Medieval Monsters

 Medieval people talked a lot about monsters. Their "bestiaries," books that discussed the supposed nature of different animals (such as that dogs were very faithful, or that lions feared white roosters), also included such monsters as the manticore, a creature with a human face, the body of a lion (usually red), and the tail and stinger of a scorpion. It ate human flesh (note the leg in the monster's mouth).

 

Depictions of manticores in the 13th century often gave them features similar to the features found in images depicting Jews. Faces would have a big hooked nose and a scruffy beard, and the manticore might wear a so-called Phrygian cap, a conical cap with a peak that tipped forward. Thus the artist could make a cruel antisemitic statement while also drawing a monstrous beast. (Julia DeBardeleben has been studying such "Jewish" manticore images.)

(Interestingly, the Phrygian cap was used in ancient Rome to identify freed slaves and during the French Revolution to designate citizens revolting against tyranny. But in the Middle Ages it meant Jews. It had many uses.)

As this example illustrates, medieval monsters were often hybrids. They had body parts of several different kinds of creatures. Deformed features could also count as monstrous, which was rather hard on disabled people.

There were plenty of stories about Wild Men, monsters who were humanoid but large and hairy, one might even say like today's Bigfoot.   These monsters could be rumored to live in some distant, wild place, or be metaphors for what people are not supposed to be like.

Lacking rationality made you into a Wild Man. Jews (again) could be characterized as monstrous because they apparently couldn't grasp the perfectly logical (or at least logical to medieval theologians) arguments why Christianity was right and Judaism wrong.  (It is of course striking that medieval people assumed that your reasoning ability would lead you to the Correct view of religion, unless your brain was deformed.)

Monsters were not always scary. Sometimes they were just the strange creatures supposedly found in distant lands, like the upside-down people on the underside of the planet, with huge toes to cling to the earth so they wouldn't fall off, or the men with heads like dogs believed to live in India (Columbus looked unsuccessfully for them when he reached the Americas).

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval ideas about animals and religion as well as other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback. 

Thirteenth-Century Churches and Documents

 The thirteenth century is strangely neglected by modern scholars.

How can you say that? cry medievalists. After all, Charles Homer Haskins, who really began medieval studies in the US, called the thirteenth the greatest century. In the church, it was the time when the popes came closest to exercising the absolute power they would have liked to have had at several other times, and the new Franciscan and Dominican orders rapidly spread, transforming ideas of the holy. Kings started keeping good records, and great counts and dukes drew up lists of who owed them homage, making political history much more straightforward. It was a time of the glories of Gothic architecture, as seen with the cathedral of Reims (below). It was when a number of great works of literature were composed (both epics and romances).

 But for monasteries, for cartularies, for the documents one finds in the archives, the period is relatively neglected.  This isn't a result of a shortage of records.  This is a matter of having too much.  The great nineteenth-century efforts to collect, analyze, and put into print the documents of a region, a monastery, a bishopric, all tended to start at the beginning, back probably in the Merovingian era.  They published everything they could find up through the tenth century. For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they tried to include everything they considered most significant.

Then they got to the thirteenth century.  Lots and lots of documents, a lot of them long and highly repetitive.   Someone at the time would make an agreement with a monastery, and several more documents would be drawn up by various people who agreed and confirmed.  The careful nineteenth-century editors looked at all those documents and shook their heads.

They weren't the first.  Those compiling cartularies in the thirteenth century (that is, books into which original documents were copied for ease of reference and safe-keeping), quickly lost steam.

The scribe who compiled the cartulary of the bishops of Auxerre in the late thirteenth century noted that the bishop's documents had been organized into boxes by topic, the boxes identified as A, B, and so on.  He started with A, carefully copying each document, though there were quite a few of them.  Then he got to box B, and his heart must have sunk.  He copied a few, then said, "And many more on similar topics."  On to box C, where he started abbreviating heavily.

