Wheat

 Wheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet, bread.  Planting wheat around the world requires clearing off other plants and trees, to be replaced by fields of food.  Now in 2022, the war in Ukraine is disrupting wheat growing, a real problem because Ukraine has been a major provider of wheat to third-world countries.  Wheat production has really expanded world-wide in the last two or three generations, due to modern fertilizers and improved hybrids and farming methods, but the danger of relying too much on one ubiquitous crop is dealing with its absence.

Wheat has been cultivated for close to 12,000 years, starting in the Middle East.  Without agriculture, you really cannot have cities (or civilization), because you need a reliable crop that will feed a lot of people without everyone having to go out and hunt and gather every couple of days, said hunting and gathering requiring that people be fairly widely spread out, so they don't exhaust local resources.

Medieval wheat was primarily winter wheat, planted in the fall, sprouting but then lying dormant through the winter, ready to start growing for real as soon as it warms up in the spring.  It would be harvested around July.  One can also plant wheat in the spring, but the most common spring-planted grains were oats, rye, and barley, barley primarily around the Mediterranean, rye and oats in more northerly climates.  You can make bread out of any of these, but it was uniformly agreed that it was inferior to wheat bread.  For one thing, those grains don't have as much gluten, meaning bread wouldn't rise nearly as well.

Farm work was thus spread out, some grain planted in the spring, wheat harvested in the summer, non-wheat grains harvested in early fall, wheat planted in late fall.  The three-field system of crop rotation, where one of the three fields lies fallow every year to theoretically regenerate itself, thus provided work spread over the months and a fall-back if there was a disastrous wheat harvest.

(People with ceoliac disease, intolerance to gluten, would have been in serious trouble in the Middle Ages.  There was no "gluten-free" aisle at the grocery store, and for that matter no grocery store.)

Wheat is derived from wild grasses, bred over the millennia to have more seed heads (which is why modern wheat needs a lot of fertilizer) and to have the seed heads not easily break away from the stem.  This makes it easier to harvest, whereas wild grasses have the seed heads break loose and disperse if the stalk is disturbed.  This is fine for wild grasses spreading themselves, but it makes for a difficult harvest.

Wheat thus had to be threshed and winnowed to get the seeds free of the stalks and hulls.  Threshing required beating it once in a barn, to break the seeds free, and winnowing, that is separating seeds from hulls.  On a windy day winnowing could be achieved by tossing the wheat and hulls in the air so the lighter chaff would blow away.

Because it needs no refrigeration, wheat could be easily stored.  The problem was keeping out mice and rats.  Medieval cities tried to stockpile grain against bad harvests.  With wheat, the grain, the food, is also the seed for next year's planting, so if there was a bad harvest there was always the unenviable choice of eating the grain now, to keep from starving, and then having little to plant, meaning starving next year.

Wheat stalks were valuable in the Middle Ages, because they were an excellent source of thatch for thatched roofs.  Modern wheat no longer has the very tall stalks it did then, because it has been deliberately bred for shorter stalks (to put more energy into the seeds instead of the stalk).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Families and Monasteries

 As I have discussed earlier, monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries) could live in uninterrupted silence, separate from the affairs of the world, engrossed in prayer and contemplation.'

But medieval families were very much involved in monasteries.  Even though a monk supposedly gave up his fleshly family for the family of brother-monks under the fatherly direction of the abbot (abba just means father), there were numerous ways that non-monastic members of a family could be involved with the monastery.

First and perhaps most important, for most monasteries the monks had all joined as boys.  The parents gave their child as what was called a "bloodless sacrifice," hoping to save his soul and theirs as well.  They might never see the boy again, or at least not for many years, and they were expected to make a sizeable gift when he was accepted as a novice.  Although the boy would not officially become a monk until he made his own decision to do so in his teens, in practice few left the cloister.

In making their son a novice monk, an "oblate" as he was called (the word means "offering"), the family was thus closely involved with the monastery.  In a number of cases virtual dynasties would be established, as a boy would be placed in the same monastery where his uncle was already a monk, someone for whom he might indeed be named (indicating, as other evidence also makes clear, that parents were not just waiting until they saw how many children they were going to have and then dumped the excess into a monastery).  When he grew up, he might welcome a nephew of his own into the cloister.

