Memory and Forgetting

 Like modern people, medieval people worried about forgetting important things.  Such important things included wars, the deaths of kings, disease outbreaks, healings by saints, the foundation of monasteries, and pious gifts.  Like modern people, medieval people wanted important things written down.

Writing has a real advantage over stories and accounts passed orally in that it doesn't change, and people not yet born when you die may read something you wrote and know what you were thinking.  An important event in the past, one that people had stopped talking about, if recorded in writing can be remembered once again.  A written record from the time can also help resolve arguments in the future about whether something really happened.

Memory was especially important at monasteries, because they were officially undying bodies.  A gift of property made in the seventh century should still belong to the monks in the twelfth century.  Similarly, a particularly holy or at least effective abbot (or bishop) deserved to be remembered as a model for later generations to seek to emulate.  Thus it was important to get as many memories in writing as possible.

The problem of course was that these written records could be lost.  Before the eighth century those in the West preferred to write on papyrus, rather than on parchment (sheep skin), and papyrus disintegrates if not kept dry.  We have extremely few surviving original documents from the beginning of the Middle Ages, even though there is plenty of evidence of widespread literacy and record-keeping then, even notaries and public archives where important documents could be stored.  Most of what we know about these centuries from written evidence comes from copies made later, when delicate records were copied onto parchment.

Parchment however does not mean that a record is now preserved forever.  Since there was only the one copy, it could become lost, nibbled by mice, burned in a fire, have ink spilled on it, stolen, become too faded to read.  And this was during the Middle Ages.  The early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth-century wars of religion to the upheavals of the French Revolution to the twentieth century's world wars, have destroyed far more.

And even copying was an issue.  Late Roman cursive, such as used in a lot of papyrus documents, was nothing like the Caroline book-hands used in the ninth through eleventh centuries, the great age of document copying.  Scribes must have looked at what was in front of them and made their best guesses as to what the words were.

Sometimes even when they could read what was written it still didn't make sense.  There were a lot of changes during the eighth century as Europe began recovering from the population loss of the sixth and seventh centuries (on which see more here), as new population centers started being established, often in different places than the late Roman ones, and as Latin was being replaced by the earliest versions of today's European languages.  Scribes of the ninth century and later could barely recognize their monastery in its earliest records, where places had different names, people lived in different places, and rules and customs were different.

Similarly, holy figures of late antiquity behaved differently than their successors half a millennium later.  Tenth- and eleventh-century monks and cathedral priests were shocked to find an abbot or bishop who had been married, or whose version of  proper behavior included dressing in rags and going barefoot.  The "life" of an early holy bishop might have to be rewritten so that the wife who appeared with him was actually a "bride of Christ" or perhaps someone to whom he had been unwillingly betrothed by his parents before entering the church.

If something was just too weird it could be deliberately forgotten.  All it took was an early, disintegrating document not to be copied for it to be lost forever.  But the past itself could not be dismissed.  After all, tradition legitimates.  "We have always done this" or "We have always been here" are still powerful.  Thus past events could not all be swept away.  Rather they had to be reconfigured into what historians call a "useful past," one which gave legitimacy to the present.  Medieval scribes explained that the past valued the same things they valued, even while hoping that no one would change the memory of the great deeds and people they recorded for their own posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Guédelon castle

 In the Puisaye region of French Burgundy, they are building a thirteenth-century castle. Its name is Guédelon.

 The project began in 1995 as an attempt to build a castle using medieval techniques.  Nearly thirty years later, they hope they are close to finishing, and they have learned a tremendous amount in the process about how castles were built in the thirteenth century.  The builders call this "experimental archaeology."

The process began with studying real castles.  Although all medieval castles have been modified over the centuries (and many are now in ruins), close analysis can show how (one simple example) walls were built with careful stonework for the inner and outer sides, and an inside filled with rubble.  A lot of medieval buildings still have builders' marks on stones or beams, giving additional clues to their construction.