At right about the same time, at the monastery of Montier-en-Der (in Champagne), a scribe chose a few major topics for his cartulary and carefully chose documents to copy for each topic.  He did not abbreviate, he did not start writing fast and sloppily, but he had selected only about 100 documents to incorporate.  He skipped over far more documents than he included.  We know this because those documents still exist, in the same bundles as the ones the scribe chose to include.  It wasn't as if he just skipped trivial documents. He even skipped many documents issued by popes, probably because these long, elaborate charters simply confirmed an agreement that had been reached locally.  Too many documents, the scribe seems to have thought, let's just hit the highlights.

Scholars today, understandably, find it easiest to start their research with printed documents.  All serious medievalists studying society and the church will spend some time in the archives, but again the temptation is strong to stick with the printed record,with just brief excursions into documents that exist only in manuscript.  Those who analyze documents from a wide range of sources, over an extended period of time, which is what one does when studying events in the twelfth century or earlier, find the thirteenth-century plethora of records overwhelming and thus not worth investigating.

 Things have changed by the time one gets to the fourteenth century. There are even more records, especially as the spread of paper, far cheaper than parchment, greatly expanded the number of things considered worth writing down.  But scholars have adapted, focusing on just one manor, for example, or the acts of just one bishop.  They could, if they wished, go back and do the same with the thirteenth century, but they find the fourteenth century too interesting (which it is), between pope-king wars, gunpowder, the spread of eyeglasses, the Black Death, and so much more.

So people doing the sixth-twelfth centuries stay away from the thirteenth century, and those doing fourteenth-fifteenth also stay away from the thirteenth century.  Opportunity for grad students looking for a project!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Pope Gelasius I

 As the discussion of the proper relationship of pope and king (or, more specifically, pope and president) continues to gain attention in the US, it seems appropriate to discuss Pope Gelasius I. After all, he is responsible for the Gelasian framing of the issue.  (Um, yeah, I hear you saying. Don't worry.  All is about to become clear.)

Gelasius I (pope 492-496) was only in office for four years, but he made them count. A native of North Africa while it was still firmly under the Roman emperors (though some scholars think his parents may have moved to the city of Rome before he was born), he is best known for his extensive pronouncements on church governance and on heresy vs. orthodoxy, many contained in letters that were copied and circulated.

Indeed, he was so well known for his writings that a number of works by other authors, written more or less around the time of his life, became attributed to him. Modern scholars have spent a good deal of energy trying to sort them out. He is indeed sometimes credited with determining which books actually belonged in the Christian Bible out of all the accounts written in the first centuries AD, because he composed a treatise defending the list, although it had in fact been determined a century earlier (at least for western Christendom) at the 397 Council of Carthage.

And now we come to the Gelasian framing of church and state, or more specifically church and empire. Let's have some background.  Gelasius argued that the emperor (now in Byzantium) and the patriarch of Constantinople were completely wrong on doctrine. Although the Nicene creed of a century and a half earlier had emphasized the dual nature of Christ, both fully human and fully divine, the emperor and patriarch insisted that Christ only had a single divine nature. Rank heresy! said the pope, who was also trying to assert that popes were over all Christians. The patriarch did not count as equal to the pope, because, as Gelasius pointed out, he himself was the heir to Peter, chief of the apostles, and who knows what the patriarch was heir to.

(Interestingly, Gelasius was able to carry on cordial relations with the Ostrogoths, a Germanic group who had taken over political rule in much of Italy, and who were Christian but followed the Arian version, which made Jesus essentially a totally-human-though-inspired prophet.  The Ostrogoths were after all right there, not like the emperor and patriarch off in Constantinople. You gotta pick your battles.)

When the emperor tried to reply to Gelasius that he, as emperor, was over everybody (including pesky popes), Gelasius came up with his famous formulation, "There are two."  Basically (paraphrasing here), he said that there were two that governed the world, the priests and bishops on the one hand (this included popes), and on the other hand princes and kings (which included emperors).

