The Common Cold

One often hears some version of, "If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they cure the common cold?"  Well, for starters there are probably 200 or so different versions of "the" common cold, so you'd need 200 cures.  They are all viruses, which scientists put into several groups, including the Rhinoviruses (the most common), and Coronaviruses, also known as Covid.

Symptoms vary but all include sniffling and aching and maybe running a fever.  One's body does build up immunity, so by the time a person has been around for a while they don't catch nearly as many colds, as they've already had and recovered from a large proportion of them.  Children, as every daycare knows, catch lots of colds, because their immune system is still developing and is meeting colds for the first time.  Influenza is another viral disease, again with a number of different strains, potentially more deadly than a cold and usually not involving sniffles, though it can make a person feel terrible otherwise.

In spite of the name, you won't "catch cold" by going outdoors without a sweater.  But the  cells in your nose that fight off foreign invaders (like viruses) may be less effective when they're chilly, making colds spread more readily, especially when people are mostly indoors during the winter months, breathing each others' air.

(Don't try to treat viral diseases with antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against living creatures like bacteria, which viruses are not, and overuse of antibiotics helps antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.  This health tip brought to you courtesy of this blog.)

Wait, you say, didn't you just mention Covid a couple paragraphs back?  What's with that?  Yes indeed, I did, because Covid-19 is a Coronovirus, related to though a lot more serious than the "common cold" versions.  It's called "19" because it was first identified in 2019.  (The number has nothing to do with the number of pounds you gained in 2020, staying home, getting no exercise, but filling your time baking sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls.)

But what, you say, does this have to do with the Middle Ages?  You're about to find out.

Some version of "the common cold" has been around for a long time, the sniffles being described by physicians in ancient Egypt.  But there is emerging evidence that one of the Coronovirus versions of the cold first appeared in humans in the thirteenth century.  Like many viruses (including Covid-19), it probably developed first in animals and then made the jump to humans.

It was a killer.  A lot of people got very sick and died.  It was not nearly as bad as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, but it was bad.  Without modern vaccines, people had to rely on their own immune systems and on friends and family keeping them warm and fed.  This is when it became a great act of charity to endow a hospital, to care for the sick and the indigent.

This disease was probably comparable in effect to modern Covid-19, and like Covid-19 it mutated readily, each iteration being somewhat less deadly but somewhat more infectious.  It seems most likely that this medieval form of Covid, now just starting to be studied seriously by historians of medicine, is still with us.  We know we still have a version of Covid that killed a lot of people in Russia in the 1890s, before becoming less deadly.  So it seems Covid-19 is going to be with us permanently, in some form.

By the way, there are a number of "just so stories" about medieval people, some of which involve colds and are clearly untrue.  No medieval priest taught that your soul would escape as you sneezed or coughed, or that the devil would zip into the vacancy your soul left behind.  So stories that people said "Bless you" to encourage your soul to stay put, or that they coughed into a handkerchief to keep the soul from escaping, are just untrue.  People have doubtless said some version of "Bless you" or "Gesundheit" (meaning Good Health) as long as people have sneezed, because sniffles are an illness you hope the person recovers from.  And they coughed into handkerchiefs because, even without knowing about viruses, no one likes a sick person spraying on them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

The sixth century

 As I have discussed before, the term "fall of the Roman Empire" is a misnomer.  No one thought the Roman Empire had fallen until close to a thousand years after it had supposedly done so.  There were still Roman emperors (in Constantinople and, in the west after 800, in Germany), Roman cities, Roman religion (Christianity), Roman language, Roman roads, Roman monuments, and so on.

The seat of Empire had shifted from Rome to Constantinople (in Byzantium) in the fourth century, under the emperor Constantine (guess how Constantinople got its name), so in many ways you could say the Empire did not fall until 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.  (It was at this point that the church of Hagia Sophia, seen below, became a mosque.)  From the fourth century to the late fifth, there were sometimes two emperors, one in Constantinople and one in Rome, until the last separate western one was assassinated at the orders of the Byzantine one.

And yet a whole lot indubitably changed during the "long" sixth century, from the late fifth century to the early seventh century.  This is one of the least well documented periods of the history of western Europe in the last two millennia, which is why British scholars have sometimes called it the Dark Ages.  But this term has unfortunate negative undertones (you mean the sun never came up?) which is why the term Late Antiquity is now mostly used instead for the fifth through seventh centuries.  (For one thing, the term recognizes that the Empire of antiquity was still around.)

