Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US, so it's a good time to blog about the holiday.  It's a harvest festival, which of course has a very long history, a time to celebrate the harvest being successfully brought in and settling down for winter.  They had harvest festivals in the Middle Ages even though not Thanksgiving as we know it.  A common day for such festivals was Saint Martin's day, November 11.  (Incidentally, Canadian Thanksgiving comes earlier than the American one, usually celebrated on the day Americans celebrate Columbus Day.)

In the US we focus on the arrival of those we call the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts in 1620. The grocery store today, where people are coming to the realization that a 35 pound frozen turkey probably won't thaw by tomorrow, has adorable pictures of boys in buckle shoes and Indian maidens in buckskins interacting with cooked turkeys.  Well, it wasn't quite like that.  There's a reason that the descendants of the Massachusetts Indians of 1620 have been holding Days of Mourning at Plymouth on the last Thursday of November for fifty years now.

Initial interactions between the white arrivals and the local native Americans were (fairly) peaceful in the 1620s.  They do indeed seem to have celebrated together in 1621, after the Europeans had managed to survive for a year (or at least half of them did) and even get in a harvest.  They knew all too well that the first English settlers in Virginia, which was where they were heading before being blown off course, had all died, so just being alive was worth celebrating.  But the legacy of European-native American interactions, as the Massachusetts Indians learned soon enough, was one of oppression and genocide, as vast swatches of  the natives were killed off, either deliberately (right up through the later nineteenth century) or by disease.

Miscellaneous fun fact:  the people we know as Pilgrims didn't call themselves that.  That term only became applied some two centuries after their arrival in Plymouth.  The term (common in the Middle Ages) meant taking a trip to a holy site, which the Americas were not.  The English folks of 1620 were dissenters, people who disagreed with the Church of England and wanted a place where they could force their own beliefs on people without anyone telling them not to.  The term Puritan may work better.

Other miscellaneous funk fact:  the Puritans didn't call it a Thanksgiving.  Their feast only started being called that in the nineteenth century, when there was an effort to bring it out, buff it up, and present it as a time of Europeans and natives getting along well, as the realization started to dawn that maybe killing off all the "savages" had perhaps been the tiniest bit cruel.  In 1621 the Europeans called their feast a festival (and included such events as foot races and target shooting), because to them a "thanksgiving" would have required prayer and fasting, hard to do when you're eating a lot.

Now we've lost track of most of that history (or transmogrified it into adorable pictures), but Thanksgiving has become a good holiday in its own right.  It's important to take time to think about all the good things in one's life.  Even though Christmas decorations have been in the department stores for weeks, and Black Friday deals are all over the place, Thanksgiving is a good day to pause before getting all Christmas-frantic.  It's become a holiday without a lot of fanfare, but one where  families get together, eat special foods, and talk to each other.

Thanksgiving foods are almost all from the New World.  Turkeys of course are--the Puritans brought domestic turkeys, descendants of Mexican wild turkeys, on the Mayflower with them.  The corn for the cornbread stuffing is New World.  So are the cranberries in the cranberry relish, the potatoes, and the pumpkin in the pie.  Medieval people had feasts of course, but their dishes would have been very different.

The conversations around the Thanksgiving table are part of the holiday.  Grandparents are urged to pass on family stories.  There is great concern about how families are going to deal with sensitive political issues with weird old Uncle Frankie.  It's interesting that "conversations around the Thanksgiving table" are a big thing, but no one worries about conversations around the table at Easter or Christmas, much less around the barbecue on Fourth of July.  (Turkey makes one talkative?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Pilgrimage

Medieval pilgrimage was a way to atone for one's sins, a way to grow spiritually, a way to seek healing, and a way to get the heck out of town.

Pilgrimage began in the first centuries of Christianity, when the faithful from communities all around the Mediterranean decided to travel to Jerusalem, to "see the places where Christ's feed trod," as one writer put it.  Pebbles from various holy sites would be brought home as souvenirs.  Even after the Muslims took over the Holy Land, Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem continued.

Rome was the other major pilgrimage goal in the early Middle Ages, to the extent that the popular Old French term for pilgrims was "Romies," even if in fact they weren't headed for Rome.  Here one could visit the tombs of Saint Peter and Paul, perhaps get a glimpse of the pope (revered in the abstract as Peter's successor, on whom see more here), and pick up the bones of a purported martyr in the catacombs.

By the eleventh century, another major pilgrimage destination emerged, Santiago in northwest Spain.  This was where Saint James, Jesus's brother (or step-brother), had supposedly died after taking ship in the Holy Land, and sailing the length of the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast.  (Iago is the same name as rendered as James in English.)

Major pilgrimage routes quickly became established all across western Europe, leading to Santiago.  The best known starting point for this trip was Vézelay, in Burgundy (the interior of this early twelfth-century church is shown above).  The monks of Vézelay claimed to have the bones of Mary Magdalene.  She had supposedly also taken ship from the Holy Land, but unlike James she put in at the Riviera.  According to the monks of Vézelay, she was not suitably appreciated there, which is why they brought her bones to where they could be properly revered.

The Santiago pilgrim's route is still popular today, though few walk the whole distance (there are, I hear, regular buses to take modern pilgrims over the Pyrenees and across the long and dusty miles of northern Spain).  Medieval pilgrims, however, walked the whole thing, planning on about twenty miles a day.  Given that a lot were ill and going to seek healing, this is quite impressive.

Pilgrims on the way to Santiago wore badges in the shape of a cockleshell, the saint's emblem.  Churches on the pilgrimage route were built with very large enclosed porches, where pilgrims would sleep on the floor.

Someone accused of a crime could often get out of their richly deserved punishment by taking off on pilgrimage.  Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, went as a pilgrim to Rome five times, staying away until the excitement blew over (from such peccadillos as killing his wife).

Initially what we call Crusades were referred to as pilgrimages.  Those going on the journey wore the sign of the cross, rather than a cockleshell.  These armed journeys to the Holy Land were indeed treated as opportunities to see the land Christ's feet had trod, as well as to kill Muslims.

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