Wheat

 Wheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet, bread.  Planting wheat around the world requires clearing off other plants and trees, to be replaced by fields of food.  Now in 2022, the war in Ukraine is disrupting wheat growing, a real problem because Ukraine has been a major provider of wheat to third-world countries.  Wheat production has really expanded world-wide in the last two or three generations, due to modern fertilizers and improved hybrids and farming methods, but the danger of relying too much on one ubiquitous crop is dealing with its absence.

Wheat has been cultivated for close to 12,000 years, starting in the Middle East.  Without agriculture, you really cannot have cities (or civilization), because you need a reliable crop that will feed a lot of people without everyone having to go out and hunt and gather every couple of days, said hunting and gathering requiring that people be fairly widely spread out, so they don't exhaust local resources.

Medieval wheat was primarily winter wheat, planted in the fall, sprouting but then lying dormant through the winter, ready to start growing for real as soon as it warms up in the spring.  It would be harvested around July.  One can also plant wheat in the spring, but the most common spring-planted grains were oats, rye, and barley, barley primarily around the Mediterranean, rye and oats in more northerly climates.  You can make bread out of any of these, but it was uniformly agreed that it was inferior to wheat bread.  For one thing, those grains don't have as much gluten, meaning bread wouldn't rise nearly as well.

Farm work was thus spread out, some grain planted in the spring, wheat harvested in the summer, non-wheat grains harvested in early fall, wheat planted in late fall.  The three-field system of crop rotation, where one of the three fields lies fallow every year to theoretically regenerate itself, thus provided work spread over the months and a fall-back if there was a disastrous wheat harvest.

(People with ceoliac disease, intolerance to gluten, would have been in serious trouble in the Middle Ages.  There was no "gluten-free" aisle at the grocery store, and for that matter no grocery store.)

Wheat is derived from wild grasses, bred over the millennia to have more seed heads (which is why modern wheat needs a lot of fertilizer) and to have the seed heads not easily break away from the stem.  This makes it easier to harvest, whereas wild grasses have the seed heads break loose and disperse if the stalk is disturbed.  This is fine for wild grasses spreading themselves, but it makes for a difficult harvest.

Wheat thus had to be threshed and winnowed to get the seeds free of the stalks and hulls.  Threshing required beating it once in a barn, to break the seeds free, and winnowing, that is separating seeds from hulls.  On a windy day winnowing could be achieved by tossing the wheat and hulls in the air so the lighter chaff would blow away.

Because it needs no refrigeration, wheat could be easily stored.  The problem was keeping out mice and rats.  Medieval cities tried to stockpile grain against bad harvests.  With wheat, the grain, the food, is also the seed for next year's planting, so if there was a bad harvest there was always the unenviable choice of eating the grain now, to keep from starving, and then having little to plant, meaning starving next year.

Wheat stalks were valuable in the Middle Ages, because they were an excellent source of thatch for thatched roofs.  Modern wheat no longer has the very tall stalks it did then, because it has been deliberately bred for shorter stalks (to put more energy into the seeds instead of the stalk).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Families and Monasteries

 As I have discussed earlier, monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries) could live in uninterrupted silence, separate from the affairs of the world, engrossed in prayer and contemplation.'

But medieval families were very much involved in monasteries.  Even though a monk supposedly gave up his fleshly family for the family of brother-monks under the fatherly direction of the abbot (abba just means father), there were numerous ways that non-monastic members of a family could be involved with the monastery.

First and perhaps most important, for most monasteries the monks had all joined as boys.  The parents gave their child as what was called a "bloodless sacrifice," hoping to save his soul and theirs as well.  They might never see the boy again, or at least not for many years, and they were expected to make a sizeable gift when he was accepted as a novice.  Although the boy would not officially become a monk until he made his own decision to do so in his teens, in practice few left the cloister.

In making their son a novice monk, an "oblate" as he was called (the word means "offering"), the family was thus closely involved with the monastery.  In a number of cases virtual dynasties would be established, as a boy would be placed in the same monastery where his uncle was already a monk, someone for whom he might indeed be named (indicating, as other evidence also makes clear, that parents were not just waiting until they saw how many children they were going to have and then dumped the excess into a monastery).  When he grew up, he might welcome a nephew of his own into the cloister.