The "long" sixth century is bracketed by the disappearance of separate Roman emperors in the West after the 470s or so, although there continued of course to be Byzantine Roman emperors who sometimes visited the West, like Justinian, and by the rise and spread of Islam in the first half of the seventh century, which radically changed the culture of the Mediterranean, which had been known as a "Roman lake."

The sixth century was also an awful time in many ways, marked by the first outbreak of the Black Death, and by several very cold years of disastrous harvests, probably caused by a volcanic eruption.  The pandemic and breakdown of trade and communication meant that cities, which had been central to Roman civilization, radically shrank.  After all, people could recognize that infection was a lot higher in a crowded city even without knowing about bacteria, and a city can't survive if the countryside isn't producing enough surplus food to sell to city-dwellers.

The cities persisted, however, as religious and governmental centers, even if with much smaller populations.  In some old Roman cities, like Nîmes, people retreated inside the amphitheater, treating its outer walls like the new city walls.  The city of Rome itself shrank into a new, smaller area with its own walls, leaving the area between the old and new walls, that had once had a large population, dotted with orchards, villas, and monasteries.

Constantinople had the same problems as the West with disease and famine, and orders stopped coming from Byzantium.  But a lot of the governmental structures stayed in place.  As provincial governors stopped ruling cities, bishops took over the role.  New kingdoms, such as those of the Franks in what is now France and the Visigoths in what is now Spain, became established, using Roman laws and Roman taxation systems as they replaced Roman regional administrators.  They dropped their original Germanic languages like hot potatoes in favor of Latin.  Urban populations continued to be literate, writing on papyrus, with city archives recording important events in people's lives.

The Franks, Visigoths, and many other so-called Germanic people were once described as invaders, destroying Roman civilization, but in fact they had been neighbors to the Empire for several centuries, traded with them, and were often recruited into the Roman armies.  The only part of the Empire where Germanic people could be said to have radically changed the culture was what was now England, with the arrival of the Angles and Saxons.

Elsewhere the new arrivals clearly wanted to be Roman, adopting the culture as well as the language.  A lot of the new arrivals kept their traditional names, however.  Yet the same family might include a Theoderic, who served the king as a regional lord (a count), and an Anthony, who entered the church.  The first was a "Germanic" name, the second a "Roman" name, indicating sons destined for different functions.

In the cities, people went to church, scribes kept records, and merchants sold goods, some of which continued to come from some distance away in spite of all the trade disruptions.  Kings and counts went to war with each other and collected booty.  In the countryside, people farmed, tended vines, and raised their animals.  One crucial sixth-century development was the end of agricultural slavery, as the legions were no longer bringing home huge numbers of people to be worked to death, then replaced.  Peasants became serfs instead of slaves, legally unfree but with their own families, houses, and plots of land.  People of whatever status recognized the need to work together in dangerous times.

A good book about the movement of so-called Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire, refuting the notion that they somehow destroyed it, is by Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Peasants in the Winter

 Winter was a tough period for medieval peasants.  For one thing, they would have had a difficult time keeping warm.  We probably do not appreciate our furnaces enough—turn up the thermostat, and heat appears!  Medieval people of all sorts, not just peasants but the rich and powerful, would have killed for a furnace (well, maybe not literally).

They had firepits, but peasants would not have had fireplaces, a thirteenth-century invention.  A fireplace, while not filling the room with smoke the way a firepit can, also sends a lot of its heat up the chimney, so it's inefficient, and if fuel is hard to get or expensive you don't want to be inefficient.  Building a fireplace was also a skill that most peasants didn't have, and they wouldn't have had the money to hire a mason.  So fancy medieval fireplaces might be found in castles (as seen below), but not peasant houses.

 

The best way to stay warm was to stay in bed, snuggled up against other people.  Fortunately there was very little work to be done in the winter, other than taking care of the animals, so there was plenty of time to stay in bed.

 Animals in fact could be advantageous to have.  They wouldn't actually live with the humans, but a medieval farm house would generally have the barn or stables attached, or perhaps on a lower floor with the humans living above.  Some of their body heat would thus help keep the structure from becoming too frigid.

But a farm would still have been a brutal place in the winter (and remember, probably 90% of the medieval population lived on a farm).  The water that both humans and animals needed might well have frozen.  The courtyard and the dung heap, where both human and animal waste was deposited, would have been a muddy mess, or a frozen muddy mess, scarcely better.  Worst of all, the food might be running out.  Everybody tried to stash away plenty for winter, but there was no doubt that it could be a close run between when the root vegetables, stored grain, and smoked meat gave out and when the first dandelion greens appeared.

Appreciate your furnace and the grocery store.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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