Interestingly, although he said there were "two," he did not specify if this meant two authorities, two powers, two principles, or what, but his meaning was clear. He went on to clarify that  the worldly power was inferior to the priestly power in matters of religion and the spirit (take that! mistaken idea of the nature of Christ), though the priestly power was inferior to the temporal (worldly) in temporal matters.

This idea of two powers/authorities was tremendously influential in the Middle Ages, with popes and emperors claiming every issue that came up was either (respectively) religious or worldly/political.  It was also connected to the passage in the Bible where the apostles are wondering if they might have to take up arms to protect Jesus from the Romans and say, "Lord, here are two swords," and Jesus replies, "It is enough." (In the event Jesus did not fight when the Romans came for him.). The "two swords" became attached to the "there are two" Gelasian framing.

(For those who've read my Yurt fantasy novels, you may recall that a common saying was "There are three who rule the world," where I've added the wizards to the priests and the kings.)

Although the "two" doctrine was Pope Gelasius's chief long-term contribution, he also is noted for having shut down the Lupercalia. This was a pagan Roman festival, held in February.  Indeed, the name for the month comes from the Latin februum, meaning a purification or cleansing.  Romans had long celebrated this festival, but Pope Gelasius did not feel it fit well with Christianity, being pagan and all.  Perhaps to lead people away from the Lupercalia, new emphasis was given to the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, established on February 2, commemorating Mary's official "purification" at the Temple in Jerusalem according to Jewish law, 40 days after giving birth.  (This is way, way pre-groundhog day.)

Fun fact: The Roman calendar originally had ten months, as their number system (like ours) was base-10.  Ever wonder why the months September through December have names that sound like Seventh through Tenth?  That's why. The year ended at the end of December, essentially at the winter solstice, then there was "winter," and months started up again with March (named for Mars), getting underway for the equinox.  At a certain point, well BC, the Romans decided that winter might as well have months as well, January named for Janus, the doorkeeper god who stands between last year and the new year, and February for Lupercalia-time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Sylvester I

 With the American president now feuding (verbally) with the pope, and people in his orbit even threatening to pull an "Avignon papacy" on Pope Leo, it seems appropriate to dip back into early Christian history for some context on church and state and a glimpse of the ways that secular and religious rulers interacted.

Popes are first and foremost bishops of Rome, the head Christian in their city. Bishops as rulers of their flock go back to the early days of Christianity.  Most Christian denominations have bishops, including the Amish.  In the first thousand years or so AD, bishops were locally elected (as they still are in Amish communities), and they ran the Church between them.  The sense gradually increased that the bishop of Rome should be over all other bishops, just as the Roman emperors were over all kings and governors.  It helped that the bishop of Rome was supposed to be heir of Saint Peter, who was the leader of the apostles.

(The Bible makes Peter the leader of the apostles, but it doesn't put him in Rome.  Rather, he preached in Antioch. Let's not worry about that now.  After all, the basilica of Saint Peter's has his bones.  Shouldn't that be good enough?)

 

This idea of the supremacy of the Roman pontiff really started with Sylvester I (pope 314-335 AD, pictured above in a later medieval image).  He was bishop of Rome at the time of Constantine, first Roman emperor to be baptized.  His feast day is December 31, so as you celebrate New Year's Eve, be sure to dedicate a glass of champagne to Saint Sylvester, as he is now known. (Germans sometimes refer to New Year's Eve as "Silvester" in his honor.)

Pope Sylvester presided over the Council of Nicaea, called in 325 to debate the true nature of the Trinity, resulting in the Nicene Creed, still the basis of Catholic teaching (and a lot of Protestant teaching as well).  Once Constantine made it acceptable to be Christian in the Roman Empire (formerly officially pagan, in spite of including a lot of Jews, Christians, and those with various other beliefs), Sylvester started the construction of the great church now known as Old Saint Peter's, which stood until the sixteenth century, when the current Saint Peter's basilica was built in its place.

