The "Three Orders" and medieval historians

 If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that it is simply false that medieval society was tidily divided into three orders.  The idea of "orders of society" had long been around, because medieval people (like us) liked to create categories, but these were theoretical rather than official.  For example, one theory was that society's three groups were cloistered virgins (monks and nuns), secular clergy (priests and bishops), and lay people.  Or perhaps there were just two, the unchaste and the virgins (these two could become three if married people became a third category).  Or maybe the two divisions of society were the powerful and the weak.  Or simply men and women.

The division of society into "those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor" was proposed in the early eleventh century and then ignored until the creation of the French Estates General in the fourteenth century, where the Estates were churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy townspeople (wait, you say, what happened to peasants? well they didn't count).

It shows you how little influence the "three orders" had that England's Parliament, established slightly earlier, had only two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.  The Lords included both church leaders and secular nobles, whereas the knights of the shire, who would have been in the "second estate" in France, were instead part of the Commons with the wealthy townspeople.  (And you note there arr still no peasants.)

(Parliament then and now meets in Westminster, near the church where King Charles III will soon be crowned.)

So even though there was no tidy division into three orders in the Middle Ages, there's always been a sense that there were different statuses in society.  Church men and women had different lives than powerful lay people, who in turn were different from townspeople or from peasants.

Interestingly, historians who study the Middle Ages loosely follow the eleventh-century theory about society's divisions in choosing what to study.  Given a choice of three groups, most historians choose only one, or at most two.  That is, someone might study the nobility and the church but pay little attention to peasants (or townspeople).  Or, as is the case with the many French historians who write regional monographs, one might study nobles and peasants but essentially ignore the church.  Interestingly, scholars essentially never study both peasants and the church, although some have focused their research on urban areas and included both urban churches and townspeople.

And of course even one of these groups provides plenty of opportunity for study.  Within the church there are monks, nuns, priests, friars, bishops, popes, and various hangers-on.  And the study of religion and religious ideas goes well beyond the study of people within the church.  Knights and nobles can be studied for their families, for their role in politics, for ideas of chivalry, for medieval warfare.  The "everybody else" group included 80-90% of the population, everything from desperately poor laborers to wealthy merchants, so there's lots there to study.  And women can be treated as a separate group within all of these.

If "society was divided into three orders" was as simple as high school textbooks might lead you to believe, medieval historians wouldn't still be writing exciting new books and I wouldn't have a blog with over 500 posts and no end in sight.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

 

Memory and Forgetting

 Like modern people, medieval people worried about forgetting important things.  Such important things included wars, the deaths of kings, disease outbreaks, healings by saints, the foundation of monasteries, and pious gifts.  Like modern people, medieval people wanted important things written down.

Writing has a real advantage over stories and accounts passed orally in that it doesn't change, and people not yet born when you die may read something you wrote and know what you were thinking.  An important event in the past, one that people had stopped talking about, if recorded in writing can be remembered once again.  A written record from the time can also help resolve arguments in the future about whether something really happened.

Memory was especially important at monasteries, because they were officially undying bodies.  A gift of property made in the seventh century should still belong to the monks in the twelfth century.  Similarly, a particularly holy or at least effective abbot (or bishop) deserved to be remembered as a model for later generations to seek to emulate.  Thus it was important to get as many memories in writing as possible.

The problem of course was that these written records could be lost.  Before the eighth century those in the West preferred to write on papyrus, rather than on parchment (sheep skin), and papyrus disintegrates if not kept dry.  We have extremely few surviving original documents from the beginning of the Middle Ages, even though there is plenty of evidence of widespread literacy and record-keeping then, even notaries and public archives where important documents could be stored.  Most of what we know about these centuries from written evidence comes from copies made later, when delicate records were copied onto parchment.

Parchment however does not mean that a record is now preserved forever.  Since there was only the one copy, it could become lost, nibbled by mice, burned in a fire, have ink spilled on it, stolen, become too faded to read.  And this was during the Middle Ages.  The early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth-century wars of religion to the upheavals of the French Revolution to the twentieth century's world wars, have destroyed far more.

And even copying was an issue.  Late Roman cursive, such as used in a lot of papyrus documents, was nothing like the Caroline book-hands used in the ninth through eleventh centuries, the great age of document copying.  Scribes must have looked at what was in front of them and made their best guesses as to what the words were.

Sometimes even when they could read what was written it still didn't make sense.  There were a lot of changes during the eighth century as Europe began recovering from the population loss of the sixth and seventh centuries (on which see more here), as new population centers started being established, often in different places than the late Roman ones, and as Latin was being replaced by the earliest versions of today's European languages.  Scribes of the ninth century and later could barely recognize their monastery in its earliest records, where places had different names, people lived in different places, and rules and customs were different.

Similarly, holy figures of late antiquity behaved differently than their successors half a millennium later.  Tenth- and eleventh-century monks and cathedral priests were shocked to find an abbot or bishop who had been married, or whose version of  proper behavior included dressing in rags and going barefoot.  The "life" of an early holy bishop might have to be rewritten so that the wife who appeared with him was actually a "bride of Christ" or perhaps someone to whom he had been unwillingly betrothed by his parents before entering the church.

If something was just too weird it could be deliberately forgotten.  All it took was an early, disintegrating document not to be copied for it to be lost forever.  But the past itself could not be dismissed.  After all, tradition legitimates.  "We have always done this" or "We have always been here" are still powerful.  Thus past events could not all be swept away.  Rather they had to be reconfigured into what historians call a "useful past," one which gave legitimacy to the present.  Medieval scribes explained that the past valued the same things they valued, even while hoping that no one would change the memory of the great deeds and people they recorded for their own posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Guédelon castle

 In the Puisaye region of French Burgundy, they are building a thirteenth-century castle. Its name is Guédelon.

