Langres

 The city of Langres, located on the Burgundy-Champagne border, was an important city in Roman Gaul and a major bishopric during the Middle Ages, even though it's become a rather quiet provincial town in recent centuries, with a current population under 10,000.

 

It's located quite dramatically at the top of a steep hill, overlooking the countryside, and still has its Roman walls.  Traffic has to drive in and out through some of its Roman gates. The gates pictured above are the best preserved of the Roman gates and thus are closed to traffic.

 

The Romans liked Langres for its strategic location, and a number of Roman roads met there. The strategic location meant that Langres continued to be important militarily up through the nineteenth century.

Like most bishoprics in what is now France, Langres dates its Christianization and first bishop to the third century.  Autun was probably the original diocese covering what is now Burgundy, and other dioceses were carved out of it between the third and fifth centuries (Langres, Auxerre, Nevers, Mâcon, and Chalon-sur-Saône).

The bishops were important counselors to the Carolingian kings in the ninth century and continued to be major political players.  During the twelfth century the Capetian kings granted the bishops the right to hold Langres and its region directly from the crown, rather than having either the duke of Burgundy or the count of Champagne be in authority over their territory. The bishops liked to say they were dukes in their own right.

 The diocese of Langres was one of the most central in the early spread of the Cistercian order. A number of houses were founded on the Langres plateau.  Unlike the monastery of Cluny, which always tried to exempt itself from the authority of its local bishop (Mâcon), the Cistercians always got along well with their bishops—some of whom were Cistercians themselves.

During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a son of Langres, Denis Diderot, established the first "Encyclopedia," volumes that purported to cover all of human knowledge, in the hope that educating the populace by whatever means possible would lead to a more rational and happier and prosperous population.

 The city of Langres commemorates Diderot (who also rates a statue and a central square named for him) with a park bench made to look like an encyclopedia volume.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Still Medieval After All These YearsAs

As I announced back in March, I've been working on a new book, and now it's out!  It's called "Still Medieval After All These Years," and it started life with this blog.

 The book's purpose is to discuss some aspects of medieval society I never got to in my first so-called blog book, "Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages."

 

Specifically, I have much more to same about peasants, their status and opportunities, and about food and beverage.  (Did you know lasagna is probably a Norman dish? Introduced by them into Italy? No tomato sauce, though.). Then I go on to discuss how medieval buildings were built, how medieval people kept healthy, and a lot on the medieval church and religion.

But the newest aspect is a focus on how much modern society owes to the Middle Ages, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.  Even though we've decided we are "modern," the medieval keeps tempting us, including (strangely enough) notions that somehow life was better then and that we should be able to use the Middle Ages as a model for a racially and religiously pure society.  (Um, that's not going to work.) 

(I also talk about medieval-themed fantasy fiction. That aspect is fine.)

Anyway, the book is now available on Amazon, both as an ebook and a paperback.  Here's the paperback link.  It's also on Barnes & Noble as an ebook and will shortly be available on all major ebook platforms, and it can be ordered through any bookstore. 

The ebook has color pictures if you read on a computer or tablet, black and white on a Kindle or as a paperback.  They're all my photos, so you get in effect a travelogue as well as social history. Hope you enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

Marginalia

Medieval manuscripts, pre-printing press, naturally were all hand written and hand illustrated. Sometimes someone with artistic ability would just take an initial letter and make it fancy.

 

But often, for a high-class book, there would be actual illustrations. Most of these illustrations were something to do with the text itself. So the initial letter of one of the prophetic books of the Bible (like Isaiah for example) might include both the letter itself and a picture of a prophet with his long beard.

This wasn't enough for some illuminators (as they were called, the artists illustrating a book). They would do their appropriate illustrations, but then they would add things in the margins that might have nothing to do with the actual text. Although they would usually refrain if illuminating an actual Bible, other books were not off-limits to marginalia.

These marginal illustrations were often witty, sometimes bawdy.  They might be a commentary on the society of their time. Rabbits frequently featured, portrayed for example as suited up in armor and jousting with other rabbits. Strange hybrid creatures sometimes appeared. Sometimes they were subtle or not so subtle digs at those in authority.

 

In the above image, a fox, wearing a bishop's mitre and carrying a bishop's staff, is preaching to his flock, quite literally a flock of birds, geese, swans, and other fowl that, presumably, the fox has intentions of eating. The birds seem quite attentive. There's a Dutch proverb that goes something like, "Watch your chickens when the fox preaches the gospel." A good warning indeed.

(The images above are, respectively, the second cartulary of Montier-en-Der from the thirteenth century, Archives de la Haute-Marne, 7 H 2; and from the fourteenth century, British Library Royal MS 10 E IV.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

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!