The Cerne Abbas Giant

On a hillside above the English village of Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, there is an outline of a gigantic figure.  He is naked and carrying a huge club.  The outline is done with white chalk, the rock underlying the region.  Little ditches dug into the soil are filled with pieces of chalk.  An informative sign erected along the highway below the hillside explains that the giant is 180 feet tall and goes on to give the dimensions of his club and several other aspects, though on one point the sign is strangely silent.

Understandably, people have long wondered who might have created this figure and what he is supposed to represent.  Most commonly he is considered to be a depiction of the Roman demigod Hercules, who too was often pictured naked and carrying a large, knotted club.  Hercules was usually seen holding a lion skin, and although the Cerne Abbas giant certainly has no lion skin, his outstretched left hand might have been draped with something in the past.

Incidentally, Christian Europe was perfectly comfortable with a pagan figure like Hercules, who was treated like a myth or fable.  The throne in Rome on which Emperor Charles the Bald sat in 875, after being crowned emperor by the pope, was decorated with ivory plates depicting the life and deeds of Hercules.

The question of whether the giant might once have been holding a lion skin gets to a fundamental issue, that there is nothing permanent about this giant.  Unlike a statue, which once carved stays (relatively) the same, the giant is chalk lines surrounded by grass.  Grass likes to grow over gaps, as anyone who sets stepping-stones into a lawn knows.  Because the giant is on a hillside, it is easy for silt to wash down over the chalk  The local people have long gone out every few years to clear away grass and renew the chalk lines, usually by adding more bits of chalk.  Over the years lines can move or, if not renewed, disappear.

After all, the people working on the lines wouldn't be able to see the big picture, being too close to it.  A vague shape intended to depict a lion skin, hanging from the left arm, might have seemed like a mistake, something to quietly ignore.  The so called White Horse of Uffington, another hillside depiction done in chalk (not far from the giant though done far earlier), seems to have moved considerably over the years, based on old drawings; it might not even have been originally intended as a horse.

 

But when was the Cerne Abbas giant originally created?  Dates have been suggested ranging from the Stone Age to the seventeenth century, when churchwarden accounts note a payment of three shillings "for repair of the giant."  Most recently however it has been argued that the giant was from the Anglo-Saxon era, the early Middle Ages.  Hercules was a well known personage in medieval art, so a gigantic masculine figure might have been made to look like him, even if not specifically intended to show a Roman demigod.

The most recent arguments, in an article in the new (January 2024) issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum, written by Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos, propose that the giant, visible from far away and projecting a strong manly aura, marked a place where armies would gather. Archaeology of the layers of chalk added over the years suggests that the giant was originally created around the time the Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Vikings.

An intriguing reinterpretation of the giant seems to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  An abbey located at Cerne (why it is called Cerne Abbas) claimed to have the relics of Saint Eadwold, a holy man supposedly from an Anglo-Saxon royal family who became a hermit.  The monks appear to have sought to depict the giant on the hillside above their abbey as their saint—a saint whose pilgrim staff sprouted buds and twigs when he found his appropriate hermitage site—though even scantily clad hermits usually did not get as naked as Hercules.

One final note:  The most recent scholarship dispenses with the notion that the giant was a depiction of a pagan god named Helith (who is mentioned nowhere else).  A sixteenth-century antiquarian, reading a thirteenth-century rather confused account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons five centuries earlier, said that in ancient Dorset a god named Helith was worshiped.  In the eighteenth century it was suddenly announced that the giant was this god.  This is all very implausible.

I myself have always been struck by the tradition established locally, from Anglo-Saxon times through Normans and Tudors and all the changes that have affected England over the last millennium and a half, to go out regularly and tend to the chalk images.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Anglo-Saxons and medieval monasteries, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in print.

Villages

 We tend to think of medieval villages as small and compact, stone houses close together, with a castle and a church at the center.

Now in fact plenty of medieval villages were built with all the houses close together, along narrow streets, and preferentially built in stone from the late Middle Ages on.  A compact village made sense if one didn't want to waste good agricultural land with buildings and yards, and it provided at least some measure of protection against potential attackers, especially if it had a wall.

Most villages had twisty streets, such as seen above, because the streets just were the openings between the houses, but starting in the twelfth century there were also planned villages, where the streets were laid out in a gridwork pattern (and were still very narrow, forget getting a car down most of them).

But how about the church and the castle?  The church was much more likely to be there than the castle.  Starting in the twelfth century, bishops made a conscious effort to establish parish churches outside of the cities, so that the rural population would have readier access to the sacraments.  A village would get a church and a parish priest, who was usually of peasant stock himself.