Added to this are medieval manuscripts which portray castles and other buildings under construction.  There are even a few handbooks from the late Middle Ages giving cryptic instructions.  The modern French builders' guilds, the ones who repair old buildings, have retained a lot of useful information over the centuries.

But in essence the builders at Guédelon are reverse engineering a castle, trying something and seeing if it works to produce something that looks real.  Any thought someone might have had in 1995 when they started, that the simple folk of the thirteenth century would not have had the sophistication of modern builders, was quickly dispelled.  Medieval builders didn't have our machines, but they knew exactly what they were doing and what would work.

Timbers (mostly oak) are cut with medieval style axes and saws, and stones are chiseled and shaped with medieval style chisels.  The sandstone from which most of the castle is being built is locally quarried, and the limestone, used for fancy vaulting and decorative carvings, comes from just a short distance away.  Most of the oakwood is from nearby.  This reflects what real thirteenth-century builders would have had to do, get as much local as they could because of the enormous transportation costs of heavy materials in a pre-truck world.

Over the last quarter century, a lot of people interested in historical reconstruction have come to learn and work at Guédelon. The builders reconstructing Notre Dame in Paris, after the fire, are trying to restore the timbers and roof to something like the thirteenth-century original, and many of the workers had been trained in medieval techniques at Guédelon.

Guédelon welcomes visitors.  You can visit during the summer months, for only 14 euros each (less for children).  They are eager for people to see their work and to teach them about medieval techniques.  I would guess that once the castle is finished they will be able to rent it out as a movie set, because it will (of course) look like a thirteenth-century castle looked in the thirteenth century.  European movies set in the Middle Ages often use real castles as a backdrop, but they have to shoot carefully (or use CG special effects) to avoid the ruined bits (Hollywood movies tend to go in for the unconvincing stage set).

The project has an extensive website (in French and English) giving the story of how they decided to build a medieval castle in the twenty-first century and illustrating construction methods, available here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Westminster Abbey

 Modern England (and for that matter the whole UK), unlike most of the rest of Europe, considers itself to be a continuation of medieval England.  King Charles III is a descendant of William the Conqueror, and for that matter of the Saxon royal line pre-1066.  No French Revolution here!  (Okay, so we don't need to talk about the English civil war of the seventeenth century, when the monarch was beheaded and replaced by Cromwell as Protector.  They eventually restored the monarchy with the dead king's son.)

England's medieval roots are always fully on display for great ceremonies, such as the upcoming royal coronation of King Charles at Westminster Abbey.  Charles is already king, having been since his mother's death in September 2022, but a new king needs an elaborate ceremony, a performative act.  He is king of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland.  The Scots will tell you that Scotland took over England rather than vice versa, because James VI was already king of Scotland when he became James I of England in 1603, but we don't need to talk about that now.

Westminster is its own city, surrounded by London but not officially part of it.  It was called Westminster because it was the area surrounding a church (what the word "minster" means) located west of what was then the city of London.  London has grown enormously over the centuries, but the central bit is still called The City.

There was an abbey founded at Westminster in the tenth century, and in the eleventh century Edward the Confessor, next to last of the Saxon kings of England (last if you don't count Harold, defeated by William the Conqueror) paid for a new church to be built for the monks.  He'd already built a royal palace right next door.  He was buried at Westminster abbey when he died in 1066, the first of a great many kings to be buried there.  (It's not happened for the last two centuries, however; Queen Elizabeth II was buried out at Windsor, even though her funeral was at Westminster—as was her wedding to Prince Philip in 1947.)  William the Conqueror chose Westminster for his own coronation ceremony in 1066, doubtless to assert continuity with Saxon kings, and chose Christmas Day, most likely to assert some sort of continuity with Charlemagne (crowned Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800).

The monastery flourished over the following centuries.  In the thirteenth centuries, as great Gothic cathedrals, like Notre Dame in Paris, were being built all over, the decision was made to tear down the Romanesque eleventh-century church, which now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, and rebuild in the high Gothic style.  The church as it now stands was more or less completed in the fifteenth century; Gothic takes a long time to build.

