Medieval Gemstones

 Medieval people valued gemstones.  They were widely used metaphorically, as, for example, the Heavenly Jerusalem had its walls studded with gems, or a larger-than-life hero in an epic tale would have jewels set in the hilt of his sword.  But they also used both precious and semi-precious stones to decorate everything from Bible covers to royal crowns to reliquaries to communion cups.

Although these days few churches would stud their holy objects with gems, medieval people did so regularly.  Just as crown jewels marked the high position of a king or queen, so gemstones attached to the reliquary that held the bones or other relics of a saint marked this saint as something very special.

The above image is the twelfth-century reliquary of Sainte Foy, patron saint of Conques, apparently at origin a Roman statue of a man (Foy was a woman), repurposed to hold Foy's relics and covered with gems to show her value.  Many of these gems may have come from jewels people donated to show their gratitude to Foy when she healed them (she was particularly known for healing blindness and diseases of the eye).  In the stories, if someone came to be healed but carefully left their rings at home (so Foy wouldn't claim them), their hands would swell unbearably the next time they wore the withheld rings.  A quick return visit to Conques would be needed.

Gemstones could also have what we would call magical powers.  The proper gem placed under the tongue, or dipped in liquid that one then drank, or placed on the body could supposedly heal disease, or reveal a secret (like adultery), or protect travelers, or help a mother in childbirth.  It was agreed that these gems might lose their potency with time, so there are accounts of priests blessing them or putting them on the altar or anointing them with special herbs to revive their power.

The powerful had much of what we would call their liquid wealth tied up in gemstones.  Women wore highly valuable necklaces, and rings set with jewels were frequent gifts from the wealthy to their closest associates, or gifts made in response to a special service.

Diamonds were extremely rare in the Middle Ages and highly valued; most diamonds in more modern times have come from deep African mines.  Other precious stones included rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals, and amethysts, plus pearls, which are actually not stones at all, although they are minerals.  Most of these precious jewels can now be created in the laboratory, but of course they were not then.  Medieval people also valued what were considered semi-precious stones (the distinction between precious and semi-precious went back to antiquity), like topaz, lapis lazuli, jade, beryl, and tourmaline.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024


For more on saints and kings 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.

Miracle Stories, Part 2

 In my previous post, I discussed miracle stories, the kind that would be collected at a shrine to extol the power of the local saint in healing the sick.  But how about saints like Mary, who were not nearly as closely tied to a specific locale?  (Though she too would have special veneration in certain places; the most important healing shrine today, that of Lourdes, is dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes.)

Miracle stories of the Virgin would be told and retold in many places.  Although she was entirely capable of healing, many of her miracle stories involved other sorts of intervention in human affairs.  At one time modern scholars tended to be a little embarrassed by some of these stories, and tried to pass them off as the superstitious tales of the unlettered.  But these were stories told by monks and clergymen.

They may have been embarrassing (now) because a lot of them lacked what you might call a clear moral lesson.  Rather, they emphasized the power of the Virgin in helping those who called on her.  In one story, a knight on the way to a tournament stopped at a shrine to Mary to pray, and he prayed so long and so hard that he forgot all about the tournament.  In the evening, he proceeded into the town where it had been held to find a place to stay and was shocked to be heralded as winning the tournament!  It turned out that Mary had been so impressed by his piety that she put on armor, took his horse and lance, and fought disguised as him, winning the prize.

Okay, you can see why some scholars would rather not talk about this as the product of learned priests.  In another story, a criminal, caught and deservedly condemned to death, prayed so hard to the Virgin that she came to the gallows where he was to be hung and, when the trap door opened to drop him and break his neck, she held him up.  After a few hours the authorities realized there was a miracle going on (man with a noose around his neck hovering, unhurt, in the air) and carefully lowered him and set him free.  In this story at least the criminal was reformed, having learned his lesson, and lived the rest of his life very virtuously.

