Medieval jewelry

 Without easy access to African diamond mines, Asian pearl fisheries, and the like (if these even existed then, which they didn't), medieval people had far fewer jewels accessible than do modern westerners, who can walk into a jewelry store and pick something out.  If you like, you can even pay heed to the Diamond Sellers of America (or whatever they're called) and spend six months' salary on an engagement ring.

But medieval people valued jewelry and precious metals just as much as we do, for a combination of their beauty and their rarity.  They had gold and silver but in small amounts, the silver mostly from German mines, and a lot of it old, constantly reused material that went back to the Romans.  Coins were officially silver, though there was always a certain amount of "baser" metal mixed in.  Gold, valued more than silver then as now because it doesn't tarnish, was used for jewelry but rarely for coins.

We tend to think of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, but there are a lot of other jewels out there, a lot of which medieval people valued.  You don't hear as much these days about tourmaline, beryls, chalcedony, peridot, and carbuncles, but these are perfectly good kinds of jewels.  For that matter, carefully cut colored class made a nice jewel equivalent (and still does).

Jewels were worn decoratively by the very rich (as they still are), by both men and women.  Rings were highly valued, both as signs of display and as gifts.  We treat rings today as symbols exchanged between engaged or married couples, but they were also given in the Middle Ages to friends, to faithful followers, and to people who performed a special service.  Jewels could also be made into necklaces, but jeweled rings and brooches were more common, because you needed far fewer stones.

Jewels as signs of prestige of course decorated crowns and diadems.  In the stories, jewels were set into the swords of the elite, but this seems very unlikely.  Every piece of jewelry was of course unique, being hand-crafted from whatever stone or stones the jeweler had to work with.

Both precious metals and precious gems were used to honor God and the saints.  An exceptionally fine Gospel book would be decorated with images using thin layers of gold leaf.  Reliquaries would be decorated with jewels.  As I have discussed before, poverty in emulation of the humility of Christ was considered (potentially) holy, but when it came to glorifying the King of Kings, medieval people didn't hold back.

Reliquaries were embossed with gold and silver, as in this arm reliquary, and precious stones adorned them.  In the post-medieval period, a lot of reliquaries were robbed of their jewels or were melted down for their gold and silver, but we still have some of them in more or less pristine form.

These days churches have gone in a much simpler look, but in the Middle Ages they were meant to take your breath away with their beauty and decoration, including statues, paintings, and jeweled reliquaries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on the medieval decoration and sense of the holy, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Peasant rents

As I have discussed before, medieval peasants were not slaves.  By our standards they worked like dogs and died, worn out, at an age we would still consider young and fun.  But they had a perhaps surprising amount of control over their own lives, and in the High Middle Ages one might consider most of them agricultural tenants.

They paid rents, no more the slave of their landlord than people who rent an apartment now are the slave of their landlord.  The rents however were not the checks that we might write.  Rather, they were a mix of produce, other agricultural products (like wine or animals), manual labor, and coins.

A typical example is provided by a charter issued for the nunnery of Marcigny in 1104.  A widow named Rotrudis wanted to "take the habit" (as becoming a nun was called) and gave Marcigny all the land she had inherited from her father.  (Monasteries and nunneries expected entry gifts, because the monks or nun was going to be fed and clothed for the rest of their life.)  The land came complete with the peasants who lived on it.  They had been paying their rents to Rotrudis, and now they would pay them to the nunnery.  The charter spelled out what the nuns could expect to receive each year:  forty-two loaves of bread, forty-two bushels of oats, forty-two gallons of wine, four sheep, four piglets, four adult pigs, nine chickens (capons were specified), and twenty-three pennies.

(I note the recurring number 42--wasn't that supposed to be the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything"?  Credit The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

The peasants clearly had fairly prosperous farms, to be able to pay this amount in rent and have far more left to feed their families.  One will also note the mix of grain, animals, wine, and coin.  Although this particular charter did not mention labor dues, other charters from the same period often mentioned that a peasant family would send someone to work on the landlord's fields once or twice a week, or that the peasants might be expected to help with work at harvest time or provide carts for bringing the harvest from a distant field to the landlord.

Here the rents that Rotrudis had been receiving, and which the nuns would receive in the future, were spelled out in writing.  However, this was probably the first time that this had been done.  The peasants knew how much they owed.  Rotrudis knew, and presumably her father had known, back when the land in question had been his.  But since normally rent obligations were not written down (and the peasants would not have known how to read anyway), memory had to keep everyone honest.

One should also note that not all peasants were tenants.  Some held their property as "allods," land that they owned outright.  In practice, most peasants probably had some allodial land and rented other land, often from more than one landlord.  Memory was expected to keep track of a lot.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval peasants, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback!

Copper

Copper played a major role in the Middle Ages, both as part of the economy and as a marker of cultural exchange.  Copper of course had been mined and used for centuries.  Although not nearly as hard as iron and thus not as good for weapons (though copper can become hard and sharp if mixed with tin to become bronze), it is a very useful metal and relatively easy both to mine and to shape into tools.  It has been used for at least 10,000 years.

In the Middle Ages, copper was used for coins (coppers--modern pennies are an alloy today but used to be copper).  Silver was officially the main form of currency, but in practice most monetary exchange was in copper.  It was also used for all sorts of bowls, lamps, pots, pipes, jewelry, and the like, as well as for roofs and for decoration.  (Health tip:  a copper bracelet will not cure arthritis.)  It transmits heat very well (as well as electricity), meaning it's good for cook pots, and barnacles won't grow on it, meaning it is prized for cladding ships.

Sicily became a major medieval center of copper usage under Norman rule (eleventh-twelfth centuries).  Sicily itself did not have much in the way of copper mines--the main Mediterranean source of copper was Cyprus, which gave its name to copper (the Romans called the metal aes cyprium, the metal of Cyprus).  But the Sicilians both worked the metal extensively and imported all sorts of small useful objects from the Middle East, much of which they resold.

Arabic scientists had worked out a lot of the details on how copper could be worked and made into alloys.  The Sicilians both read these treatises and figured out on their own how to work and shape the metal.  They also absorbed a lot of Arabic ideas on alchemy.

Although we now think of "alchemy" as involving lead and gold, and being a bunch of nonsense, it was a major intellectual thread in Arabic and Christian thought in the Middle Ages.  It was a way of thinking about the nature of the physical world, how it's put together, how different kinds of material substances relate to each other.  (The word alchemy, like algebra, is from the Arabic, as are many other words that start al-.)

One of the ways that the Sicilians used copper was to make major decorated church doors, some of which still survive.  The Temple in Jerusalem was supposed to have had copper doors, and the idea had a great deal of appeal.  The Sicilian church doors were incised with alchemical symbols and ideas.

Copper, which starts as almost golden in color and becomes green as it is exposed to oxygen (verdigris), was seen as a symbol of one important theological discussion:  the relationship of God to His creation.  It was argued by many that God had created the earth, set it in motion, then stood back to see how it would do.  Copper symbolized this, starting as bright and golden, like God's initial creation, then becoming green, like the earth covered with growing plants.  Medieval thinkers loved metaphors and analogies.

Note:  Many of the ideas in this post were inspired by the work of Robin Reich of Columbia University.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017