Bees

 Most people take honey bees for granted.  They make honey, we figure, and honey ends up in granola and shampoo and herbal tea, but we don't think much more about it.  In fact, something like a third of our food would not be possible without bees.

This is because a lot of our crop plants have to be pollinated, the fruits and nuts and vegetables (though not the grains).  They flower, but they don't set seed or fruit unless the flower is pollinated.  And unless we want a whole horde of people out there with little brushes, swiping pollen a flower at a time, we need bees to do it for us.

Medieval people understood this just fine.  Domesticated bees had already been around for several thousand years at the beginning of the Middle Ages.  Every medieval manor or village, every orchard had to have a hive of bees.  The bees, led by their queen, lived in it, and this was where they had their honey comb.  Beekeepers who knew how to keep from startling the bees (and who wore protective covering) would harvest the honey and keep the hive clean.  The bees thus served two main functions, pollinating fruits and vegetables and providing the only real source of sweetness in the medieval diet.  In addition, the wax of the honeycomb was used for high-grade candles in church.

There was a great deal of folklore associated with bees.  They were considered a symbol of hard work and industriousness, as we still use the expression, Busy as a bee.  The Merovingian kings of France of the fifth through eighth centuries used bees as their symbol, a symbol Napoleon borrowed to try to assert he was part of a thousand-year tradition.  A rural English tradition is that you have to "tell the bees" about any major life changing event, but it is not clear if this goes back to the Middle Ages.

Medieval philosophers thought that bees were born without feet, which of course is not true, although medieval bestiaries commonly repeated this idea.  This is because Isidore of Seville (writer of the late Merovingian era) said that the word apies, Latin for bee, came from a- (without) and -pies, meaning feet (which it doesn't).

Modern agriculture continues to depend on bees.  There are wild bees that will pollinate flowers, but the honey bee is really necessary, meaning it has become the basis of an industry, where bee keepers take their hives around to wherever pollination is needed.  "Colony collapse," the death of a hive due to mites or fungus, has been a real challenge to bee keepers in recent years.

It was quite fortuitous, but I posted this on what turned out to be World Bee Day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Cheese

 Cheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago.  Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth.  Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic acid in milk (though if one keeps drinking it all the time growing up, this intolerance is much less likely).  Cheese to the rescue!

To make cheese, fresh milk is deliberately curdled using rennet, which used to come from an animal's stomach lining.  The cow gives birth and starts producing milk, you kill the calf to have a tasty veal dinner, and now you have the calf's stomach lining as rennet to make cheese from the milk the cow continues to produce while you keep milking her.  (Note:  modern cheese uses cultures for the curdling process, not requiring death of a calf or kid or lamb every time.)

Properly curdled milk gives you curds and whey, basically cottage cheese.  This can be pressed to get the whey out, formed into a wheel or other shape, sometimes washed or heated, and aged so it develops a rind and hardens up.  Some cheese, like Roquefort, is aged in caves where interesting molds are found, to give it the distinctive blue veins.  There are hundreds of different kinds of cheese, some very local productions, some made in big factories.  Some of the modern French varieties are about as specific as "Madame Grangier makes this cheese in the spring from the milk of her cows Bessie and Bossie."

The Romans enjoyed cheese, and our word comes from the Latin caseus, meaning (you guessed it) cheese.  They distinguished between caseus (any kind of cheese) and caseus formatus, the latter specifically hard cheese made (formed) into a wheel.  This formatus was one of the foods given to soldiers in the legions, and is the root of the modern French  "fromage" and Italian "formaggio" (both of course meaning cheese).

The medieval diet included a lot of cheese.  It was more readily available than meat and acceptable to monks as meat was not.  Even those wealthy enough to enjoy meat on a regular basis would eat cheese or fish on Fridays instead of meat.

A story told about Charlemagne related that he visited a monastery on a Friday, and because they had no fish, they served him their local cheese (which would have been considered second-rate for a king, behind a nice trout).  When Charlemagne started cutting off the rind, the abbot unwisely corrected him, saying the rind was perfectly edible.  Now, no one tells the king he's doing something wrong.  Charlemagne pretended not to mind, ate the rind, said it was all very good, then got his revenge by ordering the abbot to send the royal court 200 big wheels of this tasty cheese every year.  After five years of the abbot scrambling madly to get enough milk to make this much cheese, leaving nothing for his monks, Charlemagne forgave him, but he'd learned his lesson!

Final note:  So-called "cheese food product" is an abomination before the Lord.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Sicily

 Sicily is the island that forms the football off the toe of Italy's boot.

Because it is as far from Rome or from the big industrial/financial centers like Milan or Turin as you can go and still be in Italy, it can be overlooked (though it is often evoked as a cradle of the New York Mafia).  But in the Middle Ages it was an important crossroads, where different cultures met.  It is a good indication that medieval Europe was not simply the white Catholic land it is often portrayed to be.

During antiquity, Sicily was home to Phoenician colonies, succeeded by Greek colonies, and it still has many excellent Greek temples.  The Romans conquered it and made it part of their empire, concerned because it was halfway between Rome and Carthage, home of Rome's arch-rivals.  In the early centuries AD Sicily was Christianized along with the rest of the Roman Empire.  But then in the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, it became the home of many Muslims.  (On the map you will notice what a short distance it is from Sicily to Muslim North Africa.)  In the Middle Ages, three major civilizations met in Sicily, Byzantine Greek, Latin west, and Muslim.  Plus a solid Jewish minority.  All had to get along, at least some of the time.

But the Byzantines fought a fairly continuous low-level war against Muslims in the Mediterranean, including in Sicily.  In the first half of the eleventh century they invited some fighters from Normandy to come fight as mercenaries in Sicily.  Even before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, then, Normans were heading off to conquer places.  Fairly quickly the Sicilian Normans decided that rather than fight for the Byzantines it made more sense to fight for themselves.  Soon the leader declared himself duke of Sicily.

The Sicilians gained the support of the popes, who were fighting the German kings (Roman emperors) and needed allies.  In return, the popes put up no fuss when in the twelfth century the dukes decided they were actually kings of Italy.  They conquered most of the foot part of the Italian boot over the following decades, declaring their whole territory the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The dukes and kings of Sicily were active in the Crusading movement.  Indeed, the First Crusade in 1095 began when the Byzantine emperor asked the pope for some more mercenaries like those Sicilian Normans, to help fight the Muslims, and got a whole lot more than he bargained for.

In the 1180s, Constance, daughter of the king of Sicily, married Henry VI, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, which he took over in 1190 on the death of his father, Frederick Barbarossa.  She was the daughter of the king of Sicily's third wife and had plenty of brothers and nephews.  But after they all died for one reason or another, she became queen of Sicily in 1194.  In that year she also gave birth to a son, future Frederick II, heir both to the Empire and to Sicily, thus squeezing the popes from both sides (the Holy Roman Empire officially included the northern half of Italy).

Although the Holy Roman Emperors usually were centered in Germany, Frederick made Sicily his home.  Popes hated him, and he wasn't much of a favorite with other European leaders.  After his death, all his sons and grandsons were hunted down, and Sicily was given to a younger brother of Louis IX of France.  But he was overthrown in 1282 with the so-called Sicilian Vespers, and title to Sicily went to the crown of Aragon (Spain) who (more or less) held onto it through the rest of the Middle Ages.

(For more on some of the people mentioned above, follow the links.)

A good book on medieval Sicily is by Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Meet (Cornell University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Italy, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.

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.