Once Christianity was tolerated out in the open, and indeed soon became the official religion of the Empire, there began to be hints of a debate that was never fully resolved:  in a Christian empire, who is the ultimate authority? the primary Christian (the pope) or the emperor?  As I've discussed before, popes really only became the effective heads of organized Christendom in the eleventh century and promptly became involved in a knock-down drag-out battle with emperors and kings which lasted on and off for four centuries.  ("Oh yeah? I depose you!" "You can't! I excommunicate you!" "So what! You're a heretic!" "No, you're the heretic!" "Oh yeah?" etc.) The squabbles between president and pope going on now have a long historical background.

Efforts by the popes to establish supremacy within the Empire did not wait for the eleventh century (much less the twenty-first).  When Constantine moved his political capitol to Constantinople in the fourth century, Pope Sylvester stayed behind in Rome.  He was probably just as glad not to have the emperor there.  Constantine after all had ordered that the Council of Nicaea be held to settle questions of the Trinity, even though he himself was not yet baptized (that happened only as he was dying). Although he didn't influence the council's outcome, he sat right there observing.

With no emperor on hand, Sylvester and his successors became the effective rulers of the city of Rome and surrounding territory, including defending against Goths, Huns, and the like.  But that wasn't enough.  By the sixth century, an elaborate story had grown up in which Constantine contacted leprosy but was healed by Pope Sylvester.  In gratitude the emperor gave Sylvester his own crown and other imperial insignia, led the pope's horse by the bridle (acting as groom), and declared that the bishop of Rome was above all other bishops.  Sylvester, not to be outdone in generosity and humility, gave the crown back -- but note the implication, the pope is the one who gets to decide if a man deserves to be crowned.

In the eighth century this story was improved further by the "discovery" of the Donation of Constantine, a supposed letter in which Constantine, on his way out the door to Constantinople, gave rule of the whole western half of the Empire to the pope.  Both popes and emperors believed this document to real, not a forgery, until the Renaissance, but the emperors always had some good reason to argue it didn't apply.  ("At least not now. Besides, the pope was a heretic.")

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

Kings

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.

Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors).  The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.

Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings.  A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.

Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).

 God and Jesus were often referred to as kings.  With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.

Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions.  We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England.  (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)

William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings.  In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.

Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament.  Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters.  Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.

Kings of course would have liked to be absolute.  James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy.  But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant.  By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).

In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.

The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king.  George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down.  The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap.  Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.

Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy.  Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

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

 

Byzantine Shipwreck

 The new National Geographic (April 2026) has a very interesting article about a shipwreck recently discovered in the Mediterranean, a Byzantine ship that went down probably in the early eighth century.  Studying the remains of the ship and its contents provided the archaeologists some new insights into economy and trade in the period.

At this time the Roman Empire was alive and well (just ask, and the emperors would have told you), though the emperors lived in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), in the region of Byzantium (now part of Turkey), rather than in Rome.  The culture that had once embraced the entire Mediterranean basin—which the Romans had nicknamed the Roman lake—had been disrupted by the rise of Islam in the seventh century.  But eastern and western halves of the old Empire were still in communication with each other, and their versions of Christianity had not yet split.

The shipwreck was found off the coast of Croatia, where violent storms can suddenly come up on an apparently clear day.  Croatia is on the Adriatic, the narrow arm of the Mediterranean that runs up the eastern side of the Italian peninsula, and the archaeologists surmise that the ship was headed to Ravenna, near the top end of the Adriatic.  It never made it.

Ravenna was an imperial city, where the emperors from Constantinople preferred to go when they visited the more western parts of their Roman Empire, rather than Rome itself.  There had been regular trade routes between Constantinople and the Adriatic since the emperors moved to Byzantium in the fourth century, and the evidence of the ship shows that even the rise of Islam had not ended that trade.

The ship was carrying a number of amphorae, the big two-handled ceramic pots used to hold wine, olive oil, or sometimes grain.  Such amphorae are found in every wreck of a ship from antiquity in the Mediterranean.  There were also such miscellany as game pieces for checkers, oil lamps, dice, and a millstone.  But what startled the archaeologists was the golden treasure that had been silted over on the sea floor during the last 1300 years. They found Byzantine coins, jewelry, and several matching sets of big golden belt buckles and accompanying belt ends, all highly decorated and some set with precious stones.  (The Geographic has good photos.)