 

But castles were a lot more expensive to build than a little parish church, so the idea of a castle in every village would not make sense.  Even more importantly, a castellan lord would normally have multiple villages in his territory, and it really was not worth having multiple castles close together.  (There are plenty of places, especially in southwest France, where multiple castles face each other, but these would have been built on the borders of the territories of rival lords.)  A village located in a strategic place (like a mountain pass) would probably have a castle, but in such a case the castle probably came first, and the village grew up around it.  (See more here on the problem of trying to see every village as coming with a standard castle or manor house.)

Villages were by definition devoted to agriculture.  For a compact village, the surrounding fields were usually divided up among the inhabitants, and they went out every morning to tend their fields.  This worked well in areas of rich soil, where the villagers shared in purchasing and (from the twelfth century on) in using a heavy mould-board plow.

But how about areas with poorer soil, where the lighter-weight aratum plow continued to be used? Here a "village" might not be compact but rather spread out.  It would still function as a village, often having a mayor and certainly having a social sense of identity, but each house and barn would be separated from the next, each being surrounded by its own fields.

Historians used to wonder why some parts of France (especially the southern parts) had the spread-out form of village structure, rather than the compact form, and there was a great deal of speculation about whether the difference marked areas where the original Celtic population remained in the majority versus those areas dominated by the (Germanic) Franks.  But village structure had nothing to do with ethnic identity.  It was based instead on agricultural techniques (and the mould-board plow became common only centuries after the Franks had settled in France).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Brother is the Enemy

 We tend to think of families as all getting along and supporting and protecting each other.  For most families in the Middle Ages, that was probably the norm as well.  But just as today siblings can become very competitive over such things as "who gets Grandma's gold coin collection," so among the medieval aristocracy there was often fierce competition between brothers.

This is to be anticipated, because even though there were no strict rules of primogeniture (that is, of the oldest son getting everything), oldest sons did tend to inherit more, and the younger sons thought this was Totally Unfair.  Throughout the medieval and early modern period there were plenty of tales about three brothers, where the oldest gets the big inheritance, the middle one gets some small thing, and the third is told, "Good luck, kid."  Of course in these stories the youngest heads off and finds something worth far more than the original inheritance, and even a princess to marry.  Take that, older brother!

The Merovingian kings of what is now France (fifth to eighth centuries) were described by contemporaries as ready to slay their brothers and cousins.  The various small kingdoms, into which what is now France and the Low Countries were divided, were parceled out between heirs, who then decided the best way to add to their holdings was to kill their rivals.  Gregory of Tours, chief historian of the Merovingian era, said that Clovis, first of the kings, complained loudly that he was alone in the world without any relatives, in the hopes of luring some relatives out of hiding so he could kill them.

The Carolingian kings were not much better (eighth to tenth centuries).  Charlemagne had a younger brother, named Carloman, whom Charlemagne's biographer Einhard said died of "some disease."  Einhard went on to say that he couldn't imagine why Carloman's widow then fled with her children.  (One can imagine just fine.)

Charlemagne's grandsons were each given a kingdom of their own, Germany for Louis, France for Charles, and the "Middle Kingdom" (including Italy) for Lothair.  Louis and Charles immediately ganged up on their brother, as perhaps should be expected.  In the confusion and disagreements over the next two generations, a kingdom of Burgundy was established within what Lothair had thought was his kingdom, and Boso declared himself king, only to be opposed by his brother Richard, who told the Carolingian kings that he was their little friend.

In England after the 1066 Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror designated Normandy, the family inheritance, for his oldest son, Robert Curthose, designated newly conquered England for his second son, William Rufus, and told Henry, the third son, "Sorry, kid."  When William Rufus died without heirs in 1100, Henry immediately took his brother's throne.  Robert Curthose was off on Crusade and was understandably shocked when he got home.  Extensive fighting then took place, and Henry eventually won, taking Normandy as well as England and locking up his brother for the rest of his life.

In France, it was often remarked in the thirteenth century, with some wonderment, that the younger brothers of the king didn't try to kill him, not even a little.  In part this was due to the kings parceling out large chunks of territory (appanages) to their younger brothers.

These examples are all of the most powerful (and there are plenty more examples of fraternal warfare).  Peasant families in contrast tended to act in solidarity.  After all, they could not call up armies or faithful followers (like Boso's brother Richard) to fight against their relatives.  Landlords were more likely than brothers to be seen as the enemy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Old French

 Old French, like the medieval versions of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, plus other variants (like Provençal), derived ultimately from Latin.  They are called Romance languages because they derive from the language of ancient Rome.  But Old French is much closer to modern French than what is called Old English is to modern English.

