Hostages

Politics was much more personal in the Middle Ages.  Rather than stationing missiles along the border to make sure a peace treaty stayed enforced, warring states and individuals would demand hostages.  A hostage was surety for good behavior, and might be offered for the short term (such as while someone was being given a safe-conduct across a territory) or the long term (such as as assuring a one-time rebel would not rebel again in the future).

Hostages could be any number of different people, but the highest value hostages were the enemy's sons.  Even if someone were not explicitly called a hostage, the status would be clear.

For example, King Charles the Bald (Charlemagne's grandson) had a number of dukes and counts try to rebel against him.  Generally these rebellions were pacified without too many people getting killed—unlike modern warfare (or the board game Risk), the purpose of fighting was not to kill as many guys as possible but rather to get the other side to pay attention.

Charles, "to show there were no hard feelings," would invite the penitent rebels to send their sons "to be brought up at court."  There the boys would indeed be treated well, but everyone knew they were hostages for their fathers' good behavior.  They could, at least theoretically, be put to death very quickly if any new rebellions broke out; ruthlessness, after all, is the other side of trying to settle things without too many deaths.  But in practice threatened execution of hostages happened far more than actual execution.  Especially if a rebel's sons were at court, he would generally change his mind about rebelling.

For the hostage boys, besides being summarily killed, the other danger (at least as their fathers saw it) was to become too close with those who were holding them hostage, what today is called Stockholm Syndrome.  And why shouldn't they become close to their captors?  They saw "Uncle" Charles (or whoever) almost every day; he encouraged them and educated them and made them presents and took them hunting and let them flirt with the ladies of court.  When their fathers expired of natural causes, they would go back and take up their fathers' rule as loyal allies to the crown.

During the early Middle Ages, hostages were almost always male.  But starting in the eleventh century, girls and women started appearing as hostages.  Here Stockholm Syndrome really was an issue, for young women might well end up marrying someone at the court where they were hostage.  Or, like the boys, they could be put to death, rather nastily if the negotiations that had brought them there totally broke down.

In the late Middle Ages, during the Hundred Years' War, the French king Jean II (1350-1364) was captured in battle by the English in 1356 and held for ransom.  He was in essence a hostage, taken to England and kept there in very pleasant circumstances while the French tried to raise the very large ransom demanded.

When by 1360 it became clear that the money raising was going too slowly, he offered to go back to France and help out, and proposed his second son (Louis) as a hostage for his good faith efforts.  Raising the money was a complete pain, however, as France was wracked with dissent and poverty and had apparently just lost the war.  (They eventually won, due to Joan of Arc, but that's a different story.)

After three years of trying unsuccessfully to get the cash together, Jean was shocked to learn that his son had escaped from the English.  Declaring that "good faith and honor" demanded it, he immediately sailed to England to become a hostage again himself, where he wouldn't have to worry about ruling,  but follow the life of leisure he'd enjoyed earlier.  He died in England, and the ransom never did get paid.  He is known as "Jean the Good."

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on medieval law and politics, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Dives and Lazrus

One of the favorite Bible stories in the Middle Ages was that of Dives and Lazarus, sometimes called "the rich man and Lazarus" in modern translations.  In the early modern period it became an English Christmas carol, and Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a series of beautiful variations on the tune.

There are several different men named Lazarus in the New Testament.  These days most people will think of the one whom Jesus brought back to life after he had been dead and buried three days--a clear prefiguration of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.  This Lazarus gave rise to the urban legend of the Wandering Jew, the man who could never die because he had, after all, already died once, and who has spent the last two thousand years wandering around.

This story also has the classic line (in the King James version) of one of Lazarus's sisters objecting when Jesus wanted her dead brother dug up--"But Lord, he stinketh."

Today we are talking about a different Lazarus.  This one appears in a parable.

He was a poor man lying at the door of Dives, a rich man.  Dives refused to give him even a crumb from his table, even though he had far more than he or his guests could eat.  Instead Dives set the dogs on Lazarus and, when the dogs refused to bite him, set his thugs on him.  But they couldn't touch him either.