Someone traveling on the ship who owned all that gold would have been stunningly wealthy.  It wasn't the emperor (we'd know about it if it a Byzantine emperor had been drowned), but he (or they) must have had a connection to the imperial court, perhaps as an ambassador.  It's in fact unlikely that one man owned all the buckle/belt-end sets and liked to swap them off on different outfits on different days to show off.  More likely they were intended to be part of a diplomatic mission, to be bestowed as rich gifts to those who went along with Byzantium's requests.

The finding of the wrecked ship indicates that Mediterranean commerce did not die in the seventh century with the rise of Islam, as was once thought.  Some of the objects the underwater archaeologists have found suggest the ship may have made stops along the Muslim-held north African coast before sailing up the Adriatic.  Finds like these can also flesh out our knowledge of a period for which few written records remain.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

Still Medieval After All These Years

 I'm working on a new blog book!  This blog has been underway for nearly a dozen years, includes over 600 posts, and I still haven't run out of things to say about the Middle Ages.  My first blog book, Positively Medieval, which came out eight years ago, pulled together a lot of the ideas I had put into the blog so far.

That book focused on medieval life and society, seeking to introduce readers to what it would have been like to live then, what people ate, how they became educated,  how they got married and raised their children.  I had extensive sections on the medieval church, which played a larger role in most people's lives than did the government.  In the process I tried to refute some common misconceptions about what the Middle Ages were like, from "fall of Rome" to "code of chivalry."

The new book will be called Still Medieval After All These Years. The cover is below.  The image is a street in Noyers, Burgundy.  People today are continuing to live in the old medieval buildings.Note the bicycle in the foreground.

 

It will include a lot of social history and interesting things you may not have known about the Middle Ages, especially the peasantry, but the main focus will be how much of what we now take for granted as "modern" has medieval roots, or how other things we also take for granted would have been deeply disturbing to our medieval ancestors (and vice versa).

Both of these blog books (as you probably already figured out) are based on this blog.  But there's not a lot of order to how I post on the blog, as I choose topics based on contemporary events (like Groundhog Day), events in the news, a book I recently read, or something that occurs to me I've never covered.  (Sometimes readers point this out.)

So for the books I try to have a more coherent organization, putting similar topics together, writing transitions and seeking to minimize repetition.  The new book will be out this summer.  In the meantime, if there's a topic you feel I haven't addressed and would like to see, mention it in the comments, as there's still time to include it both in this blog and in the book!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

In the meantime, for more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

  

Rats

 Modern cities have rats.  So did medieval cities.  The typical rats of European and now American cities are the black rat and the brown rat, the latter the so-called Norway rat (not to be confused with the Norway spruce). In spite of the evocation of Scandinavia, rats actually originated in eastern Asia, but they have spread around the world, now being found on every continent except Antarctica.

(The above photo is by Nikolett Emmert.)

Rats have adopted very well to humans.  In fact, although their ancestors lived in the wild, rats do not do well unless closely associated with humans.  They can survive in very cold climates by staying inside with the humans.  Their favorite food is whatever their local humans have left over and dump in the trash.  Italian rats, for example, favor spaghetti.

Cities are always trying to get rid of rats, but it's an uphill battle.  For one thing, rats are smart.  They can evade traps, hide so they won't be spotted, fight back against cats and terriers. They have large litters of pups at regular intervals, so even if sizeable numbers of rats are killed, they can quickly come back.

New York City thought they had kept rats out of residential neighborhoods more or less successfully until the Covid-19 pandemic. Then the restaurants closed down, and suddenly the rats found their favorite dumpsters empty.  Being resourceful, they headed out to the residential neighborhoods, which now had more food waste with more people eating at home. As restaurants reopened, the city was able to declare fewer rats in people's back yards.

