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.

 

Revolt of the White Caps

Popular movements, social revolts, heresies:  it is really hard to distinguish them for the Middle Ages.  It used to be that historians would see all heresies as social revolts in disguise, dismissing the religious aspect as just a facade.  That of course is not true, but it would be equally wrong to think of the heresies which became popular movements--as many did--as animated only by spiritual concerns.

This brings us to the White Caps, a religious/social movement of the 1180s.  It started in the town of Le Puy, in the Auvergne, a city built on a series of volcanic cones.  A man named Durand had a vision of the Virgin, who is the patron saint of Le Puy.

 

This is the town today.  On top of the highest peak you can glimpse a nneteenth-century statue of the Virgin.

Anyway, in Durand's vision in the 1180s he was told to form a group of faithful people who would all adopt a lead badge with the Virgin's image on it and a white cap or hood.  Both lords and peasants joined the group, with the goal of bringing "peace" to the region, in part by attacking bandits who were interfering with local trade.  Durand's group was known as the capucciati because of their caps.

Several chroniclers recorded the events at the time, all giving slightly different versions.  One said that the vision that began it was nothing but an "imposture," and that the greedy merchants of Le Puy just wanted an easier time transporting their goods.  Most however credited the group with real religious devotion.

The movement quickly spread north into Burgundy and became established in the region around Auxerre.  Here, the chroniclers all agreed, the movement changed, and the peasants and villagers turned on the lords who had once been part of their group, saying they were all bandits themselves.  At this point the bishop of Auxerre, recently consecrated, became involved.

Bishop Hugh rode out, heavily armed, with his men and rounded up all the White Caps folks he could find.  He took away their caps and their badges, saying they had forgotten that "the wages of sin are servitude" and they were all sinners and serfs, and that the Bible says that serfs should not attack their lords (the Bible actually says "the wages of sin are death" and talked about slaves, not medieval serfs, but this was close enough for the bishop).

He told the defeated White Caps that, to punish them, they would not be able to wear any hat at all for a year, either to shelter them from the bright sun during harvest or to keep the snow off in the winter.  The bishop's uncle, the archbishop of Sens, however saw the men roasting in the harvest fields, had pity, and told Bishop Hugh to let them wear regular hats again.

This short-lived revolt has several interesting features.  One is that it demonstrates peasant agency, the ability of people who are usually thought of as marginal and oppressed to fight back against oppression, as I have discussed earlier.  It also shows that what might be considered a social revolt, an effort by peasants to claim that all lords were, in some form, bandits, would take on a distinctly religious tone in the Middle Ages.  The capucciati were not an actual heresy, because they were not espousing erroneous doctrine, but a religious impulse clearly started their movement.  It is also important to note that bishops were not always in agreement with each other, and that many bishops, like Bishop Hugh of Auxerre, felt that they were a better judge of real religion than other people, and were prepared for armed conflict to prove it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval religion and society, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers.  Also available in paperback!

Competition Between Churches

It's easy to think of medieval priests and monks and nuns as other-worldly, focused on spiritual issues, above the normal strife of life.  And indeed this was their own ideal.  In practice, different churches were often in fierce competition with each other, "survival of the fittest," "red in tooth and claw."  (Not quite that bad, but...)

For starters, bishops and the monasteries/nunneries in their regions always differed on who was the most holy.  The bishop claimed, with a certain plausibility, to be "apostolic," to be the successor of a first-bishop in the region, who had been sent out by a bishop of Late Antiquity who had been ordained by a bishop who had been ordained by a bishop who had (etc.) back to Saint Peter, leader of the apostles.

The monks couldn't claim a similar apostolic heritage (since monasticism only began a few centuries AD), but they certainly could assert that by living in common, sharing their possessions, they were following the life of the earliest Christians, as described in the Bible, in Acts of the Apostles.  Hah!  Apostolic after all!  This meant they felt they really shouldn't be judged by a bishop who lived like an aristocrat, with his own house, his own servants, his own meat for dinner rather than bread and stewed leeks (plus maybe some nice lentils).

The monastery of Cluny, for example, spent much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries claiming exemption from their local bishop, the bishop of Mâcon.  The bishop was not convinced, even when the monks got the pope on their side.

