Brother is the Enemy

 We tend to think of families as all getting along and supporting and protecting each other.  For most families in the Middle Ages, that was probably the norm as well.  But just as today siblings can become very competitive over such things as "who gets Grandma's gold coin collection," so among the medieval aristocracy there was often fierce competition between brothers.

This is to be anticipated, because even though there were no strict rules of primogeniture (that is, of the oldest son getting everything), oldest sons did tend to inherit more, and the younger sons thought this was Totally Unfair.  Throughout the medieval and early modern period there were plenty of tales about three brothers, where the oldest gets the big inheritance, the middle one gets some small thing, and the third is told, "Good luck, kid."  Of course in these stories the youngest heads off and finds something worth far more than the original inheritance, and even a princess to marry.  Take that, older brother!

The Merovingian kings of what is now France (fifth to eighth centuries) were described by contemporaries as ready to slay their brothers and cousins.  The various small kingdoms, into which what is now France and the Low Countries were divided, were parceled out between heirs, who then decided the best way to add to their holdings was to kill their rivals.  Gregory of Tours, chief historian of the Merovingian era, said that Clovis, first of the kings, complained loudly that he was alone in the world without any relatives, in the hopes of luring some relatives out of hiding so he could kill them.

The Carolingian kings were not much better (eighth to tenth centuries).  Charlemagne had a younger brother, named Carloman, whom Charlemagne's biographer Einhard said died of "some disease."  Einhard went on to say that he couldn't imagine why Carloman's widow then fled with her children.  (One can imagine just fine.)

Charlemagne's grandsons were each given a kingdom of their own, Germany for Louis, France for Charles, and the "Middle Kingdom" (including Italy) for Lothair.  Louis and Charles immediately ganged up on their brother, as perhaps should be expected.  In the confusion and disagreements over the next two generations, a kingdom of Burgundy was established within what Lothair had thought was his kingdom, and Boso declared himself king, only to be opposed by his brother Richard, who told the Carolingian kings that he was their little friend.

In England after the 1066 Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror designated Normandy, the family inheritance, for his oldest son, Robert Curthose, designated newly conquered England for his second son, William Rufus, and told Henry, the third son, "Sorry, kid."  When William Rufus died without heirs in 1100, Henry immediately took his brother's throne.  Robert Curthose was off on Crusade and was understandably shocked when he got home.  Extensive fighting then took place, and Henry eventually won, taking Normandy as well as England and locking up his brother for the rest of his life.

In France, it was often remarked in the thirteenth century, with some wonderment, that the younger brothers of the king didn't try to kill him, not even a little.  In part this was due to the kings parceling out large chunks of territory (appanages) to their younger brothers.

These examples are all of the most powerful (and there are plenty more examples of fraternal warfare).  Peasant families in contrast tended to act in solidarity.  After all, they could not call up armies or faithful followers (like Boso's brother Richard) to fight against their relatives.  Landlords were more likely than brothers to be seen as the enemy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Old French

 Old French, like the medieval versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, plus other variants (like Provençal), derived ultimately from Latin.  They are called Romance languages because they derive from the language of ancient Rome.  But Old French is much closer to modern French than what is called Old English is to modern English.

This is because what we call Old English is Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language that was spoken in England before the Norman Conquest.  English had to incorporate a lot of French in the centuries after 1066, including going through the Middle English phase, before it became sort of what we think of as modern English in the seventeenth century.  Old French in contrast never had to incorporate an entirely different language.  (The number of words in modern English is roughly the same as the vocabularies of modern French and German put together.)

The first examples of Romance languages becoming distinct from Latin date to the ninth century.  At this point it was recognized that the pronunciation of a lot of words didn't exactly match the Latin spelling and that the grammar was increasingly different.  We should not of course be surprised at early medieval people accepting that spelling and pronunciation didn't match.  Look how English speakers pronounce though, through, tough, cough, and bough.

Written Old French came into its own in the twelfth century, primarily for stories, epics and romances.  Songs were also written in Old French.  A lot of stories had doubtless been told in the vernacular (that is, the everyday spoken language) for a long time, and songs sung in it, but now they were written down in it.

Most twelfth-century education was in Latin, and monks and bishops could converse and write fluently in correct classical Latin.  But as the century went on, more and more Old French was added to the educational mix.

During the middle years of the thirteenth century, some legal documents started being drawn up in Old French.  The spelling was subject to a great deal of variation, so that "I," ego in Latin, was spelled both je (as in modern French) and ge.  It seems clear that it was pronounced with the J sound, no matter how it was spelled.  But thirteenth-century French is close enough to modern French that a modern French speaker can read it relatively easily, with no more difficulty than a modern English speaker has in reading Shakespeare's sixteenth-century English.

Not everybody went over to using Old French.  For an especially important document, Latin was still preferred.  Stories might be told in Old French, but theological and political treatises were written in Latin.  Popes and bishops issued their documents in Latin, not the vernacular (popes still use Latin for official pronouncements).  For that matter, English scholars (like Isaac Newton) were still writing serious works in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

But the spread of Old French made it easier for more people to become literate, especially once paper started replacing the much more expensive parchment at the end of the thirteenth century.  Then one just needed to learn to read and write, not pick up a foreign language in the process.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

The Sign of the Rose

 Our word "romance" goes back to medieval French, but its meaning was somewhat different then compared to how we use the term now.  A medieval French roman was a story in which the emphasis was on personal interactions, rather than on feats of arms, as was the case with epics.  (In fact the romance-epic demarcation was not always very clear.)  More broadly it meant a story, and in fact modern French still uses roman for a novel.