 Down in the basement there are still some remains of the eleventh-century church, and there is a door tourists can visit and take pictures of, supposedly the oldest door in England, supposedly from the tenth-century original abbey.

Now of course the church has gone through a lot since the thirteenth century.  The big central window on the west end (seen above) dates from the eighteenth century.  So do the towers on either side.  (In the picture above you can see the stone of the towers is a lighter color.)  The organ was installed in the twentieth century.  And of course it is no longer a monastery.  In the sixteenth century you'll recall England became Protestant ("Church of England") under Henry VIII, and Catholic monasteries were shut down.  Briefly the abbey church was designated a cathedral, although it is not one now.  (Instead Westminster cathedral is a separate church, the seat of a Catholic bishop, head of English Catholicism.)  Although the monks are long gone, the abbey church still has a school for choir boys.

Westminster palace, built much later in its current form to replace Edward the Confessor's palace, is now the home of England's Parliament.

The April/May 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a good article about Westminster.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Cultured Knights

 There are two main stereotypes of medieval knights, one that they were crude and violent, the other that they were refined, with a delicate sensibility to the needs of the weak and of women.  Sometimes these two stereotypes are combined, portraying crude knights who hypocritically wanted to portray themselves as chivalrous and refined.

All these versions take as their starting assumption that one could not be both a violent fighter and a cultured person at the same time.  However, there is plenty of evidence that knights, for all their flaws and sinful behavior (including pride and avarice, as depicted below in a twelfth-century carving), were quite cultured in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that military training and sometimes violent behavior (even vicariously as in playing video games) can go together with education and concern for social issues.  Military veterans are found in positions of responsibility throughout our society, many vets go from the military to college, and even thoughtful, caring individuals may occasionally enjoy grabbing the game controller and shooting up the space invaders from Mars.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century knights were mostly literate, in that they could read even if not necessarily write—and read Latin at that, at least well enough to look over a charter and make sure it said what they intended it to say.  The Cistercian monk Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (depicted below), had not originally intended to go into the church, but he received a superb education in both reading and writing as a day student at a church school in Châtillon, and he was considered one of the great Latin stylists of the twelfth century.

Oaths that knights were expected to take, from the early eleventh century on, stressed protection of the weak, especially churchmen and the poor.  Anyone living at or visiting court (that is, either in the royal household or in the household of a great lord) was expected to be able to display courtly behavior, which stressed good manners, self-control, and proper dress.  By the second half of the twelfth century, the term chevalerie, which had originally just meant good battlefield skills for a mounted warrior, had come to include courtliness (courtoisie).

A late twelfth-century or thirteenth-century knight was also supposed to know how to approach women politely and courteously, even though they had not been defined as part of "the weak" back in the eleventh century.  Playing an instrument, dancing smoothly, composing elegant love-letters were all part of "courting" a lady (note that word again).  Someone who did not wear well-styled clothing or did not keep himself scrupulously clean and sweet-smelling was rejected by the ladies in the romances of the time.

A knight's house was also supposed to be fairly elegant, with tapestries on the walls and nice tablecloths.  Plates and drinking vessels couldn't have bits of yesterday's meal clinging to them.  When you think about how one was supposed to do all this without modern conveniences (for starters, running hot water) you'll realize that this was something knights had to work at deliberately.

And at the same time of course being a knight involved a whole lot of military training, to be able to fight on horseback with lance or sword (and not fall off or injure the horse), to be able to ride long distances and take proper care of one's mount.  Although there were few serious wars in the twelfth century (we aren't up to the Hundred Years' War yet), there were always plenty of local battles and skirmishes, and tournaments (mock battles) could turn violent.  Knights, full of touchy pride, were always turning on their friends in the epics in response to perceived insults.

In spite of all of this violence, the knights themselves, with serious nudges from the church and from the writers of epics and romances, actually wanted to be cultured.  They saw overcoming evil doers and helping the weak as worthy goals.  They did not merely try to fake a façade of refinement.  They wanted to be refined, even if most of the time they didn't measure up.  They would have thought the Man of La Mancha song "The Impossible Dream" was a swell song.