Even if a bishop and monastery were not fighting about oversight, they often disagreed over which one the saints of the region loved best.  At the city of Auxerre, for example, all the bishops, starting with the fifth-century Bishop Germanus, were buried at the monastery soon named St.-Germain for him.  So obviously the early sainted bishops must love the monastery best.  The bishops at the cathedral differed.  (The image below is the cathedral, though the current structure  dates to the thirteenth century, not the fifth.)

At Tours, there was comparable competition between three churches, the cathedral, where Saint Martin had been a bishop at the end of the fourth century; the monastery (Marmoutier) he founded outside of town; and the basilica where he was buried.

Within a particular region, different monasteries would compete for which one had precedence.  In Ghent in eleventh-century Flanders, on what was then the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom, two monasteries both claimed to have been the original foundation of Saint Amand, who first brought Christianity to the region centuries earlier.  Saint Peter's, up on the hill above town, rewrote the vita (a saint's biography) of Amand, explaining how he came wandering into pagan Ghent and decided that up on a hilltop was the perfect place for a monastery.

Amand had named his house, the monks of Saint Peter's continued confidently, for the leader of the Apostles.  Obviously, they continued, the monastery down by the river in town, Saint Bavo's, was named for some later, clearly inferior saint.  Now archaeology indicates that Saint Bavo's was in fact the first monastery in town, and the monks there had records to prove it! (or so they said).  For a generation the two Ghent monasteries had the same abbot when they were both recovering from Viking raids, and this was an excellent chance for the monks of both to paw through the other's archives and steal or rewrite what they found.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Growing old in the Middle Ages

"In the Middle Ages, everyone was middle-aged!"  Umm, no.

As I noted in my earlier post on medieval life expectancy, the "life span" then was the same as it is now.  That is, although the average age a person might reach, barring disease and disaster, before major body parts started wearing out was the same then as now, in practice most people in the Middle Ages would not make it to the age of 70, 80, or more that modern actuarial tables suggest.  A lack of modern medicine, malnutrition, and rough living would do in a lot of people in their 50s.

But some people certainly grew old, even if "old" kicked in earlier for them than it does for us.  And there are documented cases of rare people making it past 100--one is Saint Anthony, founder of monasticism in Egypt during late antiquity.

Old people were revered for their wisdom in the Middle Ages.  Leaders like bishops and abbots were assumed to hold their office for life, rather than being pushed out at 65.  Medieval old people were not put out on the ice floe!  In practice, bishops and abbots might retire if they felt their strength was failing, but they rarely lived more than another year or so, not enjoying any "golden years" retirement.

Among the peasants, everyone worked until they physically could not any more, at which point they transitioned into being the voice of wisdom, telling their children all they had learned in many years of experience, whether the next generation wanted to listen or not.

Among the aristocracy, heirs waiting to inherit might encourage their parents to retire to a monastery.  In practice, aristocratic women were much more likely to do so than aristocratic men.  If widowed in their 40s, having seen their children more or less grow up, they might decide that they had had enough of a world of men and go off to be nuns.  These widows were very often persuaded to become an abbess, because of their administrative experience.

In other cases, widows stayed in the world.  One Burgundian countess in the thirteenth century survived both her husbands, argued with the new bishop of Auxerre who thought she ought to help carry him in procession on the day he was consecrated, and arranged the marriages of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

In the modern West, most older people wear glasses, and some have had cataract surgery.  Medieval people without good eyesight would just have had to grope along.  (I myself would have been blind as a bat.)  Eyeglasses first appeared in the fourteenth century, mostly for reading and very expensive, and cataract surgery only came into its own in the 1960s.

Few old people would have lived by themselves, because children did not move far away as often happens in modern America.  As they became less able to take care of themselves, their families assisted them.  Most would have been carried off by disease (such as pneumonia) or infection long before memory issues became much of a problem.