Even without having a family member in a monastery, family members might try to establish a connection with it over the generations, choosing a particular house to which to make repeated pious gifts over the years, to ensure that the monks would be praying for them.  These days tracing a family's history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can often be accomplished by reading through the records of a particular monastery in which family members repeatedly appear, either making gifts or trying to reclaim the gifts made by the previous generation.

There are also instances in which a family committed what might be considered dynastic suicide, having everybody join the church, the males going into a monastery, the females into a nunnery.  This was the case with the family of Bernard of Clairvaux, the best known member of the twelfth-century Cistercian order.  He had been intended for a knightly life, but at a certain point, seized with religious fervor, he and a group of his friends all joined the monastery as young adults.

His family's initial reaction was shock, but soon all his brothers (with their wives), his sisters, his parents, and an uncle all joined the church (the uncle became Grandmaster of the Templars).  Originally the family members told the youngest son that he was going to stay a knight and carry on the family dynasty, but after a few years he announced he was not going to forgo Paradise just to carry on some lineage, and he too became a monk.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Saint Benedict

Benedictine monasticism was the dominant form of monasticism in the Middle Ages.  But who was Benedict and why did he get a whole lot of monasteries following his Rule?

As I discussed earlier, monasticism began in the third century in Egypt, as first Saint Anthony, then men following him, then ultimately women began retreating from the ordinary life of the comfortable cities of late antiquity to try to lead a more austere life, in conscious imitation of the lives of the Apostles.  Monasticism reached western Europe at the end of the fourth century when Martin, bishop of Tours, founded the monastery of Marmoutier (the name means "Martin's monastery"--he didn't name it, but others named it in his honor).

Any group of people living together need some sort of agreement on what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to behave, ideally put in writing.  Monks were no different, so rules for monastic life began to be written almost as soon as there were monasteries.  From the fifth through the eighth centuries there were multiple different rules in use in western Europe, some more detailed than others, some harsher than others, but the one that eventually came to dominate was that written by Saint Benedict (d. 547).

Benedict was Italian, usually called "of Nursia" for his hometown (in the Umbria region).  His name means "well spoken" or "blessed."  He is supposed to have had a twin sister, Scholastica.  (You can figure out her name yourself.)

He wasn't a saint yet when he wrote his famous Rule.  He was abbot of the monastery of Montecassino, in Italy.  (Montecassino was bombed by the Americans during World War II.  They thought, mistakenly, that Nazis and munitions were there.  Let's not talk about it.)  He wanted a Rule for his monks that would be clear, fair, and firm, not too harsh but also not too easy going.  He was inspired in part by the slightly earlier so-called Rule of the Master.

Benedict's Rule laid out the daily round of prayers and work (he assumed his monks would be growing much of their own crops), specified appropriate food and clothing, and told what should happen when a monk strayed or even ran away--he would be treated with both justice and mercy.  A good deal of the Rule covers the responsibilities of the abbot, who was a father to the brothers (monks), and throughout there is a strong emphasis on humility.

Although there was no effort to make this rule official, it gradually became adopted at a number of monasteries over the following centuries.  Every monastery made additions to it to suit their own circumstances, but the original was often read aloud to the monks on a regular basis.  Both Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious, urged Frankish monasteries to adopt it.  They were influenced by the abbot Benedict of Aniane, who strongly identified with his namesake from four centuries earlier.

The main monastic orders of the twelfth century, the Cistercians and Cluniacs, were Benedictine, in that they tried to follow Benedict's Rule--and got into disagreements over what Benedict would really have meant.  Some monasteries in the thirteenth century called themselves members of the Benedictine Order, because they followed Benedictine Rule without belonging to a larger organization, but there wasn't really much of an order, nothing like the Cistercian and Cluniac Orders.

This image is the twelfth-century monastery of Paray-le-Monial, of the Cluniac order.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Medieval Lent

 We are now in the season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter.  Forty days is always a significant period in the Bible; Noah after all had to build an ark because it would rain for 40 days and 40 nights.  These 40 days were intended to be a time of fasting, contemplation, and forsaking pleasures.  The idea of "mardi gras," "Fat Tuesday," a day to be hog-wild just before the beginning of Lent, is a more recent development.

