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!

Lapis lazuli

Medieval artists loved brilliant blue.  Stained glass windows included exquisite blue glass (due to trace amounts of copper and other minerals), and manuscript illustrations (called illumination) often included bright blue color.  The Madonna, for example, was routinely shown dressed in blue.

The problem for manuscript illumination was getting a pigment that would make that brilliant blue.  The only way they could do it at that time was to use lapis lazuli, a mineral mined in just one area of Afghanistan.  When ground up, this mineral would produce a color called ultramarine.  It was highly sought after in western Europe, meaning it had to be traded over several thousand miles.

Obviously this was far too expensive to use in other than very small amounts.  Clothing, for example, even expensive luxury clothing, could not be colored ultramarine.  Instead the best medieval people could manage for their clothes was indigo, dark blue, which could be made from certain plants.

Even though lapis lazuli was as valuable as gold, it was extremely desirable.  Recently archaeological excavations at a former nunnery at Dalheim, in Germany, has discovered miniscule traces of lapis lazuli on the teeth of a woman's skeleton.  (Her teeth actually look pretty good--no cavities!)

It is quite clear where the traces came from.  The nunnery, like most religious houses, copied and illuminated books.  Religious books would have luxurious illustrations that required bright blue.  An eleventh-century nun worked on a book's illustrations, doubtless bending close over the very small image she was creating, and kept licking her brush to give it a narrow point as she delicately painted the blue bits.  Tiny flecks of lapis lazuli became embedded in the plaque on her teeth, where she would not have noticed them (the modern archaeologists looked at her teeth with a microscope).

The nunnery of Dalheim and its manuscripts were destroyed long ago, probably during the Thirty Years War in the sixteenth century.  The foundations of its small church and the skeletons in its cemetery are about all that remain.  It is indicative of how little we know about the Middle Ages, in spite of everyone's best efforts.

This case also is suggestive of the activities of medieval women.  It used to be thought that all women, even nuns, were passive and uneducated, and that all art and writing was done by men.  This is now known to be false, and the example of the eleventh-century nun (it's pretty easy to tell if a skeleton is a man or a woman) is a further indication of the artistry of medieval women.  It's too bad that we will never now be able to see the manuscript she was working on.

The discovery of the flecks of blue on the skeletal teeth was carried out as part of the larger project Science of the Human Past.  Here's the link to a news article about the discovery.

(For any readers just starting to look at my blog now, I've put in links above to a lot of other entries you may find of interest.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Women in the Middle Ages

There is a popular idea that women in the Middle Ages were marginalized, forced to be subservient, under the thumb of the men.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Medieval women actually had much more rights and autonomy in the Middle Ages than women did either in ancient Rome or in the modern period (before around the 1920s).  They certainly did not have what we would now call "equal rights," but then neither did most men.  Some careers, like the priesthood, were closed to women, but this did not keep them from having a great deal of influence.

Christianity stressed that women and men were equal in the eyes of God, which put them well ahead of the women in ancient pagan Rome.

As I noted before in a post on medieval marriage, the heart of a valid marriage was the consent of the two parties, which meant that a woman could not be married against her will, any more than could a man.  In practice of course young women would be heavily pressured by their relatives into choosing whom the relatives thought an appropriate spouse, but then young men experienced similar pressure.

Although women could not be priests, they could become nuns.  In the early Middle Ages, it was fairly common to have a double monastery, one house for men and another for women, with a single head--and the head would be an abbess, a woman, because it was considered wrong for women to be under a male abbot.  Even abbesses who only ruled over women in their nunneries could and did influence men.  Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century abbess of a German nunnery, who had mystic visions greatly admired by men, wrote to bishops and even to popes to straighten them out on key details.

(Hildegard also wrote a lot of really lovely music for her nuns, which is still being performed and recorded.  She has recently been adopted by New Age folks, which Hildegard, a traditionalist Christian, would have found appalling.)

Women were as likely as men to know how to read and write, and aristocratic women taught their children, both boys and girls, their first lessons.  (Literacy was low by our standards, but it was not determined by sex.)

It was appreciated that women were weaker physically than men, but this was taken as a reason to see them as spiritually stronger--they had more to overcome (Peter Abelard especially made this point).  If some argued that sin first came into the world via a woman, Eve, then others argued equally vehemently that salvation came into the world via Mary, because Jesus would not have been able to save humans if he had not had human flesh, which he got from her--and, in addition, women were the first to see the risen Christ.