We now use "romance" in a narrower sense, to mean a love story.  In fact, romance is a well-established genre.  It has its rules, such as that you are required to have a happily-ever-after ending, or at least a happy-for-now conclusion, as the couple intends to be each other's special and only love partner.

It's easy to mock modern romance, and indeed it can easily become formulaic.  Young woman from a small town/big city moves to a big city/small town for reasons that are intended to make the story distinctive.  There she encounters a new man/a previous flame.  Sparks fly!  Problems arise.  Will they get together in spite of them? (I think you know the answer.)  But anything that makes people happy and indeed encourages reading is to be applauded (so saith the author).

Why did medieval people call a story a roman?  It was because a lot of their stories were set in mythical long-ago times.  For us long-ago is the Middle Ages.  For them it was the Roman Empire.  So accounts of deeds could be characterized as Roman stories.  (Our word "story" comes from "history," historia.  Also an account of deeds.)

By the way, because many people made pilgrimages to Rome, pilgrims were often referred to colloquially as Romies, including those going to Santiago in Spain, in the opposite direction from France than Rome.

This brings us to Guillaume de Dole ou le roman de la rose.  This was a roman written around the year 1200 in France, and which I have rewritten under the title of The Sign of the Rose.  It is in part a love story, but the Guillaume of the French title is not one of the lovers.  He gets to have adventures and go to tournaments, while his sister has to overcome slander to win the heart of the king.

The actual people in both versions of the story (the medieval original and mine) are imaginary, but I've tried to set it in something close to the real society of the thirteenth century.  I did have to make some changes for a modern audience, primarily having the lovers meet and fall in love, rather than fall in love just by hearing about each other from afar.

I characterize it as a "historical romance," and it does obey the Happily Ever After law, even though there's a lot more about the heroine's brother than a die-hard romance fan might prefer.  It's for sale on all major ebook platforms and in paperback; here's the Amazon link.

Here's the opening to whet your appetite.

Chapter 1 - Sir Kunz

“Remember how important you are to the realm, sire,” the seneschal said sternly.  “Stay with the party so that the knights can protect you.  Do not ride off by yourself like you did last time.”
Konrad did not answer, other than by giving a huff that could have been either agreement or denial.  What good was it being a king if he was still treated like a child?
It was cold for April, low clouds threatening rain or sleet.  He could feel the stallion under him wanting to run off across the fields, not to continue plodding along with the whole court.  There was a thin layer of mud on the old Roman road, its stones uneven enough to make speed impossible, even if speed had been an option when they had to hold their pace to that of the wagons.
Behind them the ladies had been singing, some songs of fighting and glory but mostly songs of love.  Konrad dropped back in the line, as if intending to converse with one of the ladies, ignoring the seneschal’s dark frown.
But the frown did it.  As soon as he was well back from the vanguard, he dug his spurs into his horse’s sides and was off, almost flying across the fields.  “No one follow!” he bellowed over his shoulder.  The cold wind streamed his hair out behind him, and he laughed as the seneschal’s faint shouts were lost in the distance.
He looked back just before he reached a line of trees.  The court, knights and ladies, servants and squires, horses and wagons, was spread out along a quarter mile of road.  At least no knights were racing after him.  There were advantages after all in being king—the court had to obey him even if they did not want to.
Besides, none of the knights could keep up with his Spanish stallion.
“Old men,” Konrad told his stallion when he finally pulled the horse to a trot, “might as well be old women.”
The seneschal was not really old in truth, he conceded to himself.  But the seneschal and the other barons who had served on the regency council had always been strict and proper.  “They would have been happy to be regents until I was thirty, had I let them,” Konrad added to the stallion.  The stallion was uninterested.
The horse pricked his ears instead at a rustling in the underbrush, and Konrad loosed the reins and let him run again.  Over a hedgerow, over two hedgerows, past a huddle of houses and they were back in the open fields again.  The soil was freshly turned—the peasants must have been plowing, thinking, as had he, that it was really spring.
Mud splashed halfway up Konrad’s legs, but he didn’t care.  A wide loop, he told himself cheerfully, and he would join the Roman road again.  He would trot back to meet his court, let the seneschal say whatever he liked because he would not be listening, and then he would ride sedately the rest of the day, chatting with the ladies.

Except that he did not find the Roman road again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

Ethnic Identity

 Because the US is a melting pot, an awful lot of us have a distinct ethnic identity related to our ancestry.  African-Americans of course refer back to their ancestors who were captured in Africa and brought to the Americas as slaves (though there are certainly some, like President Obama, who have very recent African heritage, but no ancestors who were slaves in the Americas).  Irish-Americans celebrate Saint Patrick's day, Mexican Americans (and those who like tequila) celebrate Cinco de Maio, and so on.

You can now get your DNA analyzed for further details on your ancestry.  I, not to my surprise, tested out at close to 3/4 English, with the rest a mix of German, French, Dutch, Irish, and Scandinavian.  Interestingly, I am not considered "English-American."  Although those who might be called English-Americans are not the majority in this country, they were the majority among our founders, and are still considered the default. ("We're real Americans, and everybody else is a modified-American!" Yeah. Right. Not in my view.)

But ethnic identity is more than one's DNA.  A big part of it is language and religion and food and customs.  People in the Middle Ages also had ethnic identity, though because they were exposed to other sorts of folks less than we are the topic came up less often.