In the Middle Ages, Lent was taken seriously.  Knights were not supposed to fight.  Married couples were not supposed to have sex.  Everyone was supposed to give up luxuries like meat.  Now I'm sure that fighting and sex and meat-eating still went on, but that was the ideal.  Late winter/early spring is at any rate an excellent time to celebrate eating very simply, because the food stored away in the autumn would be mostly gone, and it would still be too early for new crops.  There might at best still be a final ham left saved for a good dinner.  Easter lamb dinners doubtless began because the lambing season is right around Easter.

Because one was not supposed to eat meat during Lent, one could instead substitute fish.  Fish, because it came from cold-blooded creatures, was always considered inferior to meat from mammals according to medieval people.  They would be stunned at the promotion of the delicacy of king crab legs as appropriate for Lent.  For that matter, medieval people were supposed to give up meat for the whole 40 days, not just the Fridays when restaurants now advertise their gourmet Lenten fish fries.

 

Lent finishes up with Holy Week, which commemorates events in Jesus's final week as a mortal, starting with Palm Sunday, when he was supposed to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, greeted by people waving palm fronds. Thursday was the Last Supper, in which Jesus urged his followers to eat bread and wine in commemoration of him (the origins of Communion) and washed everyone's feet as a sign of humility.

Walking around the Middle East in sandals always got one's feet dirty, so washing one's feet or having it done was an important activity, just as getting a shoe shine once was in the US, before the wholesale switch to sneakers/athletic shoes or rough boots.  Medieval monasteries replicated this foot washing, having poor people lined up and ready to have the monks minister to them.

 Interestingly, the Last Supper looks a lot like a Passover meal, and Jesus had supposedly come to Jerusalem to be there for Passover, but Passover was celebrated on a Saturday, not a Thursday.  One of the mysteries of trying to draw the historical tidbits out of gospels written a generation or two after the fact.

Friday of Holy Week of course was the day of the Crucifixion, a day of especial solemnity and personal deprivation, before the excitement and renewal of Easter itself on Sunday.  Medieval people for the most part did not go to church very often, but if they ever went Easter was the day to do it, as it still is for many modern people.  Indeed, the Lateran Council of 1215 ordained that all Christians should attend church on Easter.  "He is risen" is an extremely powerful message and starts the real season of spring.

Note: medieval people did not have chocolate Easter eggs.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Count Scar

 As a historian, I study real medieval people, but my medieval-themed fantasy is mostly populated by people who, I hope, will immediately engage with the modern reader because they are like modern people even if in a fantastic setting.  But I've got exceptions, books that are still fantasy (and I hope engaging!) but are closer to real historical fiction.  The first of these is Count Scar.

I wrote it with my husband, Robert A. Bouchard.  It's set in an alternate version of France in the thirteenth century.  The setting is pretty close to medieval reality, but there is also working magic, studied by priests (just as all branches of knowledge were studied by real medieval priests, the reason why the first universities were attached to cathedrals).

Galoran, the scarred count of the title, believes that his useful life is over once his days as captain in the imperial army have ended.  He has little more to do than hang around his older brother's castle, where it's clear his sister-in-law has no use for him.  The scar on his cheek, from an old burn, means he believes that no woman will want him.

This all changes abruptly when he inherits the castle and county of Peyrefixade, in southern France.  As the only thing he's ever had that is really his, he clings determinedly to Peyrefixade, even while learning that dangerous magic-working heretics covet the castle, which harbors dark secrets.

And the castle comes with a spiritual advisor, named Melchior, of the magic-working Order of the Three Kings.  Supposedly their magic has been redeemed from the heretics, but can Galoran trust his new advisor?  For that matter, Melchior is unsure whether to trust him, as the threat of the Inquisition slowly rises.

The story has twists and turns, betrayals, sword fights, and a touch of romance.  We wrote it from the alternating viewpoints of the two main characters.  See if you can guess who wrote which chapter.  It's available as an ebook on all major ebook platforms; here's the Amazon link.

