Illuminated Manuscripts

 "Illuminated."  It means lit up, flooded with light.  So what's an illuminated manuscript, other than one sitting on your desk with a bright desk lamp?

Actually it means something somewhat different.  A medieval illuminated manuscript is one with drawings and paintings in it.  Because, you remember, the printing press was only invented at the end of the Middle Ages, medieval books were all unique productions.  They were copied by hand, mostly on parchment before the fourteenth century, and they were special and valuable.  Drawings and other images made them even more special.

 For something like a Bible, it was considered appropriate to be especially prolific with images.  One of the most common forms of illumination was to make the initial letter of a section into a little picture.  This is a capital D (for Deus, God) from a ninth-century book of Psalms, done at the monastery of Corbie (eastern France).

 Full page illustrations were also found, though less commonly.  Sometimes (like here) they would be in a few subdued colors, but other times they would be done in vivid colors.  Usually the copying of the text and the drawing of the illuminations would be done separately, by different people.  There are plenty of medieval manuscripts where the person who was supposed to be drawing the fancy initials started but then never got back to the project, because there are big blanks where an illuminated initial is supposed to be.

Those doing the illuminations seem sometimes to have gotten bored with their careful, devout images and started drawing little scenes in the margins, demons, cats, people with faces in unusual parts of their anatomy, horses, or whatever took their fancy.  Usually these do not show up in Bibles, but they were common in illuminated books of history and the like.

When the Middle Ages became popular and romantic in the nineteenth century, wealthy people started collecting illuminated initials.  They would even have scrapbooks, where they would carefully cut an especially nice initial out of a medieval manuscript and paste it into their scrapbook, then toss the now-mutilated piece of parchment.  This makes medievalists' stomachs hurt just to think about it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Coal mining

We don't think about coal and the Middle Ages together, but coal was certainly used for fuel then at least in some places and at least occasionally.  In fact, the Romans had used British coal when the legions were stationed there.

Now they did not have the deep tunnels and underground mines we now associate with coal mining.  Instead most of the coal that the Romans and medieval people used was what was usually called "sea coal."  They figured out that some of the black rocks that got washed up on shore would burn very hot (after being dried out, of course).  These would be pieces broken off from underwater coal deposits by the action of the waves, or perhaps pieces that fell from a deposit in an eroding cliff face.

Both Romans and medieval people would gather sea coal and, if they found an outcropping, dig out chunks, creating a pit.  Open pit mining is of course less dangerous than tunneling, which is why Britain closed its last coal mining tunnels around 2015, leaving only a few open pits.  Medieval people would have approved.

Coal had (and has) the distinct advantage that it will burn far hotter than wood.   A high temperature is needed if one is going to work iron or burn lime to make cement.  Coal was sparse throughout the Middle Ages, which is why they mostly used charcoal when high temperatures were needed.  But making charcoal, which requires burning a lot of wood very slowly, is a more complicated process than digging some shiny black rocks out of the ground, and it also uses up an awful lot of wood.

This meant that once coal mining became viable, enormous resources were poured into it.  Some of the first tunnels to be dug, following a seam of coal deep underground, were in Scotland.  Enough sea coal washed up on the shores of the Firth of Forth that a seventeenth-century entrepreneur in Culross started digging tunnels right under the firth, having figured out how to prop them so that they didn't collapse (or hardly at all).

Below is a view of the village of Culross today, on the edge of the firth. (The mines are long gone.)

 

In eighteenth-century Britain,  serious coal mining fueled the Industrial Revolution.  Britain, with its large supply of coal, was able to industrialize faster than any other region, which helped support its establishment of an Empire that extended from Canada to Africa to India to Hong Kong, with plenty of stops in between.

By the nineteenth century, Britain was fairly black with coal soot (the reason London had its famous "fogs," actually just really polluted air), and slag from the mines turned many rivers black.  Since World War II, however, Britain has really pushed toward improving its environment, phasing out coal and cleaning up the countryside.  Parts of the countryside look so verdant and pastoral that one can imagine they haven't changed since the Middle Ages.  Well, they have, but they've been restored to something closer to what they would have been like 800 years ago.

In the US, we are still mining coal, although with sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro now cheaper, coal is clearly on the way out.  A concern of course is for the coal miners, many of whom have destroyed their lungs by years in the mines.  None of them love coal mining for its own sake, but it pays very well, and it allows them to live in the mountains that they love, much of which is still beautiful territory in spite of the mines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

 

Medieval households

 We tend to think of the "household" as the stereotypical Mom-Dad-kids, with the assumption that Mom and Dad as married and the kids as all theirs.  But in fact the US census shows that this describes only a small minority of households.  Medieval households were the same.

In fact the medieval Latin term "familia" meant not family but household.  "Family" was described by terms such as "gens," 'stirps," or "consanguinei."  Medieval people were extremely aware of their family connections, but for most purposes the household was the more important unit.

Think about modern households.  There might be just one person in the house.  There might be a couple (married or unmarried) without children, or some non-romantic roommates, or some adults with children who might not all be both of theirs.  Children might live with a single parent.  Siblings might live together as adults.  There might be a grandparent or aunt or uncle attached to a household  There might be a boarder.  On a farm, the hired hands might live in the same house and eat with the farmer.  For more well-to-do families, there might be a live-in nanny, a cook or housekeeper, even a butler.  Medieval households could have versions of any of these.

Medieval peasant households routinely included a collection of relatives who did not match the simple Mom-Dad-kids model.  In a medieval town, a well to do merchant or artisan family would have a servant or two and probably also have young apprentices living with them.  A castle would have a whole array of people living there, the castellan lord and (usually) his lady, perhaps their children, perhaps some other relatives, unrelated knights, servants, craftsmen, young men in training, maybe a priest or two.  This medieval castle would be occupied disproportionately by men.

And of course medieval people lived in a very "face to face" world, unlike us, who chat with our friends and family largely through social media or phone calls.  In a peasant village, you'd know the people next door almost as well as you knew the people who slept under your roof.  For one thing, you'd see them every time they trotted out to the dung pile, as well as other times.  In a castle or monastery, a lot of people slept in the same room, so there wasn't much of what we'd consider privacy.  Still, the household was the basic economic and social unit, as it really still is for us.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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