The French in the Middle Ages liked to say that the French were best (big surprise) and mocked the Germans for not being as good knights or fighters as they considered themselves to be.  England after the Norman Conquest had clear demarcations between the French and the English (some of these "French" were genetically half Scandinavian, but that didn't count).  Italians always knew they were not German, and asserted Germans were bad.  Heretics, non-Christians (especially Muslims), and Greek Orthodox Christians were considered the Other by the Latin Christian majority.  Jewish communities focused on their religion and their family customs to maintain themselves among a sea of non-Jews, as they indeed have for three thousand years.

Language was one of the big markers of identity, as indeed it still is now.  The Norman French may have had a lot of Scandinavian DNA, but they were French because they spoke French.  Each region of medieval Europe had its own language.  Portuguese was like (but unlike) Spanish, which had similarities to Catalan, which was related to the Occitan of southwest France, which had similarities both to the French around Paris and to Provençal, spoken in southeastern France, which was similar to northern Italian.

Italian itself had (and has) many variants.  Sicilian is still almost its own language.  Latin, the language of the area around Rome (Latium), was the language spread by the Roman legions, but other parts of the long Italian peninsula had been speaking their own version of proto-Italian for centuries.  Hence Portuguese, Provençal, and the rest grew out of Latin in different ways, but the various regions of Italy had a long head start in diversification.

Then there's German.  The Rhine was and is the theoretic dividing line between Romance languages and Germanic languages, as it was the theoretic boundary of the Roman Empire of antiquity, but in practice the line was anything but sharp.  Alsace, now part of France and on the French side of the Rhine, went back and forth between school children being taught in French or in German in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as control of the region shifted back and forth.  Now Alsatian kids go to school in French but usually hang out with their friends in Alsatian, a German dialect.

Although the French of France today is derived ultimately from Latin, those who live in the modern French republic (and have ancestors going way, way back there) have Celtic ancestors from pre-Roman and Gallo-Roman times, and Germanic ancestors in the Franks who became the rulers of the region in  late antiquity.  The Franks gave their name to the country but dropped their German language like a hot potato once they settled in the Roman Empire.

Medieval Germany, like modern Germany, had dialects of its own.  Dutch (and Letzburg, still spoken on the streets of Luxembourg) and Anglo-Saxon are Germanic languages, as are all the Scandinavian languages except for Finnish.  Friend or foe could be determined in part by whether one was fluent in the right language.

Regional dialects are strongest if people don't move around much.  The "My Fair Lady" story is predicated on even different regions of London having distinctive accents.  Even now in Britain some regional dialects are considered low-class. In the US regional dialects are rapidly disappearing, due both to population movement and to people all watching the same movies, TV shows, and Tik-Tok videos in different parts of the country.

If the regional dialects are fading, there is still an assertion that one's heritage and food and way of life are the best.  One can get Maine lobster in Alabama and southern fried chicken in Maine, but everyone will tell you that those who "appropriated" their cuisine did a bad job with it.  This doesn't keep people from enjoying the ethnic dishes of other countries.  Pizza demonstrates that Anglo-Americans may have been instrumental in the US's founding, but Italian-Americans are keeping it going.

And I haven't even mentioned the indigenous Americans.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Food Waste

 In the modern US, more than a third of the food produced is never eaten.  Instead it goes to waste, some of it composted, but much ending up in landfills where as it decomposes it produces methane, a gas that helps lead to global warming.

How about medieval food?  Was it wasted in the same way?

Well, food waste is always an issue, but it's different in different societies.  In the US, more than half of the food wasted is wasted before it even gets on somebody's plate.  A farmer who produces far more potatoes (for example) than he knows he can sell will just leave them to rot in the field.  A wholesaler won't even bother trying to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables to a grocery store.  A restaurant will cook up a lot of a dish it hopes will sell well, and often there is some left over, ready to be tossed.  A grocery store will fill the dumpster with overripe bananas, apples that have developed a  bad spot, or meat that didn't sell by its Sell By date.  A bakery may put "day old" bread on sale, but two-day-old bread is thrown away.

Most of this would not have been at issue in the Middle Ages.  A farmer would try to harvest and store everything grown, whether or not there was an immediate market for it—and in fact there usually was.  Misshapen fruits and vegetables bothered no one.  Who cared if the apple wasn't perfectly round and red?

There were far fewer of what we'd consider restaurants, and an inn would just reheat the next day anything that didn't move today.  Bread had to be baked frequently, since it didn't have the preservatives found in most modern bread, but dried out bread would still find a place on the menu, probably cooked into something else.

The food wasted before it got to the consumer was wasted for other reasons.  Grain was a favorite meal for mice and rats, and storage facilities were not nearly as effective in the Middle Ages as they are now at keeping out the vermin.  Cats were valued not as pets but as pest control.

All food will eventually rot, becoming unfit (or even dangerous) to eat, and it was much harder to keep without modern refrigeration.  Hence drying, salting, smoking, or sticking full of peppercorns or cloves were widely practiced, as was making milk into cheese, a more durable form.  But an onion will eventually rot even if properly dried, even heavily salted and smoked meat isn't going to last over a year without refrigeration, and spices were expensive.  And there nothing like canning to preserve "shelf life."  Fresh fruits and vegetables had to be eaten when fresh.

Even so, some part of the food was never going to be eaten.  A lot of cheese has an inedible rind.  No one was going to eat onion skins or egg shells or bones.  Technically these are also food waste, destined for the landfill today, tossed in a midden heap or buried in the Middle Ages.