The theme of people who dislike or distrust each other still having to work together is continued in the sequel, Heretic Wind.  As well as the two main characters, Galoran and Melchior, there's a surprise new point of view character and other new faces to further complicate a story in which the Inquisition plays an even larger role.  It's available both as an ebook and a paperback.

Both Count Scar and Heretic Wind are available bundled together in a big fat omnibus called, appropriately enough, Galoran and Melchior.  It's available as an ebook, a large-format paperback available wherever paperbacks are found, and now as a limited edition hardcover from Amazon.

It's something of a challenge to write characters who are more like real medieval people than modern people wearing medieval outfits (which one sees too often in historical fiction), and still have readers relate to the characters.  As well as the Count Scar books, I've published three books that are retellings of real medieval tales, trying to keep much of the original flavor while making the situations understandable to a modern audience:  Ashes of Heaven (based on Tristan and Isolde stories), The Sign of the Rose (based on a medieval story called Romance of the Rose), and The Knight of the Short Nose (based on the Guillaume d'Orange epic cycle).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Paper

 We take paper for granted.  It's all around us, piling up on the desk or table (or chairs or floor...) in the form of memos, magazines, books, and random jottings.  We also use paper for cleaning, that is paper towels and bathroom tissue, to say nothing of cardboard boxes.  Remember when computers promised we would soon have a "paperless office"?  Yeah, like that's going to happen.  But medieval people did not have paper before the thirteenth century.

The word paper derives from papyrus, but it's actually quite different.  Papyrus, used in the ancient Roman empire, is made from papyrus reeds, which are sticky on the inside, slit and pressed together.  The reeds grow along the Nile.  With the breakdown of Roman trade routes and the rise of Islam (sixth-seventh centuries), the West stopped having easy access to papyrus and went over exclusively to parchment, except for the popes, who kept using their carefully hoarded store of papyrus until the eleventh century.  Parchment is made from thin, carefully prepared animal skins (generally sheep).  Parchment had been around for centuries but had not been used for letters or records for the most part, really only being used if something had to be rolled (like a scroll).  It was more expansive than papyrus had been and was considered less elegant.  But parchment survives much better in Europe's damp climate than does papyrus, which can disintegrate when wet.

Parchment remained expensive in the Middle Ages, but its durability means that medieval books and legal documents written on it still exist, unless burned or chewed by rats or otherwise destroyed.

For quick jottings and for writing rough drafts, medieval people used wax tablets and a stylus.  Because parchment was expensive, and all books had to be copied by hand, only the wealthy (including churches) could afford them.  It wasn't worth learning to read for most of the population.

Enter paper.  Paper is made from cellulose fibers, from wood or rags (cotton or linen especially).  The fibers are boiled out (with chemicals), drained across a mesh, then pressed together and dried.  The process was invented in China in the second century AD and spread to the Muslim world in the eighth or ninth century.  Western Europe learned it from the Arabs in the thirteenth century, and by the fourteenth century the use of paper, made from linen or cotton fibers, was widespread.

Because paper was so much cheaper than parchment, books became substantially less expensive.  It became worth it to be literate, because it was easier to own something worth reading.  This especially was true with the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press.  Those writing on paper tended to be much sloppier than their predecessors writing on parchment, when they carefully wrote each letter.  The high rag paper of the late Middle Ages has stood up very well over the centuries, but sometimes the handwriting has one scratching one's head, unlike the neat eleventh- and twelfth-century hands.

The production of rag paper became industrialized fairly quickly.  It stayed essentially the same until the nineteenth century, when wood pulp began to be used for paper.  It was even cheaper than rag paper and was cranked out in paper mills all over the country.  Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century process of making wood pulp paper was very acidic, and over the decades the paper started to disintegrate.  An old paperback you might find at the back of a shelf is probably more likely to fall apart than a fourteenth-century account book.  (In recent decades lower acid ways of making paper have been developed.)

With the advent of wood pulp paper, meanwhile, paper became so cheap that it could be used for throwaways, tissue, paper towels, sanitary products, and the like.  For these medieval people used rags (or handkerchiefs) which would then have to be washed.