 The project began in 1995 as an attempt to build a castle using medieval techniques.  Nearly thirty years later, they hope they are close to finishing, and they have learned a tremendous amount in the process about how castles were built in the thirteenth century.  The builders call this "experimental archaeology."

The process began with studying real castles.  Although all medieval castles have been modified over the centuries (and many are now in ruins), close analysis can show how (one simple example) walls were built with careful stonework for the inner and outer sides, and an inside filled with rubble.  A lot of medieval buildings still have builders' marks on stones or beams, giving additional clues to their construction.

Added to this are medieval manuscripts which portray castles and other buildings under construction.  There are even a few handbooks from the late Middle Ages giving cryptic instructions.  The modern French builders' guilds, the ones who repair old buildings, have retained a lot of useful information over the centuries.

But in essence the builders at Guédelon are reverse engineering a castle, trying something and seeing if it works to produce something that looks real.  Any thought someone might have had in 1995 when they started, that the simple folk of the thirteenth century would not have had the sophistication of modern builders, was quickly dispelled.  Medieval builders didn't have our machines, but they knew exactly what they were doing and what would work.

Timbers (mostly oak) are cut with medieval style axes and saws, and stones are chiseled and shaped with medieval style chisels.  The sandstone from which most of the castle is being built is locally quarried, and the limestone, used for fancy vaulting and decorative carvings, comes from just a short distance away.  Most of the oakwood is from nearby.  This reflects what real thirteenth-century builders would have had to do, get as much local as they could because of the enormous transportation costs of heavy materials in a pre-truck world.

Over the last quarter century, a lot of people interested in historical reconstruction have come to learn and work at Guédelon. The builders reconstructing Notre Dame in Paris, after the fire, are trying to restore the timbers and roof to something like the thirteenth-century original, and many of the workers had been trained in medieval techniques at Guédelon.

Guédelon welcomes visitors.  You can visit during the summer months, for only 14 euros each (less for children).  They are eager for people to see their work and to teach them about medieval techniques.  I would guess that once the castle is finished they will be able to rent it out as a movie set, because it will (of course) look like a thirteenth-century castle looked in the thirteenth century.  European movies set in the Middle Ages often use real castles as a backdrop, but they have to shoot carefully (or use CG special effects) to avoid the ruined bits (Hollywood movies tend to go in for the unconvincing stage set).

The project has an extensive website (in French and English) giving the story of how they decided to build a medieval castle in the twenty-first century and illustrating construction methods, available here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Westminster Abbey

 Modern England (and for that matter the whole UK), unlike most of the rest of Europe, considers itself to be a continuation of medieval England.  King Charles III is a descendant of William the Conqueror, and for that matter of the Saxon royal line pre-1066.  No French Revolution here!  (Okay, so we don't need to talk about the English civil war of the seventeenth century, when the monarch was beheaded and replaced by Cromwell as Protector.  They eventually restored the monarchy with the dead king's son.)

England's medieval roots are always fully on display for great ceremonies, such as the upcoming royal coronation of King Charles at Westminster Abbey.  Charles is already king, having been since his mother's death in September 2022, but a new king needs an elaborate ceremony, a performative act.  He is king of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland.  The Scots will tell you that Scotland took over England rather than vice versa, because James VI was already king of Scotland when he became James I of England in 1603, but we don't need to talk about that now.

Westminster is its own city, surrounded by London but not officially part of it.  It was called Westminster because it was the area surrounding a church (what the word "minster" means) located west of what was then the city of London.  London has grown enormously over the centuries, but the central bit is still called The City.

There was an abbey founded at Westminster in the tenth century, and in the eleventh century Edward the Confessor, next to last of the Saxon kings of England (last if you don't count Harold, defeated by William the Conqueror) paid for a new church to be built for the monks.  He'd already built a royal palace right next door.  He was buried at Westminster abbey when he died in 1066, the first of a great many kings to be buried there.  (It's not happened for the last two centuries, however; Queen Elizabeth II was buried out at Windsor, even though her funeral was at Westminster—as was her wedding to Prince Philip in 1947.)  William the Conqueror chose Westminster for his own coronation ceremony in 1066, doubtless to assert continuity with Saxon kings, and chose Christmas Day, most likely to assert some sort of continuity with Charlemagne (crowned Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800).

The monastery flourished over the following centuries.  In the thirteenth centuries, as great Gothic cathedrals, like Notre Dame in Paris, were being built all over, the decision was made to tear down the Romanesque eleventh-century church, which now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, and rebuild in the high Gothic style.  The church as it now stands was more or less completed in the fifteenth century; Gothic takes a long time to build.

 Down in the basement there are still some remains of the eleventh-century church, and there is a door tourists can visit and take pictures of, supposedly the oldest door in England, supposedly from the tenth-century original abbey.

Now of course the church has gone through a lot since the thirteenth century.  The big central window on the west end (seen above) dates from the eighteenth century.  So do the towers on either side.  (In the picture above you can see the stone of the towers is a lighter color.)  The organ was installed in the twentieth century.  And of course it is no longer a monastery.  In the sixteenth century you'll recall England became Protestant ("Church of England") under Henry VIII, and Catholic monasteries were shut down.  Briefly the abbey church was designated a cathedral, although it is not one now.  (Instead Westminster cathedral is a separate church, the seat of a Catholic bishop, head of English Catholicism.)  Although the monks are long gone, the abbey church still has a school for choir boys.

Westminster palace, built much later in its current form to replace Edward the Confessor's palace, is now the home of England's Parliament.

The April/May 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a good article about Westminster.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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