How about food that now either gets taken into the house (and left to slowly go off in the refrigerator) or gets onto the plate but not into the mouth?  Such waste constitutes 40% of the food waste in the modern US.  In medieval times, there was doubtless some of that, but very little.  By our standards, most people were always on the edge of being "food insecure."  If food was there, you ate it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Church and State

 In the US we believe in the separation of church and state.  It's written both into the Constitution and into law.  There is no state religion, and people are not told that they can or cannot follow a particular religion.  Employers (other than churches) cannot refuse to hire someone based solely on their religious beliefs.  And yet many people feel that their own beliefs ought to be enshrined in law.  How did we get here?  And hey! isn't this supposed to be a blog about the Middle Ages?

 

Of course it is.  To understand why our founders wanted to separate church and state, one has to look at history going back to the eighteenth century and, before then, back to the Middle Ages.  The American War of Independence was fought against England, where the king (or queen) was (and is) the official head of the English (Anglican) church.  The seventeenth-century pilgrims came to North America because they could not worship as they wanted back in England.  No wonder our founders wanted to ensure separation of church and state.  (Modern Britain has freedom of religion now, even though it still has a state church.)

England and the rest of Europe had had extensive religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as first Catholics and Protestants went to war with each other, then different Protestants with each other.  A semi pause in all the fighting was the idea that each ruler got to declare the religion for his territory, "Cuius regio, eius religio" (His region means his religion).  If you didn't like the local state religion, tough, move somewhere else.

(Some of my Protestant ancestors left the little German state where they lived because the ruler was Catholic. They settled in France, because at the time Protestants, called Huguenots, were tolerated.  When the French crown decided everyone had to be Catholic, their descendants moved to Ireland, where at the time the English crown encouraged Protestantism.  You can see where this is going.)

But how about the Middle Ages?  There the separation of church and state would have made no sense.  Part of the responsibility of a ruler was supposed to be to bring his people to God, and that was understood to be by making sure they followed the True Religion, whatever that was.

Now in the Middle Ages there was not the wide mix of different versions of Christianity we have now, with all the Protestant denominations and variations of Catholicism and orthodoxy.  Everyone in the medieval West was supposedly following the same version of Christianity.  Of course in practice there was lots of variation, as different areas might well be different without even realizing they were, and there were reasonably sized communities of Muslims and Jews in Europe, who alternated between being persecuted and being tolerated.  Western Catholicism supposedly was open to Greek Orthodoxy (and its variants, like Russian Orthodoxy), but Eastern and Western Christianity declared the other heretics in the eleventh century and never made up.

The apparent unity of western Europe's religion was indeed often broken by certain groups being declared heretical, that is (as it was understood then) following deviant Christianity even though they ought to have known better.  Heretics of course always believed they were the true Christians, and the other guys were the heretics.  The wars of northern France against southern France in the thirteenth century with the support of the crown, the Albigensian Crusade, were efforts to overcome heresy.  With examples like this from history, it's not surprising that America was founded on the idea of not imposing a religion on anyone.

In recent years this has become complicated by some people arguing that their religious freedom is violated by other people doing things that their own version of religion considers Wrong, and that laws allowing them to do so are oppressive on their own religious freedom.  Examples of countries like Iran, where there really is a state religion enforced on everybody, ought to give such folks pause.  Suppose they discovered they were the ones the state declared heretics?  The overall level of religious tolerance in the modern US (and modern Europe for that matter) has made it too easy to forget what can happen when church and state really are united.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Medieval orphans

 Medieval parents, like modern parents, loved their children (one sometimes hears that they didn't, but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of medieval society, as I have discussed previously).  But who is going to raise the children?

Even today an awful lot of children are not brought up in the stereotypical way, by Mom and Dad (married to each other of course).  Single parents and divorced parents are raising a lot of children.  But these days there aren't many widowed parents raising children.  With the much lower life expectancy of the Middle Ages,  on top of single parents and divorced parents, the chances were much lower of a child being raised by her two biological parents.

In the Italian Renaissance, for which we have at least some good glimpses into demography, children might lose a parent to the Black Death (a feature of the Renaissance) or another disease, have the surviving parent remarry, then lose the second biological parent, and end up being raised by a married couple, to neither of whom the child was related.

Because few medieval adults made it very far out of their 50s, there were an awful lot of orphans among adults, but it was the orphan children who were worried about.  One hears the phrase now, "It takes a village to raise a child," and medieval people certainly would have agreed with that.  Relatives would routinely take in a child who had lost his parents.  If there were no nearby relatives, neighbors would take in the child.

For the powerful, it was considered an appropriate act of charity to take in an orphan.  The child might end up doing menial chores, but that was true of all children unless they were the pampered heirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, Europe was underpopulated, and children were thus valuable.

Medieval Europe did not have orphanages or formal systems of fostering or adopting.  If one took in a child to raise, he was part of the family (though often on a lower rung than the biological children).  Romans had had formal adoption systems among the elite, intended to clarify inheritance, but medieval people did not bother with that.

For that matter, formal adoption processes are quite recent.  Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had "Homes" for orphans and abandoned children, including one large one in Nova Scotia.  If someone in the eastern part of the country wanted a boy or girl to help on the farm or around the house, they would send off to the Home and be sent one, pretty much no questions asked, no wait time or home inspections or anything.  In the Anne of Green Gables stories, Anne is a "home-girl," and she lucked out in ending up with the Cuthberts.  A lot of home-boys and home-girls essentially became servants, fed and clothed and given a place to sleep but certainly not paid.  Medieval orphans might well end up in a similar situation, but they would not first have to take a long train ride to somewhere they'd never been.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Failure of prophecy

 The other day the national emergency system was tested, with sirens and alerts sent to people's phones.  The announcement that it was coming was greeted with a whole panoply of wild conspiracy theories, primarily that the sound would trigger the microchip (or perhaps the evil virus) that the Covid-19 vaccine had supposedly planted in our bodies, thus either giving us all some dread disease or even (best yet!) turning us all into zombies.