Now I myself would have thought maybe there was some sort of message here, but Dives just laughed it off.  Imagine his surprise when demons seized his soul as he died.  All his wealth did him no good.  The twelfth-century carving pictured above, from the abbey church of Vézelay, shows him on his death bed, money bags stacked underneath, and the demons grabbing his soul with great enthusiasm as it emerges from his body.  His wife, on the left, is understandably horrified.

Poor Lazarus, in the meantime, also died (probably from starvation), but he went straight to heaven.

The remarkably clear message from this was that it was the responsibility of the rich to help the poor, as I discussed in more detail earlier.  The well to do, including both noble households and monasteries, would routinely give leftover food out at the back door to poor people who gathered there.  They were quite deliberately avoiding the error of Dives.

In a broader sense, the story was a radical rejection of the value of worldly wealth and power.  Even though there were plenty of wealthy and powerful people (including church leaders) in the Middle Ages, the parable of Dives and Lazarus, frequently represented in church decorations (as here), was a constant reminder that wealth was not going to matter a bit when it came to your soul.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Medieval Houses

We tend to think of medieval houses as built of stone because most obvious surviving medieval buildings are stone.  But these buildings are churches and castles for the most part, not regular people's houses.

Wood was the most common building material in the Middle Ages, as it still is in the modern US, because it was fairly cheap and easy to work.  The earliest castles were built with wooden palisades, and palaces were largely built of wood.  In Scandinavia, churches too were often built of wood.

But in the twelfth century wood started becoming scarce.  As the population grew, forests were cut down for new crop land.  Efforts were made to protect the remaining forests, for hunting or for pasturing pigs.  So big beams became hard to find.

Ordinary people's houses were built mostly of what is called wattle and daub, small pieces of wood providing a framework, filled in with a combination of straw, twigs, mud, and maybe plaster (sometimes dung).  If one thinks of what we now call half timber, wattle and daub was a rougher version--most existing half timber structures were built in the fifteenth century or later.  If the whole thing was whitewashed, it wouldn't look too bad.

Wattle and daub was not strong enough to support a multi-story house, so most medieval houses would be two stories high at most.  The floor would be dirt; conscientious housekeepers would try to keep it (vaguely) clean by constant sweeping, which meant that the floor might end up several inches lower than the ground outside.

If there were nearby marshes, thatch (made from reeds) was a popular choice for the roof.  A well made thatch roof will last for over thirty years, although nowadays thatchers say that acid rain has resulted in weaker, less long-lasting reeds.  The problem with thatch is that it will burn, so in towns those constructing houses were encouraged to use tiles or slates instead.

Starting in the twelfth century, a few wealthy townspeople might build a house in stone.  Such a house was far more expensive but much longer lasting.  It could also be built higher.  Such a house might have a flagstone or tile floor, rather than dirt.

In the late Middle Ages, more and more people started building in stone.  One of the effects of the devastating Black Death of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was that the population was severely reduced, leaving more wealth for the survivors.  Most European stone villages took the form they have now between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, although there are still some twelfth-century structures mixed in.

In the country, the barn with its animals was usually built immediately adjacent to the farmhouse (see more here).  Barns became stone at the same time as the farmhouses.  A medieval stone barn was built as a series of long, narrow open areas with stone walls in between, which made it easy to span the open areas with short boards, for the upper story (hay or grain storage).

Most medieval houses did not have fireplaces.  Instead they had a fire pit, the smoke from which made its way out through small holes near the eaves.  Fireplaces really only came in during the thirteenth century.  They were more expensive and much less efficient in heating the place, so they generally were found only in castles or palaces.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Medieval calendars

We take calendars for granted.  Doubtless there is one hanging on a wall somewhere near you.  We write appointments on the calendar--"Billy to the doctor at 4:15 on the 21st."

Medieval people had the same basic calendar we do (365 days spread over 12 months, the same ones with 30 or 31 days, February always gets shorted but does get an extra day every 4 years).  This is and was your basic Julian calendar.  But, just as medieval people thought about telling time differently (as I have discussed earlier), so they thought of calendars differently.

They would not have a page for each month with an attractive picture (flowers, a rural scene, puppies) next to a grid of little boxes, each with a day number.  (This is an attractive rural scene, in case you couldn't tell.)

Instead each day of the month would be listed underneath the others.  Next to it would be the saint whose special day it was, whose anniversary would be celebrated that day.  Although modern Catholicism has a saint for every day of the year, a lot of medieval calendars wouldn't have anyone special to commemorate on many days.  Unusual events might also be noted, such as an eclipse or a flood.