Many people now draw up living wills, saying that they don't want to be kept alive by machines and feeding tubes.  This would not have been a concern in the Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Saint Patrick's Day

Saint Patrick's Day was this week, a day celebrated with much more gusto in the US than in Ireland itself.  The Irish note that it is the feast day of their island's patron saint and celebrate with religious ceremonies, but you don't catch people in Dublin or Derry drinking green beer and wearing T-shirts that say, "Kiss me, I'm Irish."

Interestingly, although everybody in an American bar proudly claims to be Irish once they have a few green beers in them, and elementary schools promote the "wearing of the green," a century ago the Irish were looked down on as uncouth and probably dangerously stupid.  They were not even considered really "white."

Unfortunately, this has happened with most groups of immigrants, as people with no money came to the US looking for a better life and were looked down when they arrived because they were poor--and, not surprisingly, not sophisticated or well-educated.  But the Irish, like the Italians and the Poles (though not yet the Mexicans), have gone from a group one would cross the street to avoid to a group that one would pretend to join, at least one day a year.  (Also unfortunately, those with African ancestry, whose ancestors had no choice about coming to the Americas but were here before the ancestors of most European-Americans, can still not "pass for white.")

The real Saint Patrick (Pádraig), celebrated on March 17, was a historical figure.  He was not Irish but British, living in what is now England in the fifth century--it was not yet England, because the Anglo-Saxons had not yet arrived there.  His Britain was a Romanized, Christianized, Celtic community.  As a youth, he appears to have been captured by Irish (and pagan) pirates and taken there as a slave.  After some years, he managed to get home to Britain, where he became a priest.  But he remembered the Irish more fondly than one might have expected and worried about their souls.  Hence, he returned to Ireland, this time as a missionary, and set about converting the population to Christianity.

By the way, although it is sometimes said that he "drove the snakes out of Ireland" (because Ireland does not have the poisonous snakes of England and the Continent), in fact the snakes were killed by the glaciers a great many millennia before Patrick.  When the glaciers retreated and plants and animals returned to Ireland, snakes never made it across the Irish sea.

For me, Saint Patrick's Day will always be the day I first left home to go to Auxerre (in France) to do my dissertation research.  In many ways I have never come back.  As I was waiting for my evening flight to Europe (via Iceland in those days), I saw the mayor of Dublin, wearing a bright green top hat, who had been in town to take part in the Saint Patrick's Day parade, something they didn't have back home in Ireland.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

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

Telling Time in the Middle Ages

Of course we know that the day has twenty-four hours.  Ever since the ancient Babylonian astronomers announced that there were twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night, we have believed them.  (The Babylonians loved twelves.)

But when you think about it, there is no particular physical reason why we should divide up the day the way we do.  And for medieval people, there was certainly no reason why hours always had to be the same length.

They, like us, assumed a daily cycle of twenty-four hours--that is, they assumed the sun went around the earth once every twenty-four hours, whereas we know the earth rotates once every twenty-four hours.  But close enough.

Where they differed radically was that hours were longer or shorter depending on the season.  By definition, for them, there were twelve hours between sunrise and sunset, and twelve more from sunset to sunrise.  This meant that in the summer the daylight hours were long and the night hours short, and vice-versa in the winter.

Whereas we count our hours from midnight, they counted theirs from sunrise.  So what we would call 7 am at the equinox, one hour after sunrise, was for them the first hour, "prime."  Many events were supposed to take place at certain hours, such as the big meal of the day at "none," the ninth hour, in the middle of what we would call the afternoon (on mealtimes, see more here).  Because they recognized that hours were longer or shorter at different time of the year, some things were adjusted according to the season.

For example, monks were supposed to get up at certain times during the night for prayers and liturgy.  During the winter, they went back to bed in between these "night offices."  During the short nights of summer, however, there was no time to do so before the next round of prayer and psalms.  Thus, the monks were allowed a nap in the afternoon.

Every church had people who were supposed to keep track of the time and ring the bells (every three hours, not every hour).  Without modern clocks, they would keep track through the angle of the sun, the position of the stars, and such things as candles and water clocks (where the water dripped through slowly), though the latter had to be adjusted according to the season.  In a cathedral city, the ringing of the cathedral bells was an important event.  Some of the other churches in town would wait until the cathedral started ringing and then quickly start ringing as well.  Other churches, to show their independence of the bishops, would deliberately ring at different times.