Now of course hardly anyone was turned into a zombie, or not that you'd notice.  But the incident does raise an interesting issue:  What are the prophets supposed to do when prophecy fails?  This was a problem in the Middle Ages too, although then it was more likely based on some prophecy out of the Bible than on vaccines and zombies.

The failure of the zombie apocalypse the other day was met with extended discussions of why this wasn't actually a failure of prophecy.  The social media gurus who started the idea began by denying they had actually said it would happen right away (even though that was of course what they'd suggested, even if the words "right away" had not passed their lips -- or the keyboard on their phones). This was met with appropriate derision.

 Struggling to find respect, today's conspiracy prophets insisted that things really had turned out just as they said, except that the dread disease (or microchip) was going to take a few days, even a few weeks, for its effects to be felt.  Or perhaps the sirens had been set to a different frequency than that required to activate the microchip.  Maybe Homeland Security had been warned of the dangers of a zombie apocalypse and changed the sirens at the last moment!  yes, that's the answer!  We're heroes!  (More derision.)

Those predicting the end of the world in the Middle Ages (an issue that came up frequently, though curiously enough not in the year 1000, the year modern textbooks like to talk about) had to deal with similar concerns.  If you predict the world is about to end, and yet sure enough there it is the next day, hanging in there, you have to come up with some rational explanation.

One of the best responses was that God had seen all the faithful people who believed in the end of the world praying away, been touched by their faith, and changed His mind, figuring to give us another chance.  This meant the prophets could call themselves heroes, even if it did make God seem rather unsure of Himself, and it always failed to persuade those who hadn't believed in the end of the world originally.

Alternately prophets could claim the end really was coming, but their calculations had been a tiny bit off, they'd forgotten to carry the 2, next summer for sure!  This only works once.  The next time the prophecy fails people start getting suspicious of the prophets.

The strongest response was to say that the apocalypse really had happened, but only the select few were capable of noticing.  This actually works well for a small, core group of believers, who essentially have given up on recruiting anyone else to their cause.  (Though even they may become suspicious after a while.)

In the Middle Ages failed prophecies quickly became heresies.  Groups like the Cathars of twelfth-thirteenth-century southern France, heretics already, had numerous prophecies, often based around ideas of three ages of the world, with things changing mightily in the third.  (It could become complicated, some Cathar theologians had each age have three divisions of its own, so the beginning of the Third Age was also the beginning of the seventh smaller age, allowing more room for different signs and events.)  Being the only ones who believed the prophecies could draw a group labeled as heretical closer together.

But for most of the medieval population, including those who at least temporarily believed in the coming end of the world, the most common response was to go home and pretend they'd never believed in anything so silly.  One assumes that those who were preparing for the zombie apocalypse this week took a similar approach.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Estate Sales

 In the US it is common to see ads for estate sales, where the older generation has died (or gone into a Home) and the younger generation is selling everything off: the recliner chair, the china, some old jewelry, miscellaneous vinyl records from the '40s or '50s, the canning jars, a lawn tractor, a collection of miniature toy cars.

They didn't have estate sales in the Middle Ages.  So, you ask, is this going to be a very short blog post?  No, actually, because the topic opens up a discussion of medieval material culture and inheritance.

One of the sharpest differences between a modern middle-class household and a medieval household, even a wealthy household, is how much Stuff we all have compared to medieval people.  Industrialization (made possible initially by an abundance of mined coal) means that material objects are far, far cheaper and more abundant now than when everything had to be made by hand, without power tools (and of course a lot of goods for sale in the US are made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper).

Medieval people had far less furniture, far less clothing, far fewer kitchen utensils, and far, far fewer books (plus of course fewer miniature toy cars or lawn tractors....).  This meant that when the older generation died (or perhaps went off to a monastery for their final time on earth) there was very little Stuff left behind.  And rather than saying, "What are we going to do with all this old Stuff?" the younger generation wanted it.

In fact a lot of people wanted it.  In a castle or manor house, the heir just took over, treating everything in the place as theirs now, furniture, tapestries, cooking and eating utensils, weapons, linens, and so on.  Old-fashioned or broken jewelry would not be sold for a few bucks just to get rid of it, but either treasured as it was or reset to look more modern.

Peasant households also had goods that everyone wanted.  If the heir was living with the parents, she or he would just take over everything (recalling that "everything" was a pretty skimpy selection once one got past the ox and the plow).  Landlords wanted those goods too, and although they would rarely just seize them from the heir, they would if there were no heir in sight.  After all, everyone could use another table or storage chest or cook pot, to say nothing of the ox and plow.  Some peasants negotiated deals with their landlords, that an heir would have a year to make an appearance before the landlord just appropriated the goods.

Who were these heirs?  Generally the child or children of the deceased (oldest sons had a certain priority, or at least they thought so, but like most legal requirements in the Middle Ages, any dispute started with a big discussion and usually ended in compromise).  Otherwise uncles and cousins  were usually next in line.  If a peasant had no obvious heirs, a landlord would just take over.  If a great noble had no heirs (or if the heir was a young girl) the crown would step in to take charge of the Stuff.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Homesteading

 Ever since the Industrial Revolution, when millions of people left farming for work in the factories, there has been some sort of "back to the farm" movement.  People lose track of why they left the farm in the first place, and people who have never farmed, but want to break away from factories and urban life, think of farming with a sort of golden glow.