A good book on cultured knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is by Martin Aurell, The Lettered Knight (Central European University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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

Iceland

 Iceland is the second biggest island in Europe, smaller than Great Britain (home to England, Wales, and Scotland) but bigger than Ireland.  It still speaks something very close to Old Norse, the medieval language of Scandinavia, though of course they have had to come up with new words for things like TVs and trucks, and it is very proud of its Viking heritage.

 One continuity with the Icelanders' Norse past is they do not have last names in our sense.  Eirik Olafsson is son of Olaf.  His son will be surnamed Eiriksson.  The phone book (I expect there wasn't an Old Norse word for phone book) lists people alphabetically by first name.

Europeans have been in Iceland on and off since the ninth and probably the eighth century, some of the first being Celtic hermits, whose desire to get away from it all certainly took them far from human settlements.  Its traditional foundation date however is 874, when settlers from Norway established a permanent colony in what is now the capital of Reykjavik.  The early settlers were mostly Norwegian, bringing with them Celtic slaves they had captured in the islands north of Scotland.

By the tenth century there were enough settlers that they needed a form of governance, and they established the Althing, what might be called a parliament, a system of democratic government.  (As you probably guessed, the word means "all thing," or the thing/process/get-together for everybody.)  Iceland proudly calls its parliament the world's oldest, though the country's current status as an independent republic (now with a President) dates only to the last days of World War II, and for many of the years in between it was under one of the Scandinavian kings (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark).  The Althing is now the legislature for the country.

One of the most important decisions of the medieval Althing, around the year 1000, was to vote to adopt Christianity for the country.  They had been pagan until then, but they'd been visited by missionaries and decided this Christianity stuff made sense.  The Norse gods we now associate with early medieval Scandinavia are now known from stories written in Iceland, but only several centuries after they had all become Christian.

Besides the eddas, the stories of legendary gods, the Icelanders wrote sagas, more or less historical accounts of early settlers.  Many of the stories are about people deciding to kill their relatives.  One might wonder why a community of peaceful sheep farmers and fishermen would be interested in blood-thirsty tales of revenge, but a lot of the sagas seem intended as cautionary tales and examples of how to defuse violence before it gets out of hand, an activity in which women played a major role.

Sheep farming and fishing were indeed the principal activities of these Viking descendants.  Fishing included going after walruses and narwhals in the icy Arctic seas, coming home with ivory equivalents (tusks that could be substituted for elephant tusks), which made excellent trade goods.

One problem with sheep farming is that sheep eat baby trees before they can become established.  Iceland had had plenty of forests when Europeans arrived, but once they were cut down for ships or building, they did not replenish themselves, as new seeds would have had to travel over the ocean.  This had happened back at the end of the Ice Age, but there hadn't been sheep in Iceland then.

(Fun fact:  The word for mutton in Icelandic is the same as the word for meat.  Beef is cow-mutton.  Pork is pig-mutton.  Meat, just as a word, means meat from the sheep unless otherwise specified, because meat from the sheep was what you were going to get.)

A lot of Iceland is also volcanic, not suited for either sheep or forest.  Its volcanoes periodically erupt, releasing clouds that can foul air traffic.  The volcanoes do  fuel hot springs that help keep Reykjavik warmer than you'd expect for its latitude.  Indeed, modern Iceland's power comes almost entirely from hot springs and waterfalls.  Iceland's population is low, less than that of Vermont though it's substantially bigger, less than 10% that of Ireland, an island nearly as big.

It used to be that the cheapest way for Americans to fly to Europe was through Iceland, to Luxembourg.  One would get off the plane in Iceland while it refueled, and the gift shop was right there.  I have a most excellent sweater made of Icelandic wool that I bought there.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

White Archival Gloves

 It might seem self-evident that people should wear white gloves in the archives, to protect the documents from the touch of human fingers.  But medievalists do not wear such gloves, and most archives not only don't require them, but actively try to persuade visitors not to wear them.  Why is this? you say.

