Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not medieval.  It was built somewhere around 2500 BC.  But medieval people of course knew it was there, it's hard to miss a circle of huge standing stones, and they had their own theories about it.

 Modern archaeologists of course have had plenty of theories as well.  The current thinking is that it was built during a (relatively) short period at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic) which also saw most of the other great stone circles and standing stones erected across Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.  During a period that may have been as short as a century, Neolithic men across the region dragged huge stones many miles and heaved them up into position without machines, horses, or even the wheel.  (One assumes Neolithic women were wondering when the guys would do something useful, like raise some food.)  (Am I sexist in assuming the women had something better to do than create huge erections? of course not.)

And it certainly is a remarkable achievement.  Stonehenge's big stones weigh several tons each. The bluestones, those making a smaller circle in the center of the monument, came from Wales, 175 miles away.  (Stonehenge is unique in this; all the other stone circles in Britain just were built from local stone.)  There is even a site near the original Welsh quarry that has pits spaced the same as the stones at Stonehenge, but with no stones in them (maybe a test run?)  There is also some evidence that the cremated human remains found at Stonehenge are from people who had been living in Wales, perhaps those who had accompanied the bluestones to their final destination.

The biggest Stonehenge stones were all quarried locally, but they still would have needed to be dragged several miles.  And think about trying to heave the lintel stones up on top of the standing stones.  It's no wonder that Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing King Arthur stories in the twelfth century, said that Merlin had magically erected Stonehenge, having brought the stones from Ireland (some millennia-old legend of bluestones coming from Wales?).

In modern popular belief, Stonehenge is often attributed to the Druids and the Celtic peoples, and self-styled pagans like to hold special ceremonies there at the summer and winter solstice (the longest and shortest days of the year).  Stonehenge is indeed lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice, but we know nothing of what this may have meant for the builders' religion.  We know a little about the Druids, but they came along some 2000 years later, making it pointless to assume similarities.

Whatever it meant to the people who built it, Stonehenge has generated lots of meanings in the last thousand years.  It has been taken as King Arthur's "real" round table, as proof that giants used to exist, as a sign of alien visitors from outer space, and of course as an excuse to wear green and do "pagan" dances.  The chronicler William of Huntington, writing in England in the 1130s, was probably more honest than most when he said he had no idea when or why it was built.  He still named it a "wonder of England."

The megalith builders (as they are called) did not only erect stone structures.  They also built huge circles of wood, sometimes made of very old, very tall oaks that would have weighed even more than the stones.  Archaeologists have found the remains of such "wood henges," though they are not visible now as the stone circles are; millennia ago, however, they would have stood as impressive monuments for centuries.

Although we can only guess at what the megalith builders were trying to do, it is interesting to note that they had agriculture, and thus a (fairly) reliable source of food, not needing to wander around hunting and gathering.  Some 4000 years after Stonehenge was built, the Inca emperors in what is now Peru had great stone structures built to honor their gods (and themselves), again using stone-age technology (this was not long before Columbus) and having well-established agriculture.  (They concentrated on walls, rather than standing stones, and smoothed the stones so that they would fit together so tightly you couldn't even slide a piece of paper between them.)

There is a good article on the current scientific understanding of Stonehenge's construction in the August 2022 National Geographic.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

500 Posts

So this is a milestone.  This marks the 500th post on my blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

I started the blog back in 2014, over eight years ago, because I knew there was a lot of interest in medieval social history but not necessarily a lot of places to actually learn about it.  Sure, there were little "fun fact" things that might mention something from the Middle Ages, such as, "Medieval kings often received visitors while in the bathtub," complete with a drawing of someone lying in a clawfoot tub, wearing a crown, greeting someone dressed like the Vatican's Swiss guard.  (Ultimate source for this highly unlikely image is a comment by a contemporary biographer of Charlemagne, saying the king invited his courtiers to join him in the hot spring baths of Aachen, which would have been more like a small swimming pool.)  But I wanted to provide a look at how medieval people lived their lives, in an informal but scholarly accurate way.