So what is going on?  These were stories both about the power of the saint and stories to tell sinners that anyone can turn to the saints for help.  The greatest sin has always been despair, feeling that you are so evil that you are beyond redemption (which of course requires pride in one's wickedness).  These stories say that anyone, even knights (routinely branded as sinful) and criminals, could count on mercy if it was sought with a truly contrite heart.  Mary took the role especially of the mother who always will love you, no matter what.  (That's a medieval wooden statue of her below.)

 

Other saints would also listen even to sinners.  In fact, a lot of miracle stories were quite subversive, with those in authority, both secular lords and church leaders, being given their comeuppance by the saint.  For example, at Conques (see previous post), Saint Foy routinely broke the chains of escaped criminals, and when the monks tried to lock the church doors to keep poor pilgrims out, she swung the doors open herself.  Not just sinners but the poor and downtrodden were depicted in the miracle stories as helped by the saints.

The New Testament parallels were entirely deliberate.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


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.

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


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.

Conques

One of the loveliest medieval villages in France is Conques.  It was a major stop on the pilgrimage route from Vézelay to Santiago.  Efforts have been made to link the town's name to the cockle shell that was the emblem of pilgrims.  The medieval bridge at the bottom of the village's hill is still called the "Romey" bridge because pilgrims (locally called Romeys, even though they were going to Spain rather than Rome) headed (and head) across it.  (In fact, cars still use it.)

There are a lot of tourists and modern pilgrims in Conques, but once the tour buses leave it is still a stunning place.  The village is dominated by the old abbey church. The monks had the bones of Saint Foy ("Saint Faith"), supposedly a girl who was martyred by the pagan Roman governor because she wouldn't give up her Christian faith.

In fact, unlike most French churches, Conques still has the relics of their saint.  She was hidden during the French Revolution and is now in a little museum.  The golden reliquary is in the shape of a seated person, with a head that appears to be that of a man from Late Antiquity.  It is encrusted with semi-precious stones.

The monastery of Conques claimed to have been founded by Charlemagne (unlikely, as Charlemagne founded no monasteries), and "proved" it by carving Charlemagne on the front of their church.  They also had a curious silver object (probably really from around the year 1100) that I would say looks like the letter V, but they called "Charlemagne's A."  According to the monks, Charlemagne listed the 24 best monasteries in his empire (the medieval alphabet had 24 letters, not 26, because I and J were the same letter, as were U and V) and gave them each a silver letter to show it.  Conques naturally got the A, as best of all.  When asked why, if Charlemagne had been handing out letters, no one else seemed to have them, the monks responded by saying that other houses were too embarrassed to admit that were (for example) way down at X or Y, or even worse, not even on the 24-best list at all.

The monks had Foy's bones because, they said, the (other) church that had had them since Late Antiquity didn't respect her properly.  The monks sent one of their number who pretended to join that church, stole the relics, and miraculously wasn't spotted as he fled (because of course she wanted to leave).

Because Foy was martyred as a girl, twelfth-century accounts say she still is playful and likes to play tricks on people who might not be properly reverent.  Her particular focus is eyes--she will blind evil-doers and restore the sight of those blinded by evil-doers.  If someone came to Conques to seek healing without bringing any of the jewels she expected in return, she might do something like make their hand swell the next time they wore the withheld rings.

Foy also was subversive (a truculent teenager?).  Any noble lord or high official in the church who did something that harmed a poor person was in trouble.  Even her own monks did not get off scot-free, according to twelfth-century accounts.  When they started locking up the church at night to keep out the pilgrims (fearing they would steal the golden reliquary), she broke the locks to let the pilgrims in.

Conques is definitely worth a visit.  Be sure not to miss the treasury/museum with Foy's reliquary.  I knew she was looking after me when my retina detachment surgery was scheduled for a Catholic hospital and the nurses made  me remove my rings before the surgery.  I didn't dare tell Foy I didn't believe in her until after I was healed (fortunately I got both my rings and my vision back). 

© C. Dale Brittain 2018


For more on monasticism, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.