Even without having a family member in a monastery, family members might try to establish a connection with it over the generations, choosing a particular house to which to make repeated pious gifts over the years, to ensure that the monks would be praying for them.  These days tracing a family's history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can often be accomplished by reading through the records of a particular monastery in which family members repeatedly appear, either making gifts or trying to reclaim the gifts made by the previous generation.

There are also instances in which a family committed what might be considered dynastic suicide, having everybody join the church, the males going into a monastery, the females into a nunnery.  This was the case with the family of Bernard of Clairvaux, the best known member of the twelfth-century Cistercian order.  He had been intended for a knightly life, but at a certain point, seized with religious fervor, he and a group of his friends all joined the monastery as young adults.

His family's initial reaction was shock, but soon all his brothers (with their wives), his sisters, his parents, and an uncle all joined the church (the uncle became Grandmaster of the Templars).  Originally the family members told the youngest son that he was going to stay a knight and carry on the family dynasty, but after a few years he announced he was not going to forgo Paradise just to carry on some lineage, and he too became a monk.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Saint Benedict

Benedictine monasticism was the dominant form of monasticism in the Middle Ages.  But who was Benedict and why did he get a whole lot of monasteries following his Rule?

As I discussed earlier, monasticism began in the third century in Egypt, as first Saint Anthony, then men following him, then ultimately women began retreating from the ordinary life of the comfortable cities of late antiquity to try to lead a more austere life, in conscious imitation of the lives of the Apostles.  Monasticism reached western Europe at the end of the fourth century when Martin, bishop of Tours, founded the monastery of Marmoutier (the name means "Martin's monastery"--he didn't name it, but others named it in his honor).

Any group of people living together need some sort of agreement on what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to behave, ideally put in writing.  Monks were no different, so rules for monastic life began to be written almost as soon as there were monasteries.  From the fifth through the eighth centuries there were multiple different rules in use in western Europe, some more detailed than others, some harsher than others, but the one that eventually came to dominate was that written by Saint Benedict (d. 547).

Benedict was Italian, usually called "of Nursia" for his hometown (in the Umbria region).  His name means "well spoken" or "blessed."  He is supposed to have had a twin sister, Scholastica.  (You can figure out her name yourself.)

He wasn't a saint yet when he wrote his famous Rule.  He was abbot of the monastery of Montecassino, in Italy.  (Montecassino was bombed by the Americans during World War II.  They thought, mistakenly, that Nazis and munitions were there.  Let's not talk about it.)  He wanted a Rule for his monks that would be clear, fair, and firm, not too harsh but also not too easy going.  He was inspired in part by the slightly earlier so-called Rule of the Master.

Benedict's Rule laid out the daily round of prayers and work (he assumed his monks would be growing much of their own crops), specified appropriate food and clothing, and told what should happen when a monk strayed or even ran away--he would be treated with both justice and mercy.  A good deal of the Rule covers the responsibilities of the abbot, who was a father to the brothers (monks), and throughout there is a strong emphasis on humility.

Although there was no effort to make this rule official, it gradually became adopted at a number of monasteries over the following centuries.  Every monastery made additions to it to suit their own circumstances, but the original was often read aloud to the monks on a regular basis.  Both Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious, urged Frankish monasteries to adopt it.  They were influenced by the abbot Benedict of Aniane, who strongly identified with his namesake from four centuries earlier.

The main monastic orders of the twelfth century, the Cistercians and Cluniacs, were Benedictine, in that they tried to follow Benedict's Rule--and got into disagreements over what Benedict would really have meant.  Some monasteries in the thirteenth century called themselves members of the Benedictine Order, because they followed Benedictine Rule without belonging to a larger organization, but there wasn't really much of an order, nothing like the Cistercian and Cluniac Orders.

This image is the twelfth-century monastery of Paray-le-Monial, of the Cluniac order.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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