This is because what we call Old English is Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language that was spoken in England before the Norman Conquest.  English had to incorporate a lot of French in the centuries after 1066, including going through the Middle English phase, before it became sort of what we think of as modern English in the seventeenth century.  Old French in contrast never had to incorporate an entirely different language.  (The number of words in modern English is roughly the same as the vocabularies of modern French and German put together.)

The first examples of Romance languages becoming distinct from Latin date to the ninth century.  At this point it was recognized that the pronunciation of a lot of words didn't exactly match the Latin spelling and that the grammar was increasingly different.  We should not of course be surprised at early medieval people accepting that spelling and pronunciation didn't match.  Look how English speakers pronounce though, through, tough, cough, and bough.

Written Old French came into its own in the twelfth century, primarily for stories, epics and romances.  Songs were also written in Old French.  A lot of stories had doubtless been told in the vernacular (that is, the everyday spoken language) for a long time, and songs sung in it, but now they were written down in it.

Most twelfth-century education was in Latin, and monks and bishops could converse and write fluently in correct classical Latin.  But as the century went on, more and more Old French was added to the educational mix.

During the middle years of the thirteenth century, some legal documents started being drawn up in Old French.  The spelling was subject to a great deal of variation, so that "I," ego in Latin, was spelled both je (as in modern French) and ge.  It seems clear that it was pronounced with the J sound, no matter how it was spelled.  But thirteenth-century French is close enough to modern French that a modern French speaker can read it relatively easily, with no more difficulty than a modern English speaker has in reading Shakespeare's sixteenth-century English.

Not everybody went over to using Old French.  For an especially important document, Latin was still preferred.  Stories might be told in Old French, but theological and political treatises were written in Latin.  Popes and bishops issued their documents in Latin, not the vernacular (popes still use Latin for official pronouncements).  For that matter, English scholars (like Isaac Newton) were still writing serious works in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

But the spread of Old French made it easier for more people to become literate, especially once paper started replacing the much more expensive parchment at the end of the thirteenth century.  Then one just needed to learn to read and write, not pick up a foreign language in the process.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

The Sign of the Rose

 Our word "romance" goes back to medieval French, but its meaning was somewhat different then compared to how we use the term now.  A medieval French roman was a story in which the emphasis was on personal interactions, rather than on feats of arms, as was the case with epics.  (In fact the romance-epic demarcation was not always very clear.)  More broadly it meant a story, and in fact modern French still uses roman for a novel.

We now use "romance" in a narrower sense, to mean a love story.  In fact, romance is a well-established genre.  It has its rules, such as that you are required to have a happily-ever-after ending, or at least a happy-for-now conclusion, as the couple intends to be each other's special and only love partner.

It's easy to mock modern romance, and indeed it can easily become formulaic.  Young woman from a small town/big city moves to a big city/small town for reasons that are intended to make the story distinctive.  There she encounters a new man/a previous flame.  Sparks fly!  Problems arise.  Will they get together in spite of them? (I think you know the answer.)  But anything that makes people happy and indeed encourages reading is to be applauded (so saith the author).

Why did medieval people call a story a roman?  It was because a lot of their stories were set in mythical long-ago times.  For us long-ago is the Middle Ages.  For them it was the Roman Empire.  So accounts of deeds could be characterized as Roman stories.  (Our word "story" comes from "history," historia.  Also an account of deeds.)

By the way, because many people made pilgrimages to Rome, pilgrims were often referred to colloquially as Romies, including those going to Santiago in Spain, in the opposite direction from France than Rome.

This brings us to Guillaume de Dole ou le roman de la rose.  This was a roman written around the year 1200 in France, and which I have rewritten under the title of The Sign of the Rose.  It is in part a love story, but the Guillaume of the French title is not one of the lovers.  He gets to have adventures and go to tournaments, while his sister has to overcome slander to win the heart of the king.

The actual people in both versions of the story (the medieval original and mine) are imaginary, but I've tried to set it in something close to the real society of the thirteenth century.  I did have to make some changes for a modern audience, primarily having the lovers meet and fall in love, rather than fall in love just by hearing about each other from afar.

I characterize it as a "historical romance," and it does obey the Happily Ever After law, even though there's a lot more about the heroine's brother than a die-hard romance fan might prefer.  It's for sale on all major ebook platforms and in paperback; here's the Amazon link.

Here's the opening to whet your appetite.