One of the most important things to note on a calendar was Easter.  In the Middle Ages, Easter was by far the most important religious holiday, unlike today when it has to take a back seat to Christmas.  Easter is now (as then) the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Equinox.  As you can imagine, it moves around a lot.  Exactly when the Spring Equinox falls is open to discussion, and do you count the first full moon as the day whose evening sees it rise or the following day?  In 2016, Greek Orthodox Easter fell in May, a month after Latin Easter.  Medieval people had all sorts of charts and tables trying to show when Easter would be next year.

We assume the new year starts in January.  Some medieval people did as well.  But depending on the region, the new year might start at Christmas, at Easter, or even at the Incarnation (March 25, nine months before Christmas, when Mary became pregnant).  Easter was the most common, which meant that if Easter was early one year and late the next, a "year" might have almost two whole Aprils in it, one at each end.  Sometimes, especially in Italy where the cities were in fierce competition, one could be off by one or two years just by walking a short distance from one city to another.

We count days of the month by the day, 1st, 2nd, etc.  Medieval people, like the Romans, were more likely to refer to the kalends or the ides.  The kalends was the 1st (it's where the word "calendar" comes from).  So a medieval document might be dated by "the second kalends of June," meaning the next to last day of May.  Ides fell in the middle of the month (Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March, or March 15).

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

The Royal Touch

Medieval kings were not divine-right kings; that idea started only in the seventeenth century.  Certainly medieval kings were not gods or even gods-in-waiting, like the original Roman emperors or the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

But they still were anointed with holy oil at their coronations, ever since Pippin the Short (father of Charlemagne).  And as semi-sacral beings, they had certain God-given abilities.  The French kings of the High Middle Ages were believed to be able to cure scrofula with the royal touch.

Scrofula was a term used then for a variety of skin diseases, though the term now is restricted to certain infections of the lymph nodes, often associated with tuberculosis, in which the sufferer has black or purple growths on their neck.  Sounds nasty, and it is.

From at least the eleventh century on, French kings were assumed capable of healing this disease, which was therefore sometimes called the King's Evil.  People with skin diseases (and at this distance one can't really say if they all really had scrofula or something else) would petition for healing, and at certain times the king would allow them to approach and be touched with the king's touch.  Modern medicine may be rightly skeptical of how this could possibly lead to healing, but people certainly believed that it worked, because they kept coming back.

For a long time only the French kings could heal with their touch.  The English kings, the former dukes of Normandy, had nothing similar.  For that matter, the French kings were always treated with more reverence by their subjects than were the English kings, who couldn't even get along with their own family members and whose funerals sometimes degenerated into disgusting farces.

But this changed in the late Middle Ages, when several English kings married French princesses and thus gave their descendants the Royal Touch.  Right through the early modern period, both French and English kings would "touch" scrofula sufferers.  (The German kings were never so blessed.)

The practice was eventually ended in England in the seventeenth century (the kings decided the practice was "too Catholic" in a country where Church of England was determinedly Protestant) and in France in the eighteenth century.

These days no one thinks of European or American rulers as semi-sacral.  Imagine the security issues if a president was believed to be able to cure diseases with his touch and had sick people lining up for treatment.

For more on scrofula and the kings, there's a whole book on the topic by the great French historian Marc Bloch, written in the first half of the twentieth century but still in print, The Royal Touch.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval kingship and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Saint Martin

It's November, time to talk about Saint Martin.  Between the election and Veterans' Day it's easy to lose track, but his feast day was November 11, and that day was an important one for medieval people, as rents and the like were often due then (at the end of the harvest).  In parts of Belgium they still have parades in his honor, and some children get presents from him, rather than having to wait for Saint Nicholas almost a month later.

As I noted earlier, although Gaul (France) by the late sixth century had a lot of saints, many of these are not quite as historical as one would like (and had not been revered until sixth-century bishops conveniently discovered their burial places).  But Martin (d. 397) is a historical figure, probably about the first historical saint of Gaul.

He originally came from what is now part of Hungary and was then part of the Roman Empire.  He appears to have converted to Christianity as a youth, just as Christianity was becoming widely tolerated and indeed encouraged in the Empire, but he was still expected to join the army, as all sturdy lads were supposed to do.  He traveled great distances with the troops, getting as far as Amiens, in northwestern France.