One of the few places that I know that has successfully beaten back rat populations for good is in the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific on the equator.  There are a number of unique species there, not only the famous Galapagos tortoises, and those species had few natural enemies until the whaling ships showed up, complete with rats. In subsequent years, the rats were very harmful to the nests of ground-nesting birds and other creatures. However, recent vigorous trapping efforts have eradicated them from some of the islands where no humans live.

Because rats are intelligent and adaptable, they have been used in scientific research since the end of the nineteenth century (think of the expression, "like a rat in a maze").  They can be used for studying behavior and also digestion, since they eat the same range of foods that humans do.  Lab rats are generally white, descendants of an albino strain, and have become quite tame after generations of living directly with humans, rather than hidden in their walls.  Such rats are also sometimes kept as pets. Medieval people would be appalled.

The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a man who lures all the rats out of the city of Hamelin  with his magical pipe playing, has its origins in thirteenth-century Germany.  It has appeared in many guises over the centuries—I used a version of it myself in my novel Daughter of Magic. Most versions of the story take on a darker tone when the piper is not properly paid for ridding the city of rats. But for medieval people, the underlying premise was obvious:  their cities needed fewer rats (people in New York City today would understand).

Rats were considered to spread disease in the closely-packed late medieval cities. They were accused, accurately, for helping spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  They carried the fleas who transmitted the disease to humans.  People killed their cats and dogs to try to get rid of the fleas, but the fleas just jumped onto humans, and the rats, carrying fleas, eluded efforts to eliminate them.

Even when they weren't spreading disease, rats were a major problem for medieval people because they would eat the grain. Keeping the grain away from rats and mice is always important, especially as it represents both this year's food and next year's seed, and it was an especially critical concern for a society in which bread was the principal food. Cats were valued as rodent-hunters more than as pets.  There's a reason even now that farms have barn cats.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 How does one become a writer?  My first published novel, some 35 years ago now, was A Bad Spell in Yurt.  It was however far from the first book I'd written.  Like many authors, I'd been making up stories since before I even started school.  A lot of my early efforts were, shall we say, derivative.  But I loved writing stories and, in grade school, illustrating them.

I'm a pretty decent speller (in spite of how totally weird the English language is), and I think it's because when I was writing out my stories I'd keep asking Mom how a particular word was spelled, and I'd remember what she told me.

In junior high I moved from writing kids' books with pictures to writing novels.  In ninth grade I read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time (certainly not the last!), and it had a profound effect on me.  Fantasy rules!  From then on, the majority of what I wrote was more or less fantasy—although initially a lot of it was stories set in a pseudo-medieval world that had lots of action but no magic.

Starting when I was in college, I tried intermittently to get something published.  This was back when there was no self-publishing, so it was traditional publishing or nothing.  For years I didn't get anywhere, and it's probably just as well, because some of it I'd now be embarrassed to have attributed to me.  I was also busy being a graduate student and getting established as an academic in the field of medieval history (again, I think Tolkien is largely responsible).

But then I had an unusually vivid dream, which featured the opening of what became A Bad Spell in Yurt and much of the characters.  I started writing, and my husband encouraged me to finish and try to find a publisher.  And I did!  Some twenty-five years after I first packed up a manuscript and mailed it off to a publisher, my first novel was published (my first academic book preceded it by a dozen years). With a great cover by Tom Kidd, it became a national science-fiction/fantasy best seller.

 

(When I was about seven I'd decided both that I wanted to write fun books that people would read and that I wanted to write a "history of the world." Medieval history isn't the history of the whole world, but to a large extent I've achieved my childhood dream.)

 The publisher, Baen, brought out much of the rest of the Yurt series.  I hadn't planned on a series, but (again) my husband encouraged me to make it a series, and he was right.  But then the books went out of print, as books do, and once I got my rights back I turned to self-publishing.

Baen had published the Yurt books as mass-market (small) paperbacks.  I reissued them initially as ebooks, whch remains my best-selling format.  Here are the US link and the UK link.  The book is also available in other Amazon stores around the world.