Paper mills today recycle a lot of paper, which means fewer pine trees have to be cut down, but they understandably don't want used tissue.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Countries and dynasties

 It's easy to think of countries as self-evident units.  After all, England was a country in the Middle Ages, with its borders pretty much the same as they are now (well, that's cheating, most of its borders are ocean).  France was a country, and although big parts of what's now Belgium were part of France in the Middle Ages, and the medieval kingdom didn't include much along its eastern edge that's now firmly part of France (Alsace, the Jura region, Provence), most of what's France now was France then.

But a lot of borders and even countries are due to dynastic events in the Middle Ages (or early modern period).  For example, we think of Spain as a country, with a little western bit being Portugal, but if Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castile had not married in the fifteenth century (and for that matter driven the Muslims out of Grenada), the Iberian peninsula might have a lot more countries on it than it does now.

Even the division between France and Germany is due to family dynamics.  Charlemagne's grandsons, Lothar, Louis, and Charles, decided to divide up what had been a single Frankish territory, rather than continuing to slug it out as to who got to be the heir.  Lothar got to call himself emperor and got a slice down the middle of Frankish territory, including what are now parts of Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine, much of Switzerland, Provence, and a claim to Italy, including Rome, where emperors had to be crowned (the Italians had different ideas, but that's another story).  This lasted for a little while, long enough for the name "Lothar's land" (Lotharingia) to become attached to, and give its name to, Lorraine (Alsace had long had its own name).

Louis and Charles went along with this division at the 843 Treaty of Verdun, but before too long they decided it was Not Fair for Lothar and his son Lothar II to hog both Aachen (Charlemagne's capital) and Rome, to say nothing of the imperial title.  So they ganged up on him and divided Frankish territory between just the two of them, more or less along the Rhône-Saône river system, meaning Provence stayed under the German kings, even though it was culturally more French than anything, and even though Alsace and Lorraine continued to be a major source of contention for the next thousand years, as the Rhine (east side of Alsace) seemed more like a natural boundary than the line drawn on the map.

Then there are the countries that never quite made it, due to dynasties dying out.  An excellent example is Sedan, in northern France, in the Ardennes near the Belgian border, more or less where the Champagne and Lorraine regions meet.  You probably never heard of it, but in slightly different circumstances it could have been a much bigger and more powerful principality than Monaco or even Luxembourg.

Sedan is now noted for its castle, described as the biggest in Europe by the local tourist bureau, which may indeed be true (though Stirling in Scotland is also extremely large, as are some other royal castles).  Sedan's castle is certainly enormous.  It was begun in the late Middle Ages and added to and modified right up to the nineteenth century.  This model will give you an idea of its size.

 

The interior courtyard will also give you some idea of the scale of the place.  The multistory building was intended both as a garrison for troops and as a place to store weapons and munitions.  It is now a luxury hotel.

 

It is not only huge but built with enormously thick walls.  Succeeding generations of lords kept making them thicker and thicker.  Cannon balls didn't stand a chance.

For a while the powerful lords of Sedan flourished.  In the sixteenth century they converted to Protestantism and established a college for Protestants.  The town had a profitable textile industry and book publishing industry.  But then, in the seventeenth century, they ran out of heirs, and the principality was eventually absorbed into the French kingdom.  If the family dynamic had been slightly different, they might have become their own country in the early nineteenth century, when western Europe's boundaries were (sort of) settled in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.

But Sedan was now firmly part of France.  The French appreciated those heavy walls.  But even medieval walls, maintained and added to over the generations, cannot by themselves win all battles, even though the castle was never actually taken.  In the battle of Sedan in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, the outnumbered French army was in the city streets, being fired on from the surrounding hills by the superior German forces.  The castle never fell, but emperor Napoleon III surrendered, rather than see all his troops slaughtered.

Sedan is worth visiting.  Spend the day.  There's a lot to see, and not many tourists.

An interesting book about how medieval dynasties shaped their countries' histories is by Robert Bartlett, Blood Royal (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  (He talks about Charlemagne's grandsons, and a great many other royal dynasties, but not Sedan's lords, because they never actually called themselves royal.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval castles and nations, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.