Inheritance went preferentially to sons, rather than daughters, but girls were not excluded from their parents' inheritance, and in the absence of brothers they could inherit, not just land and property but castles and lordships.  Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine by heredity and queen of both France and England (successively, click here for more detail), ruled Aquitaine in her own right.  In the early twelfth century, when Henry I of England was dying without sons, he named his daughter Mathilda as king (not queen) of England to succeed him.  She spent the next twenty years fighting her cousin Stephen, who thought he was the rightful king of England, but there wasn't any doubt that a women could be ruling kings.

In nineteenth-century England, married women's property became their husband's property, but this was not true in the Middle Ages.  If a medieval woman wanted to sell or give away her own property, she was free to do so, although she would generally have her husband formally agree.  He on the other hand could not give away or sell her property and would need her consent to do anything with his own.

Interestingly, medieval spouses did not inherit from each other.  Among the aristocracy, widows generally had a right to a third of their late husband's property for their lifetime, but they could not sell it or give it away, because it wasn't theirs.  Property instead was inherited by the children of a couple, or in the absence of children, by the relatives of the late couple, her property going to her relatives, his to his.  Widows could and did become regents for their minor children, effectively ruling great estates, even duchies, even if in the name of an infant son (see more here on regency).

In many occupations, like farming, husbands and wives worked side by side.  In the guilds, women could become masters, even though most of the masters were men--only the guilds of professors and merchants were closed to women, and on the other hand men couldn't join the ribbon-makers' guild.  Women ran the castles, as everyone knew, including the titular lords of the castles.

Click here to see more on medieval women.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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

Medieval Monasteries

What's monasticism?  The institution of monasteries.  What's a monastery?  It's a place where monks live.  So what's a monk?

Literally a monk, "monachus" in medieval Latin, was someone who lived by himself, solitary (from the root mono-, one).  And the first monks were indeed solitary men, hermits we would now call them, starting in the third century in Egypt.  At the time there were a number of comfortably settled Christian communities in Egypt, and Anthony, monasticism's founder, thought that it had become too easy just to be a "Christian on Sunday" and headed out into the desert in search of a simpler, purer, life.

The problem with hermits is that someone can just make up his own rules, and it can be hard for others to tell the God-inspired recluse from the crazed vagrant.  Quickly hermits started gathering in groups, where they could help and correct each other, under the authority of an elected leader, the abbot (from abba, meaning Father).  These were the first real monasteries.

The New Testament is full of radical calls to give up one's possessions and one's comfortable life.  For the last two thousand years, there have been periodic waves of enthusiasm for doing so.  In the Middle Ages, these most commonly led to new, stricter versions of monasticism.

At any self-respecting monastery, the monks gave up all the comforts and pleasures of ordinary life.  They lived in common, sharing their possessions rather than owning anything of their own--as the Bible says the original Apostles did.  They slept in a dormitory with skimpy bedding.  They all wore the same standard-issue robes and had their beards and heads shaved, leaving just a circle of short hair around a shaved crown.

They ate a vegetarian diet, with no meat, though they did have cheese and eggs and, occasionally, fish. They spent their days in prayer, in singing the psalms, and in reading and copying books, both religious books and books of history, including works of classical antiquity.  Indeed, we would know virtually nothing about classical (pagan) Rome if it were not for archaeology and for medieval monks copying their writings from fragile papyrus onto more durable parchment.

Although early monks were all men, women too soon wanted to become monks (as discussed more here).  Nunneries, monasteries for women (now often called convents), soon became established, although for most of the Middle Ages there were far more monks than nuns.  Men thought that nuns should have an easier regimen than monks, more blankets on the bed, a richer diet, less hopping up in the middle of the night for the liturgy.  The nuns disagreed.  If men could be strict, they wanted to be just as strict.

Both men and women gave up marriage, sex, and family in "converting" (as it was called) to the monastic life.  Once you'd made your vows, you couldn't pop home for a vacation or change your mind.  A runaway monk or nun, with a shaved head, was pretty obvious.

Parents might offer a child to a monastery or nunnery, knowing they might never see that child again.  One sometimes sees mistaken suggestions that parents disposed of excess children in this way, but in the relatively underpopulated Middle Ages, when all children were cherished, this was quite a wrench, done both as a sacrifice on the parents' part (a large gift was also expected to accompany the child) and to give the child a good shot at salvation.

People could and did convert to the monastic life as adults, often in widowhood, but sometimes in enthusiastic young adulthood.  If someone was married, the spouse also had to "leave the world" for the monastic life.

The wealthy who did not want to become monks and nuns themselves often made gifts.  "The monks are so holy, they lead such a simple life of poverty so far from civilization, I think I'll go drop in on them and make them rich presents."  The wealthy never understood why monks were not as enthusiastic about this as they were.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity and here for more on medieval monasticism.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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