As well as the ebook, I've brought Bad Spell out as a large-format ("trade") paperback and a hardcover. The rest of the series is available both as ebooks and as paperbacks (some in omnibus editions). I've also written and self-published a "Yurt, the Next Generation" series and some other books as well, having more time to write now that I've retired from that pesky day job.

Don't know if I'd recommend my path to anyone else, but that's how I became a writer. 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

Medieval people and psychology

 Medieval people were a whole lot like us.  This shouldn't be a big surprise.  One can talk to grandparents or other relatives who grew up in another country or another time, without the technology and popular culture we have now, and yet they have the same emotions and sense of humor the young folks do.  Medieval people didn't have phones or TVs or Taylor Swift, but they loved their children and got upset over unfair treatment and enjoyed doing things with their friends just as we do.

A lot of medieval literature does as good a job as modern literature (once you accept the different assumptions about how literature should be written) in showing psychological complexity.  In the tale of Tristan and Isolde, for example, King Mark, Isolde's husband, spends much of the book eaten up with a desire to "know for sure" if Isolde is unfaithful to him, even while he also knows that revealing the betrayal of the woman he loves would destroy him.

(Shameless plug. I've rewritten the Tristan and Isolde story to make it more accessible for modern readers, titled "Ashes of Heaven."  Available as an ebook or paperback, on all major ebook platforms or in your favorite book store.  Here's the Amazon link.) 

 But can we do psychoanalysis on medieval people?  For example, can we figure out that a particular count or duke was cruel because he was raised by a wet-nurse until he was two and then taken from her?  Can we postulate that someone decided to become a monk because his father died when he was very small and he needed an abbot as a replacement father figure?

Well, as soon as you put it that way it sounds rightly absurd.  After all, it's hard to make sweeping statements about an individual's development based on them experiencing the same thing everyone else experienced.  If being taken from a wet-nurse when very young would necessarily warp someone, we'd expect all members of the elite to be cruel and vindictive, which they certainly were not. Plenty of young men who converted to monasticism when they reached adulthood had fathers at home the whole time.

To know whether a particular experience was what made someone behave a certain way, and to help that person deal with that experience if they needed to change their behavior, you'd need to repeatedly have long, personal discussions with them.  There's a reason why one hears references to years of counseling.  The tricky part of doing counseling with a medieval person is that they've been dead for centuries.

This didn't necessarily stop historians.  For a while, back in the 1970s, there was a major interest in so-called psycho-history, analyzing people of the past through the lens of psychoanalysis.  It appealed even more if the historian didn't know much about psychoanalysis other than having read a couple books by Freud and maybe one other psychologist.

This didn't work out very well, and historians quickly moved on, trying to suggest they'd never dipped into psycho-history.  I myself consider historians trying to grab a few tidbits of some social science (sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography) as lusting after false gods.  Those are perfectly good fields in their own right, and we historians cannot just grab a few tidbits and pretend we're a "scientific" field and not a form of the humanities (which is what we are).  We'd be rightly upset after all if an anthropologist read some medieval social history book and announced he now understood our "primitive ancestors" to compare to people in modern-day third-world countries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

Buttons

 We take buttons for granted.  They fasten our shirts, our coats, our waistbands.  They're now most commonly made of plastic, but they can also be made of metal or bone or wood or shell.  The image below shows buttons made of shell on a sweater.  

 Buttons can also be a fashion statement; the buttons on a suit jacket sleeve really have no practical purpose, and a double-breasted jacket has lots of buttons that don't do anything.

 For much of the Middle Ages, clothes were not fastened with buttons.  Whereas the modern standard for buttoned openings is to overlap two pieces of cloth, with the lower level having a button that goes through a buttonhole on the upper one, medieval clothing typically butted two pieces of cloth together, side by side  They were held together by stitches, by toggles, or by a clasp.

Interestingly, early medieval people did have buttons, or things that look like buttons, little knobs sewn onto clothes as decorative features, the way today we might put souvenir pins on a hat or campaign "buttons" on a jacket.  Some buttons were even jeweled. They just weren't used to fasten the clothes together. 