 Gloves have distinct disadvantages for handling rare and delicate objects.  For one thing, those white gloves probably have more dirt on them than a pair of recently washed hands.  Perhaps even more importantly, wearing gloves reduces the sensitivity of one's fingers.  The scholar is thus more likely to tear a page in a book just trying to turn to the next page, or to have a document slip from her hands and fall to the floor.  These obviously are bad events.

There is in fact an excellent reason to allow human fingers to touch medieval documents, and that is that most medieval documents were written on parchment, which started life as animal skin.  There are oils in parchment that are the same as the oils naturally occurring in human skin.  The oils can dry out, making parchment brittle, but careful handling by clean fingers can help restore the natural oils.

(This is very much not an invitation to smear olive oil or linseed oil on medieval documents.  And of course one should not be handling documents with hands freshly moisturized by lotions "in new lavender - nutmeg scent.")

So where does the idea come from that archivists should be wearing gloves, along with any scholars in the archives?  It may be partly related to the common expression, "He had to handle the situation with kid gloves," meaning he had to choose his response delicately.  Gloves! and delicacy! all in one phrase.  But of course the people who originated this phrase were not talking about archives.  (Kid gloves are thin, made from the skin of baby goats, as opposed to the horsehide or oxhide gloves used for heavy work.)

But the ultimate source of the belief that white gloves must be worn in the archives is doubtless movies and TV shows.  Just as scientists are always shown in a lab with strange whirling machines, and doctors are shown with white coats and stethoscopes, so librarians and archivists are shown with white gloves, as a quick shorthand to the audience of what kind of professional this is.  We do not need to copy scenes from the movies.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Performative Acts

 One of the new directions in medieval studies is a focus on performative acts.  Like many aspects of medieval studies, once scholars got past "rise of the nation state" about 50 years ago, this focus can seem obvious when one thinks about it, even if one hasn't thought about it before.  But what are "performative acts?" you say.  I'm about to tell you.

Every act done in public (and for that matter some done in private) is at some level a performance.  A good actor isn't just reading the lines of the script but performing, making you believe that he or she is really that person, really feeling the emotion of the situation.  In the same way, a college professor giving a lecture isn't just conveying information.  She or he is also indicating by subtle or not-so-subtle cues that this is authoritative information, and the professor is very well informed on the topic.  The professor stands up in front, wears more formal clothes than the students, and is the one who announces, "It's time to get started."

In the same way, medieval people surrounded their actions with symbols, visual cues, and ceremonies that reinforced what was happening or supposed to happen.  A king would "wear his crown" (as the chronicles put it) several times a year, when he wanted his loyal men to renew their vows to him.  Normally of course a king would not walk around with jewels and metal on his head, but when he did it emphasized his position.  (Queen Elizabeth II of England did not usually wear a crown either, but she did when addressing Parliament.)

The oath of loyalty itself was full of symbols, the loyal man kneeling to indicate subservience, the lord kissing him on both cheeks to indicate that their bond was one of mutual affection and respect, not just one of master and subject.  Someone making a gift to a monastery would not merely say he was giving something but would do so accompanied by many witnesses, to give the act extra significance.

In eleventh-century Anjou and probably elsewhere, serfs were expected to pay a penny a year to their lord of the body (in addition to any rent they might owe to the same or a different lord), and they didn't just pay it, but came on their knees with a rope around their neck and the penny on their head.  This certainly underscored their subservient position (and it's not surprising that serfs tried to buy their way out of this ceremony, offering far more than the penny-a-year was worth monetarily).

And then there was getting one's doctorate degree from the University of Paris.  One stood on the front steps of Notre Dame and answered all philosophical questions anyone could throw (in Latin of course).  Talk about a performance!

We still do performative acts, even though we're not nearly as conscious of doing so as medieval people were.  Weddings, with a bridal white dress, groups of male and female attendants, rings, and a church setting even for people who rarely attend church are certainly conveying much more than that two people have decided to stay together permanently.  Medieval weddings weren't quite the same as ours, but they had comparable ceremony.

Once you start thinking about such things, you'll be startled at how many such performative acts you do yourself.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social structures, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.