In recent years this "back to the farm" concept has been branded as "homesteading."  Originally American homesteading meant people getting a certain number of acres of unoccupied frontier land (at least land that was unoccupied once the indigenous people had been driven off), and they could keep it if they farmed it successfully for a certain number of years.  But more recently the term has come to mean making one's living on a farm, after having had a quite different sort of career.

It's easy to be nostalgic for a rural past, without the hurly-burly of modern life, without the noise and industrial pollution, living as self-reliant, close to home, interacting with one's family most of the day rather than just after work, eating wholesome home-grown food.  The rural population is often described as being the "real Americans."  Popular "country music" evokes the rural (or at least small-town) life.  The Middle Ages, when almost everyone was involved in farming, is often seen as epitomizing this rural past.  On this blog, the entry about medieval farm animals has been the most popular for nine years, ever since I first posted it.

 

 But farming is very hard work, and if you're imagining the fresh scent of clover as greeting you in the morning, add to that the fresh scent of the manure pile.  Modern homesteaders have advantages medieval peasants never dreamed of.  Starting with the fact that they live in the twenty-first century, even if they're engaging in activities that have roots going back ten or twelve thousand years.

Their farms have electricity, TVs, internet connections, and modern plumbing.  Their kids ride the school bus to get educated.  They have cars and/or trucks to get to town, for shopping, for entertainment, to settle legal issues, and to get medical assistance if needed.  Driving a tractor is a lot easier than walking back and forth across the field behind a plow.  They can sell their hand-crafted honey (or whatever) on their website for extra money.  If they haven't canned enough vegetables to last through the winter (recalling that modern canning was invented in the nineteenth century) they can buy fresh produce at the grocery store, imported from California or South America.

You've got to admire our ancestors.  They were tough and resourceful, and it's a wonder enough of them survived to produce the generations that led to us.  Few of us would survive a year as a medieval peasant.

Fortunately we don't have to!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Roy Fox and the Palmatian

 I've got a new book!  It's called "Roy Fox and the Palmatian" (as you probably already guessed from this post's header), and it's what's called a "first chapter book," a book for kids who have advanced beyond picture books but who aren't ready for YA (Young Adult), kids roughly 7-10 years old.

It can also be enjoyed as a read-aloud, and I hope that adults will get a chuckle from it too.

As you have also doubtless figured out, it's about a fox, and in fact it opened on Amazon as #1 in New Release Fox Stories (who knew there was such a category?)  Roy is a trickster fox, so the story doesn't exactly have a Strong Moral Message, and if you want your kids to have stories in which they are taught to Always be Honest and Keep your Things Tidy it's probably not for you.  But it is very funny!

 

What's a Palmatian? you are doubtless wondering.  Well, it might be something like a Dalmatian, or it might be something like a spotty fox, or it might even be an old mongrel dog.  Whatever it is, it's part of Roy Fox's cunning plan.

It's available on Amazon both as an ebook and a paperback.  It can be ordered as a paperback from any bookstore, and the ebook version is coming soon to other platforms.  Here's the US Amazon link:

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGJMLCG7

And here's the opening to whet your appetite.

****

Daisy Fox was arrested as a chicken thief and thrown in the King’s dungeon. And I, Roy Fox, had to save her.

Now of course any fox will tell you that foxes are not really chicken thieves. We may take a chicken out of the hen house to protect them, in case there’s a bear or a weasel nearby. And if the chicken happens to die, because of old age or something, it would be a shame not to eat it.

But Daisy was locked up as a chicken thief, and it was up to me to set her free.

Fortunately I had a cunning plan. 

 © C. Dale Brittain 2023

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.

Medieval prisons

 We think of jails and prisons both as somewhere to lock up bad people so they won't do further harm and also as places of punishment, where someone who has committed something less than a totally heinous crime may "serve their time" and then emerge, considered properly punished.  Medieval prisons were somewhat different.

(In the US we draw a distinction between local "jails" and state or federal "prisons," which I'm not going to worry about here.  We don't really have "dungeons" anymore, a dark nasty place under a castle.)

A medieval person convicted of a crime would not be punished with "prison time."  Usually the punishment was a fine or, for serious crimes, hanging, though capital crimes (leading to the death penalty) were usually only tried by high courts, not by a local mayor's or manorial court.

Prisons were intended to hold people until whatever "happened next" might happen.  Someone awaiting a trial might be held in prison (as people still are if they can't make bail).  Since trials were extremely speedy by modern standards, this might just be a day or two.  Someone captured in battle might be imprisoned until his friends and family could pay a ransom.

Cruel castellan lords were routinely accused of capturing people and putting them in prison just because they felt like it.  Saints like Saint Foy of Conques was praised for freeing prisoners.  She would appear in a vision to someone unjustly held, telling them how to escape, or unlocking the door for them.  They were, unsurprisingly, highly grateful and would come to Conques, still wearing a chain or two, to thank the saint and get the chains cut off.  Her altar was surrounded with discarded chains.

Political prisoners were also imprisoned.  For example, King Henry I of England imprisoned his older brother, Robert Curthose, for the rest of his life, after defeating him in battle, for daring to think that he, rather than Henry, should be king of England.  King Henry II imprisoned his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for a period for fomenting rebellion against him.