Chapter 1 - Sir Kunz

“Remember how important you are to the realm, sire,” the seneschal said sternly.  “Stay with the party so that the knights can protect you.  Do not ride off by yourself like you did last time.”
Konrad did not answer, other than by giving a huff that could have been either agreement or denial.  What good was it being a king if he was still treated like a child?
It was cold for April, low clouds threatening rain or sleet.  He could feel the stallion under him wanting to run off across the fields, not to continue plodding along with the whole court.  There was a thin layer of mud on the old Roman road, its stones uneven enough to make speed impossible, even if speed had been an option when they had to hold their pace to that of the wagons.
Behind them the ladies had been singing, some songs of fighting and glory but mostly songs of love.  Konrad dropped back in the line, as if intending to converse with one of the ladies, ignoring the seneschal’s dark frown.
But the frown did it.  As soon as he was well back from the vanguard, he dug his spurs into his horse’s sides and was off, almost flying across the fields.  “No one follow!” he bellowed over his shoulder.  The cold wind streamed his hair out behind him, and he laughed as the seneschal’s faint shouts were lost in the distance.
He looked back just before he reached a line of trees.  The court, knights and ladies, servants and squires, horses and wagons, was spread out along a quarter mile of road.  At least no knights were racing after him.  There were advantages after all in being king—the court had to obey him even if they did not want to.
Besides, none of the knights could keep up with his Spanish stallion.
“Old men,” Konrad told his stallion when he finally pulled the horse to a trot, “might as well be old women.”
The seneschal was not really old in truth, he conceded to himself.  But the seneschal and the other barons who had served on the regency council had always been strict and proper.  “They would have been happy to be regents until I was thirty, had I let them,” Konrad added to the stallion.  The stallion was uninterested.
The horse pricked his ears instead at a rustling in the underbrush, and Konrad loosed the reins and let him run again.  Over a hedgerow, over two hedgerows, past a huddle of houses and they were back in the open fields again.  The soil was freshly turned—the peasants must have been plowing, thinking, as had he, that it was really spring.
Mud splashed halfway up Konrad’s legs, but he didn’t care.  A wide loop, he told himself cheerfully, and he would join the Roman road again.  He would trot back to meet his court, let the seneschal say whatever he liked because he would not be listening, and then he would ride sedately the rest of the day, chatting with the ladies.

Except that he did not find the Roman road again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

Ethnic Identity

 Because the US is a melting pot, an awful lot of us have a distinct ethnic identity related to our ancestry.  African-Americans of course refer back to their ancestors who were captured in Africa and brought to the Americas as slaves (though there are certainly some, like President Obama, who have very recent African heritage, but no ancestors who were slaves in the Americas).  Irish-Americans celebrate Saint Patrick's day, Mexican Americans (and those who like tequila) celebrate Cinco de Maio, and so on.

You can now get your DNA analyzed for further details on your ancestry.  I, not to my surprise, tested out at close to 3/4 English, with the rest a mix of German, French, Dutch, Irish, and Scandinavian.  Interestingly, I am not considered "English-American."  Although those who might be called English-Americans are not the majority in this country, they were the majority among our founders, and are still considered the default. ("We're real Americans, and everybody else is a modified-American!" Yeah. Right. Not in my view.)

But ethnic identity is more than one's DNA.  A big part of it is language and religion and food and customs.  People in the Middle Ages also had ethnic identity, though because they were exposed to other sorts of folks less than we are the topic came up less often.

The French in the Middle Ages liked to say that the French were best (big surprise) and mocked the Germans for not being as good knights or fighters as they considered themselves to be.  England after the Norman Conquest had clear demarcations between the French and the English (some of these "French" were genetically half Scandinavian, but that didn't count).  Italians always knew they were not German, and asserted Germans were bad.  Heretics, non-Christians (especially Muslims), and Greek Orthodox Christians were considered the Other by the Latin Christian majority.  Jewish communities focused on their religion and their family customs to maintain themselves among a sea of non-Jews, as they indeed have for three thousand years.

Language was one of the big markers of identity, as indeed it still is now.  The Norman French may have had a lot of Scandinavian DNA, but they were French because they spoke French.  Each region of medieval Europe had its own language.  Portuguese was like (but unlike) Spanish, which had similarities to Catalan, which was related to the Occitan of southwest France, which had similarities both to the French around Paris and to Provençal, spoken in southeastern France, which was similar to northern Italian.

Italian itself had (and has) many variants.  Sicilian is still almost its own language.  Latin, the language of the area around Rome (Latium), was the language spread by the Roman legions, but other parts of the long Italian peninsula had been speaking their own version of proto-Italian for centuries.  Hence Portuguese, Provençal, and the rest grew out of Latin in different ways, but the various regions of Italy had a long head start in diversification.

