms had a very rapid turnover of kings during much of the Middle Ages, many of the kings being murdered by their opponents—who were sometimes their brothers.  The French kingdom in contrast experienced peaceful transfers of power from the late tenth century until the fourteenth century, which everyone agreed was unusual.

In the Middle Ages, as now, fighting was considered an appropriate way to get what one wanted when other methods failed.  Although the Middle Ages was not nearly as violent as often portrayed, as I have discussed earlier, combat was a recognized way of proving one was right–even according to the church, before the thirteenth century.  A battle could be construed as a "trial by combat," with God showing who was in the right by allowing that person to win.

Nonetheless, slaughtering a lot of people always seemed at least somewhat suspect as a Christian deed.  After William the Conqueror made himself king of England in 1066 by winning the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold (the former king) was killed, William and his wife founded a monastery and a nunnery to try to make amends.

Even when a new person had become king, that did not mean they were safe from attacks.  King Boso spent much of his short reign fighting against those who thought he should not be king, including his own brother.  King Charles the Simple was defeated in battle in 922 and locked up for the rest of his life (some have suggested he should be called Charles the Straightforward, taking his Latin nickname, Simplex, to mean not cunning or devious, but I like just plain old Simple, because he really was an incompetent king).

The English kings continued to have violence part of royal transitions after William the Conqueror.  His son became Henry I in 1100 because Henry's older brother Robert was off on Crusade, and when Robert, furious, came home, Henry defeated him in battle and locked him up for the rest of his life.  After Henry I died in 1135, his daughter Mathilda and nephew Stephen spent the next two decades battling each other over who was the rightful king of England.  The English barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 with threats of violence, and they did rebel violently against his son, Henry III.  English historians take the end of the Middle Ages in Britain to arrive in 1485, when King Richard III was defeated and killed in battle by Henry VII.

We now honor Joan of Arc, the only Catholic saint to have been burned at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic church, but her legacy is one of violence:  she defeated the English armies in order to put King Charles VII on the throne in 1422.

Even the leadership of smaller units of government might be determined violently.  Bishops ran their cities all during the Middle Ages, usually in concert with or in tension with the local count, but during the twelfth century the inhabitants began to insist on a role in governance, usually with an elected mayor.  Agreement between all the interested parties was usually reached (fairly) peacefully, but in the 1120s disagreements in the French city of Laon between bishop and townspeople turned into violent riots, with the bishop killed and his body left in the street.

The United States of America is a young country.  We do not have fifteen hundred years of history of Europe's countries during which there were numerous violent changes of government (though 1776, never forget, was an armed rebellion).  Our biggest example of trying to overthrow the government violently was the Civil War, 160 years ago.  Then there's the effort of one year ago, which fortunately failed, but might not next time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval political history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.