What were these prisons like?  Sometimes being in prison was more like house arrest.  Robert Curthose was not down with the ooze and the rats and could lead a comfortable life, as long as he got no ideas about leaving.  Political prisoners in the Tower of London had perfectly nice quarters.

But dungeons could be appalling, down under a castle.  Being underground, dungeons were wet and dark.  There were of course no sanitary facilities.  As well as being locked in, prisoners might be chained to the wall.  Food would be provided at times, but of course not fine dining (Robert Curthose did all right, but he wasn't down in a dungeon).

Sometimes prison cells had more light and air but came with their own problems. At Château Gaillard in Normandy, some French princesses were imprisoned at the end of the Middle Ages, accused of adultery.  As princesses they were not down in the dungeon. They had a cell high above the river, carved out of the cliff, with no furniture, and one side wide open, as seen here (the grill is modern, to protect tourists.)

When cold or rainy, the weather came right in.  Even worse, the floor slants ever so slightly.  At night, one would not dare fall asleep too deeply, for fear of rolling over and dropping through the opening.  (George Martin borrowed this idea for one of his books.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Kindle Unlimited

 The rise of the independent author ("indie") has set up a curious dance between the indies, their readers, and Amazon, which leads the world in indie-published books.

It all goes back to a little over fifteen years ago, when Amazon introduced the Kindle.  The idea of an ebook had been around for a while, and business people had long been reading documents on the screen (and often then printing them out), but the Kindle was different.  About the dimensions (width & height) of a small paperback but much thinner, its screen showed what looked like a page in a real book, not like text on a web page.  And the person reading could choose their favorite font to read it, Times or Helvetica or whatever, and make it bigger or smaller for reading ease.

Great!  People loved it!  But wait!  There were hardly any ebooks to read on the Kindle ereader.  Amazon begged traditional publishers to digitize some of their list, quickly digitized a whole lot of out-of-copyright classics (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, here we come), and launched.

Immediately people bought up Kindles and loved them.  One could have dozens of ebooks ready to read on a device lighter than one paperback.  Half a million were quickly sold.  But there were fewer than 100,000 titles for those half million readers to read.

Enter the indies.  Everyone knew that there were thousands of people out there who imagined they could be great writers if they ever had a chance, or who had been trying to interest traditional publishers for years without success.  Come right on in! cried Amazon.  Give us your Word document, and we'll do the rest!  No more gate-keepers1  Anyone can publish a book!  And so KDP was born (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was very exciting for the indie authors who got in early.  Pretty much anything would sell, and because the indie books were new, readers snatched them up in preference to the out-of-copyright classics they'd had to read in high school or college.  It quickly became obvious also that there was a great reader hunger for books "just like" popular books, and the indies could provide that.

For example, traditional publishers wouldn't publish a book too similar to one already out there, not even because of plagiarism issues, but just because they thought the market was saturated. But it wasn't. These were the days when the "Twilight" series, teenage romance with vampires and werewolves, was very popular.  Amanda Hocking sold hundreds of thousands of copies of KDP ebooks about teenage romance with vampires and werewolves (different setting, different names, different plot of course).

And traditional publishers rarely let their authors publish more than one or maybe two books a year.  KDP didn't care.  Anyone could crank out a book every couple of months, or put up a whole lot of books that had been written over many years, and KDP was fine with that.  So if someone found a new favorite author, they could count on lots of ebooks by that author on Amazon.

Other companies noticed what Amazon was doing.  Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Borders (with their Kobo branch) all jumped into ebook publishing.  And they started offering 70% royalties, rather than Amazon's 35%.  At the same time, traditional publishers all raced to digitize anything to which they had the publishing rights, and they put their own ebooks up on all platforms.

So Amazon had been first, but others were coming up fast.  KDP quickly raised its ebook royalty rate to 70% (at least for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99) and tried to figure out how to hang onto its indies, who were starting to "go wide," that is publishing on all ebook platforms, not only Amazon (including me by this point).

Once traditional publishers had all their books as ebooks for sale on Amazon, B&N, etc., of course, that spelled the end of the brief golden indie age.  Now readers could choose from a great many ebooks, including new releases from the traditional publishers, often better than the average indie book (once a lot of people who should never have imagined themselves authors saw what Amanda Hocking was doing and thought they too could make big bucks).  Maybe gate-keepers weren't as bad as we thought?

But Amazon's big advantage was its indies, even if the indies quickly found out they weren't going to come anywhere near Amanda Hocking's numbers.  Amazon still had more indies than anyone else.  Even if a lot of bad indie books were flooding the market (by this time most lucky to sell 3 or 4 copies, ever), there were also a lot of good indie books, promising readers lots and lots of titles by their favorite author, not only one a year, and books "just like" some book everyone loved.  So Amazon had to make sure its indies didn't wander off ("go wide").

It did so by promising benefits to indie authors who stayed exclusive to Amazon.  It tried offering various marketing tools to its exclusive indies, but soon it settled on "Kindle Unlimited."  Avid ebook readers could pay $10 a month (it's recently gone up to $12) to "borrow" and read as many exclusive indie ebooks as they wanted.  Given that most indie ebooks are priced around $4 or $5, this was a bargain even if one just read three books a month.  But avid ebook readers, especially in genres like contemporary romance, might read three or more books a week.  They loved it.

Indie authors are paid on the basis of how many pages a KU member has read.  (Your Kindle knows what you're reading, how fast, how far you've gotten...  Does it know what you had for breakfast?)  It's helped a lot of indie authors find readers in today's saturated market, because someone would "borrow" and read an indie book through KU, knowing it cost them nothing extra, even if they might not lay out $5 for an ebook by an unknown.