The invention of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century marked a major change in how people thought about time.  Now hours were all the same length, a radical concept.  One could plan to meet someone at "terce" (mid-morning) and know, from glancing at a clock, if terce was soon or a while yet, rather than waiting to hear the bells.  Clocks were far too big and complicated for personal use (as watches), but a centrally-located one could be readily consulted.

Medieval merchants and artisans thus found clocks very useful for business.  The late medieval clock in Auxerre, pictured above, was erected as a symbol of municipal liberties, in opposition to the bishop and the cathedral's version of hours.

Of course, for most of the population, time was reckoned somewhat differently.  When you woke up, it was time to work.  When you were so hungry you couldn't work anymore, it was time to eat.  When you were so exhausted you couldn't work anymore, it was time to go to bed.  (This pattern was ameliorated during festival times and when there were few farm chores, as during the winter, but it was still the standard.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

A medieval cathedral

A cathedral is not merely a big church.  It is the church of a bishop, the head of the church in his region. When the Roman Empire became Christianized, starting in the third century and especially in the fourth, each administrative unit of the Empire got its own bishop, elected by the local Christians.  The cathedral, that is the bishop's church, was the first church of a region.  The earliest churches date from the fourth century, when Christianity became tolerated in the Empire, so people dared worship publicly rather than in secret.

Soon other churches grew up in the cities around the cathedral, including churches attached to monasteries.  Every century or so the cathedral priests would decide their church was hopelessly old-fashioned and rebuild.  There are essentially no remnants of cathedrals built before the eighth or ninth centuries, because they have been rebuilt so many times.  Occasionally, however, a cathedral may still have its sixth-century crypt, where important people were buried.

The twelfth century was a period of rapid growth, in population, in the economy, and in religious enthusiasm.  Many eighth- and ninth-century cathedrals were rebuilt then, and the monasteries were also rebuilding their churches.  In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the new Gothic style was coming in, marked by greater height and more windows, those cathedrals that had not already been rebuilt undertook new building programs.

(One assumes that the monastic churches, which had looked very new and modern in the early twelfth century, looked very dark and old-fashioned compared to Gothic, but the monasteries had already spent their money and couldn't undertake new renovations.)

Cathedrals were now so big that they might take generations to build.  Auxerre cathedral, seen above, was begun in the thirteenth century and finished (more or less) in the fourteenth.  It was intended to have two towers on the front but only has one, because the money ran out.

They were designed and built by professional architects and stone masons.  There is now a popular though mistaken belief that ordinary people built cathedrals.  But without knowing what you are doing, it is extremely hard to work stone and make it come out right.  Most of Europe's cathedrals today are primarily products of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  They were big, they were extremely expensive, and they were highly decorated, to the glory of God.  There might be major changes to the interior decoration, but the exterior has stayed the same since the Middle Ages.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity and here for more on the medieval church.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Life in the Middle Ages - Welcome

Welcome to the C. Dale Brittain blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

Between "Lord of the Rings" and "Game of Thrones," there's a whole lot of interest in what life in the Middle Ages was really like.  As both a professor of medieval history and a fantasy writer myself, I've been studying medieval times for over 40 years.

In this blog, I'll be posting fun bits of information about the period--some funny, some sad, some downright weird.  I'll also be putting up some pictures of medieval architecture and the like, almost all of them mine.  There is an amazing amount of misinformation about the Middle Ages out there (no, not everyone was middle-aged!), so I'll be correcting some of that too.

First tidbit of information:  The Ox.

An ox was a crucial medieval animal.  An ox is just a bull who was castrated as a calf, so he (it?) grew up with a bull's powerful muscles but none of a bull's testosterone-fueled fury.  Strong and placid, able to subsist on grass rather than needing expensive grain (because of the multiple stomachs all cattle have, good for getting the last ounce of nutrition out of something), an ox made a great draft animal.  Carts and plows were normally drawn by oxen.

And when an ox got old and died, its skin was used for leather (ox hide is thick and tough), and its meat could be boiled up and eaten (though also thick and tough).

(Click here for more on medieval farm animals.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014