Here, according to legend, he had his most famous experience.  Riding along on a wet, cold night, wrapped up in his military cloak, he spotted a poor, ragged beggar.  Feeling sorry for him, Martin cut his cloak in two to share, as depicted centuries later in El Greco's famous painting (where, incidentally, Martin doesn't look anything like a Roman soldier).

To his surprise and understandable shock, the beggar turned into Christ.  This got his attention, as it would certainly have gotten mine, and Martin decided to give up the army life for the religious life.

Monasticism at this time was just starting in the West, although it had been around in the eastern Mediterranean for a century.  Martin founded the first known monastery in Gaul in Tours.  He also became bishop of Tours; the story is that he didn't want to become bishop and tried hiding so they couldn't make him, but the geese among which he was hiding gave him away by honking.  He appears to have been a somewhat disturbing bishop, who followed a rough and simple life rather than the more comfortable life many of his contemporaries chose.

After his death, at least three churches in Tours all claimed precedence over the others on the grounds that Martin loved them best:  Marmoutier, the monastery he founded (the name is a variation of Martini monasterium, Martin's monastery); the cathedral where he had been bishop; and the basilica outside of town where he was buried.  Pilgrims would rub his stone sarcophagus to get saint-dust, until actual holes started appearing in it.

His cape (or at least the half that remained) became an important relic in its own right.  Around the year 900, in the aftermath of Viking invasions, the ancestors of the French Capetian dynasty became titular abbots of Martin's monastery and took the cape as their special possession.  Hugh Capet, first king of the dynasty in 987, got his nickname from the cape.

Martin is the patron saint of beggars, of clothing makers, and of geese-keeping.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

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

Medieval Elections

It's Election Day in the US, a good time to blog about medieval elections.

Athens may have invented direct democracy, where all the citizens got to vote on major decisions, but the Middle Ages invented representative democracy, where people elect those who will represent their views in government or elect those who will lead them.

Voting was the normal way to settle difficult issues in the church, where it was assumed that God would speak through the majority.  A unanimous decision of course was best, but a majority would work (or, as was sometimes said, the "wiser part").  Church councils settled such complex issues as the nature of the Trinity (Nicaea, 325) by getting all the bishops together and voting.  New church leaders, bishops, abbots (over monasteries), and popes were elected by those who would serve under them.

Even today new popes are elected by the College of Cardinals, the major priests of the city of Rome and the most important Catholic bishops from around the world, who are considered to represent the views and wishes of their flocks.  Sometimes there are multiple ballots before a consensus is reached.  Today the ballots are burned after each round of voting, and chemicals are added to give dark smoke if no one got the requisite two-thirds majority.  Those waiting outside are hoping to see white smoke, which means a new pope has been chosen.

Medieval kings were also elected.  There was no ballot box, no get-out-the-vote effort, and only a very tiny fraction of the population voted, but it was still an election.  When a king had died, the most powerful men of the country, including dukes, counts, and bishops, would assemble to elect a new king.  They were considered in some sense to "speak" for everybody else.  Kings would have liked to be hereditary, but they really only established the hereditary principle at the end of the Middle Ages.  Before then, the assumption was that a worthy king would have royal blood, but he still needed election.  (Kings were doubtless irritated that counts had held their offices by heredity since the tenth century.)

A king with an adult son could die in the happy hope that the great lords of his kingdom would elect his boy.  To make sure this happened, kings often had the election held while they were still alive and sitting there, in which case the younger man would become co-king with his father.  But the great lords were perfectly capable of electing someone else.  In England, after Henry I died without sons in 1135, the English barons promptly "forgot" their promise to elect Henry's daughter Mathilda as their king and instead turned to her cousin Stephen, who they hoped would be a weaker leader.

Medieval cities all had elected city councils from the twelfth century on.  Here any citizen of the city with a certain amount of property would vote.  The city council was very much representative democracy, a few fellow-citizens elected to represent the will of the (male) populace in running things.  City councils in fact preceded mayors, though most cities decided fairly early that a mayor, a single elected executive, made a lot of things function better.

Hope everybody got out and voted today!

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

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