(Incidentally, KDP has also started publishing paperbacks, and a lot of indie authors like having a physical book, but for almost all KDP authors ebooks far, far outsell paperbacks.)

That brings us to my own current experimentation with KU.  My ebooks are mostly "wide," available on all major ebook platforms.  But fantasy is a genre that can do well with KU members.  So I've made my "Shadow of the Wanderers" exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (one promises exclusivity for 90 days, then can renew if desired).  It's never sold very well, either as an ebook or under its original title of "Voima," when traditionally published.  Yurt fans don't like that it's not Yurt, but it's one of my favorites.

 

So if you are a KU member, you can read it all summer for free, or anyone can buy it.  Here's the link.  It's epic fantasy, in the spirit of Norse legend (though without Thor and Loki).  I've given the opening below to whet your appetite.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

______________________________________________

Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

 

Medieval monasteries post-medieval

 The twelfth century was a high point for monasteries.  With very few exceptions (primarily the cathedrals), all urban churches then either were monasteries or houses of canons regular, where priests shared their property in common like monks, though they devoted their days to ministering to the community rather than the reading, writing, and prayer of the monastery.  A great many new monasteries had been established in the countryside.

But what happened to these monasteries?  Although many of the churches are still there, many have been repurposed, as parish churches, as museums, as Protestant churches, as private houses, even as theatres.

 How did this happen?  Well, monasteries began going downhill (by twelfth-century standards) in the late Middle Ages.  Abbots of important monasteries were appointed by the pope, and he tended to appoint his friends (or those who came up with a suitable "donation").  Many of these abbots were the titular heads of multiple monasteries.  They lived more like lords than monks, often having a town house where they spent most of their time, rather than at the monastery.  For example, the Cluny museum in Paris is called that because the building was a town house of the abbot of the Burgundian monastery of Cluny (the museum now houses many medieval artifacts, such as the head of an Old Testament king originally on the facade of Notre Dame).

During the early modern period (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries), a lot of old monasteries stopped having a regular life, or monks at all.  Some continued, but with a much more comfortable life than the twelfth century would have considered appropriate.  The houses that continued assumed they would always continue.  The monks rebuilt, made inventories of their property, and expected their life to continue indefinitely as it was.

Thus in France the French Revolution (starting 1789) was a great shock.  The country went officially atheistic, and monks were ejected from their monasteries, many of which passed into the hands of private individuals.  The carvings on many churches were defaced, which is how the royal head seen above was knocked off.  Some monasteries were repurposed as prisons.  Although France returned to Catholicism under Napoleon, most monasteries never regained their monks.  Something similar had happened in Great Britain two centuries earlier, when Henry VIII turned Protestant, and in those parts of Germany where the local ruler adopted Lutheranism.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some monasteries were reestablished, though far fewer than earlier.  Most are a little more relaxed than the twelfth century would have tolerated; for example, modern monks may watch TV.  A few are very strict, however, most notably the Trappists, a group formed by reforming a branch of the Cistercians, back in the seventeenth century.  But the indefinite future for which early modern monks planned clearly no longer exists.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on monasticism and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other online bookstores.  Ebook or paperback.

The Physicality of Miracles

 As I've discussed before, miracle stories were very much part of the elite culture of the Middle Ages.  The stories were written by highly educated churchmen, and the doubters in the stories were the uneducated.  These were not superstitious imaginings by the ignorant.

Yet they seem weird to the educated today.  One of the weirdest things is often the physicality.  People are not just healed of afflictions, they are healed dramatically, abruptly, often painfully.  For example, when someone who had been deaf was healed and given hearing, blood routinely poured from their ears.  Someone whose body had been contorted, so for example their legs were bent permanently so that their feet touched their buttocks (a common element in accounts of miracles worked by the Virgin), their legs wouldn't just be straightened but yanked into position so forcefully that the person being healed would scream in pain, and blood would pour from their buttocks as the feet ripped away.

The real miracle, those writing the stories all agreed, was the moral and spiritual regeneration, but physicality got everyone's attention.  Someone quietly mending their evil ways would not inspire others to do the same, but going from so deformed that they had to be carried everywhere to leaping and bounding in delight at their healing certainly got everyone's attention.

 

The Virgin (seen above being crowned Queen of Heaven in a twelfth-century carving) could be counted on to help even the worst sinners, as long as they prayed to her and mended their ways after healing.  In one story, a monk who was supposed to keep track of the hours at night (so that the other monks could be called for the night liturgy) took advantage of being unsupervised all night to row across a little lake to his mistress's house for a quicky.

But one night (you can see where this is going) his boat sank and him with it.  But wait!  Every night before heading out on the lake he'd pray to the Virgin, and again when he got back.  So as the demons arrived to take the drowning man's soul, she fought them off, giving him one last chance.  Meanwhile, back at the monastery, the other monks realized they'd never been called for the night offices, looked for the man who'd been supposed to ring the bell, and realized both he and the boat were missing.  When his body washed up, they were sure he was dead, but surprise! he sat up and related his vision of being saved by the Virgin from the demons.  No more midnight quickies for him! you can be sure.

But suppose the Virgin didn't come through?  Of course one prayed harder, but again physicality played a role.  At one shrine noted for healings by the Virgin, pilgrims who had come to seek her aid would become irritated after a week or two if she didn't respond.  They would strip off every stitch of clothing and crawl on their bellies to her altar, asking people to whip them as they went, to show how penitent they were.  According to the stories, the Virgin always came through after such a clear demonstration.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.