The basic item of clothing then for both men and women was a tunic, basically a long T-shirt.  It would have to be loose enough to wiggle one's way into without zippers or buttons or any sort of opening, though fancy women's dresses were cut on the bias, giving the fabric enough stretch that it could be cut closer to the body.  Fancy tight sleeves would have to be stitched on once someone pulled on their sleeveless tunic; at night the stitches would be cut and the sleeves removed.  One sleeveless tunic could be paired with several sets of sleeves for different looks.

This changed in the thirteenth century. It's not clear if other parts of the hemisphere (which too had long had decorative buttons) had earlier invented closing openings with buttons paired with loops or buttonholes, or if Europeans invented the idea. But at any rate this use of buttons reached Europe. The aristocracy loved them.

A tight fitting jacket or vest (known as a doublet) could be cut to follow your upper body's shape without worrying about how you'd wiggle into something so tight.  Instead, it was open down the front until buttoned right up with a couple dozen buttons. Funerary carvings of the deceased often showed them with all their buttons.

The military of the post-medieval period adopted buttons with a vengeance, lots of brass buttons, both for buttoning and for show.  As a result, when the Amish appeared in the seventeenth century, with one their central tenets non-violence, they rejected the use of buttons as too associated with the military.

As I have discussed previously, the modern Amish are not living in some version of the Middle Ages, but like medieval people before the thirteenth century they do not use buttons. Small children may, but adults use hooks and eyes (Velcro counts as hooks and eyes) and pins.  It is apparently quite a move toward adulthood when an Amish girl can graduate to the use of all straight pins, rather than buttons, to hold her outfit together.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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

 

 

Linen

Linen was the standard cloth for any medieval clothing not made of wool.  Linen is still in use today but has become far less popular, mostly because it wrinkles easily (unlike most cotton-polyester blends).   It's still found in handkerchiefs, bedding, and some shirts, but many people may own no linen clothing at all (interestingly, underwear, now universally made from cotton and maybe nylon, is often referred to collectively as "linen").

But when silk was extremely expensive, polyester and nylon and rayon were unknown, and cotton was rare (it really only reached western Europe in the thirteenth century), linen was the cloth you wanted next to your skin.  (It was also the cloth from which sails were made.)

Linen even now has advantages over a lot of other kinds of cloth.  It is never itchy, as wool can be if not processed properly.  It is strong, stronger than cotton, and is never munched on by clothes moths, as is wool. It is cool and thus good to wear in hot weather.  It also takes up dye readily. 

Linen is made from flax, a kind of grass that can, when treated, be spun as one spins wool and then woven.   It has been in use since ancient times; the semi-diaphanous outfits people were wearing in Egyptian wall paintings were made of linen.  Scraps of linen fabric have been found in central Asia that are believed to be tens of thousands of years old.  Below is an image of the flax plant's details; note that blue flowers.

 Going from the grass-like linen plant to fibers ready to be spun and woven into cloth was a complicated process.  First the plants were "retted," soaked in pond water, where both the water and the bacteria in it would loosen the fibers from each other (medieval people didn't know about bacteria eating pectin, but they knew soaking in the right water got rid of the sticky stuff holding the fibers together).  Then the plants were "scutched," crushed to break down the stalks so that the fibers were freed of them.  Then the fibers were "heckled," combed to get rid of short bits, leaving only the longer fibers, ready for spinning.

In the Middle Ages, linen production, like wool production, could take place anywhere but was especially common in northern Germany and what are now the Benelux countries.  One might call it an industry, but there were no factories, rather villages in which a number of the houses contained spinning and weaving operations.  Women especially produced the cloth on small-scale hand looms.

Linen's natural color is a creamy white, but medieval people liked it even whiter and would bleach it in the sun. A sign of refinement was to wear very lightweight, very white linen.  All the heroines in the stories wore white linen.  It would of course need to be ironed, with a flat iron heated up in the fire.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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