The blog has been a success.  It routinely gets hundreds of hits a day.  I think some home-school curricula include links to it.  My post on "medieval farm animals" is especially popular, being viewed multiple times a day.  I try to post new material fairly regularly, but there's a whole lot out there already, everything from what medieval marriage was like, to latrines, to war horses, to medieval diet, to the origins of universities, to the history of the Bible, and so much more.  Scroll through, and I'm sure you'll find something interesting.

Along the way I also discuss, at least in passing, some of the things that modern western society takes for granted, like electricity and clean running water (and chocolate), to draw a contrast between our lives and those of our ancestors.  On the other hand, a constant effort has been not to draw too sharp a contrast between us and medieval people.  They really are like us in everything besides the material objects that surround us.  Looking down at people of the past as somehow defective because they didn't have cell phones doesn't help anything.

I also blog intermittently about my own fiction.  I write fantasy, set in a semi-medieval world.  It helps that in knowing a lot of real medieval history I can add texture and detail to the background.  And when I'm anachronistic, I'm doing it on purpose.

So if you've just stumbled across my blog, or if you've been following it for a long time, I hope you continue to find it enjoyable.  And are there topics I've never covered that you'd like to know about?  If so, let me know in the comments section, or email me (link in my profile).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For much of the material from the first half dozen years of the blog, organized into handy chapters, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback, on Amazon and other on-line retailers, or for sale from your local bookstore.

Burgundy

 Medieval and early modern France was divided into counties and duchies, held by powerful lords.  These divisions were all done away with in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, replaced by the départements, administrative units (originally there were 89, but more have been added around Paris).

But the old regional divisions persisted in people's minds, even if there were no more dukes or counts.  In recent years, there has been a new interest in regions, so it isn't only the Michelin guides anymore but also the local administrators who will tell you proudly that you have entered Anjou or Normandy or Alsace or whatever.

One of the most important medieval duchies was Burgundy.  Interestingly, the name Burgundy has been applied over the years to a great variety of different geographic locations, a lot of which don't even overlap.  Originally the Burgundians were centered in the Jura, the region where modern France and Switzerland meet.  They had their own kingdom in the early Middle Ages, and the end of their line of kings was preserved in legends that became attached to the story of Siegfried.

In the ninth century, the kingdom of Burgundy extended from there down the Rhône valley to the Mediterranean, with its capital at Vienne (near Lyon).  It included Provence and was part of what had been the Lotharingian "middle kingdom" between France and Germany (another part of this middle kingdom lingered on further north, in the region that became known as Lorraine, from "Lotharingia").  This kingdom did not however last more than a generation or two.

From the tenth century on, Burgundy became defined as the duchy centered on Dijon, stretching from the Loire on the west to Lorraine on the east, from the region of Sens in the north to the Mâconnais in the south.  Borders varied over time, and in the early modern period part of the northwest section of Burgundy, the regions of Nevers and Auxerre, were no longer under the dukes, but they are considered Burgundian by medievalists.

Medieval Burgundy was a great center of monasticism.  The great medieval monasteries of Cluny and Cîteaux, both soon heads of orders, were both founded in Burgundy (in 910 and 1098 respectively).  The region is still dotted with medieval churches, both Cluniac and Cistercian.  (That's part of the ruins of the abbey church of Cluny, below.)  Burgundian Romanesque architecture from the eleventh and especially twelfth centuries may be found throughout the region.

 Burgundy was in the Middle Ages, as it is now, also a great wine growing region.  It was conveniently located on rivers that ran downstream to Paris, making it easy to move wine to market.  One tends to think of Burgundy as red wine, but the region has plenty of white wine too, including Chablis; the valley of Chablis is entirely lined with vineyards.  The standard local white wine is called Bourgogne aligoté.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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