Then there's German.  The Rhine was and is the theoretic dividing line between Romance languages and Germanic languages, as it was the theoretic boundary of the Roman Empire of antiquity, but in practice the line was anything but sharp.  Alsace, now part of France and on the French side of the Rhine, went back and forth between school children being taught in French or in German in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as control of the region shifted back and forth.  Now Alsatian kids go to school in French but usually hang out with their friends in Alsatian, a German dialect.

Although the French of France today is derived ultimately from Latin, those who live in the modern French republic (and have ancestors going way, way back there) have Celtic ancestors from pre-Roman and Gallo-Roman times, and Germanic ancestors in the Franks who became the rulers of the region in  late antiquity.  The Franks gave their name to the country but dropped their German language like a hot potato once they settled in the Roman Empire.

Medieval Germany, like modern Germany, had dialects of its own.  Dutch (and Letzburg, still spoken on the streets of Luxembourg) and Anglo-Saxon are Germanic languages, as are all the Scandinavian languages except for Finnish.  Friend or foe could be determined in part by whether one was fluent in the right language.

Regional dialects are strongest if people don't move around much.  The "My Fair Lady" story is predicated on even different regions of London having distinctive accents.  Even now in Britain some regional dialects are considered low-class. In the US regional dialects are rapidly disappearing, due both to population movement and to people all watching the same movies, TV shows, and Tik-Tok videos in different parts of the country.

If the regional dialects are fading, there is still an assertion that one's heritage and food and way of life are the best.  One can get Maine lobster in Alabama and southern fried chicken in Maine, but everyone will tell you that those who "appropriated" their cuisine did a bad job with it.  This doesn't keep people from enjoying the ethnic dishes of other countries.  Pizza demonstrates that Anglo-Americans may have been instrumental in the US's founding, but Italian-Americans are keeping it going.

And I haven't even mentioned the indigenous Americans.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Food Waste

 In the modern US, more than a third of the food produced is never eaten.  Instead it goes to waste, some of it composted, but much ending up in landfills where as it decomposes it produces methane, a gas that helps lead to global warming.

How about medieval food?  Was it wasted in the same way?

Well, food waste is always an issue, but it's different in different societies.  In the US, more than half of the food wasted is wasted before it even gets on somebody's plate.  A farmer who produces far more potatoes (for example) than he knows he can sell will just leave them to rot in the field.  A wholesaler won't even bother trying to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables to a grocery store.  A restaurant will cook up a lot of a dish it hopes will sell well, and often there is some left over, ready to be tossed.  A grocery store will fill the dumpster with overripe bananas, apples that have developed a  bad spot, or meat that didn't sell by its Sell By date.  A bakery may put "day old" bread on sale, but two-day-old bread is thrown away.

Most of this would not have been at issue in the Middle Ages.  A farmer would try to harvest and store everything grown, whether or not there was an immediate market for it—and in fact there usually was.  Misshapen fruits and vegetables bothered no one.  Who cared if the apple wasn't perfectly round and red?

There were far fewer of what we'd consider restaurants, and an inn would just reheat the next day anything that didn't move today.  Bread had to be baked frequently, since it didn't have the preservatives found in most modern bread, but dried out bread would still find a place on the menu, probably cooked into something else.

The food wasted before it got to the consumer was wasted for other reasons.  Grain was a favorite meal for mice and rats, and storage facilities were not nearly as effective in the Middle Ages as they are now at keeping out the vermin.  Cats were valued not as pets but as pest control.

All food will eventually rot, becoming unfit (or even dangerous) to eat, and it was much harder to keep without modern refrigeration.  Hence drying, salting, smoking, or sticking full of peppercorns or cloves were widely practiced, as was making milk into cheese, a more durable form.  But an onion will eventually rot even if properly dried, even heavily salted and smoked meat isn't going to last over a year without refrigeration, and spices were expensive.  And there nothing like canning to preserve "shelf life."  Fresh fruits and vegetables had to be eaten when fresh.

Even so, some part of the food was never going to be eaten.  A lot of cheese has an inedible rind.  No one was going to eat onion skins or egg shells or bones.  Technically these are also food waste, destined for the landfill today, tossed in a midden heap or buried in the Middle Ages.

How about food that now either gets taken into the house (and left to slowly go off in the refrigerator) or gets onto the plate but not into the mouth?  Such waste constitutes 40% of the food waste in the modern US.  In medieval times, there was doubtless some of that, but very little.  By our standards, most people were always on the edge of being "food insecure."  If food was there, you ate it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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