Medieval Gemstones

 Medieval people valued gemstones.  They were widely used metaphorically, as, for example, the Heavenly Jerusalem had its walls studded with gems, or a larger-than-life hero in an epic tale would have jewels set in the hilt of his sword.  But they also used both precious and semi-precious stones to decorate everything from Bible covers to royal crowns to reliquaries to communion cups.

Although these days few churches would stud their holy objects with gems, medieval people did so regularly.  Just as crown jewels marked the high position of a king or queen, so gemstones attached to the reliquary that held the bones or other relics of a saint marked this saint as something very special.

The above image is the twelfth-century reliquary of Sainte Foy, patron saint of Conques, apparently at origin a Roman statue of a man (Foy was a woman), repurposed to hold Foy's relics and covered with gems to show her value.  Many of these gems may have come from jewels people donated to show their gratitude to Foy when she healed them (she was particularly known for healing blindness and diseases of the eye).  In the stories, if someone came to be healed but carefully left their rings at home (so Foy wouldn't claim them), their hands would swell unbearably the next time they wore the withheld rings.  A quick return visit to Conques would be needed.

Gemstones could also have what we would call magical powers.  The proper gem placed under the tongue, or dipped in liquid that one then drank, or placed on the body could supposedly heal disease, or reveal a secret (like adultery), or protect travelers, or help a mother in childbirth.  It was agreed that these gems might lose their potency with time, so there are accounts of priests blessing them or putting them on the altar or anointing them with special herbs to revive their power.

The powerful had much of what we would call their liquid wealth tied up in gemstones.  Women wore highly valuable necklaces, and rings set with jewels were frequent gifts from the wealthy to their closest associates, or gifts made in response to a special service.

Diamonds were extremely rare in the Middle Ages and highly valued; most diamonds in more modern times have come from deep African mines.  Other precious stones included rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals, and amethysts, plus pearls, which are actually not stones at all, although they are minerals.  Most of these precious jewels can now be created in the laboratory, but of course they were not then.  Medieval people also valued what were considered semi-precious stones (the distinction between precious and semi-precious went back to antiquity), like topaz, lapis lazuli, jade, beryl, and tourmaline.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024


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

Building in wood

We tend to think of medieval buildings as stone, and indeed that was the most common material for castles and churches, at least from the eleventh century onward.  I've blogged earlier about building in stone.  But medieval people also built in wood.  It's just that wood hasn't held up nearly as well over the intervening centuries, for obvious reasons.

Houses in towns and villages were usually wooden before the late Middle Ages.  Wood is cheaper than stone and much easier to work, as anyone who has ever tried to build a stone wall will tell you.  On some early medieval manors, part of a peasant's rent might be paid in wooden shingles (such was the case with the peasant Bodo, who has been made perhaps unduly famous as a "typical" peasant).

The danger of course is that wood will burn.  Tightly packed medieval cities could be devastated by fire, and wooden shingles are especially a problem, as flying sparks land right on them.  (Wooden shingles are forbidden in parts of the US today for that reason.)  Medieval cities tried to mandate slate or tiles for roofs, even if the houses were wattle and daub, that is made of small pieces of wood with mud plaster in between.

The small pieces of wood are the clue for why late medieval villages and towns increasingly started being built in stone, in spite of the expense.  Wood was becoming increasingly scarce, and large pieces of wood, such as one might need to build a house, were becoming increasingly expensive as a result.  Wood after all was used for all sorts of purposes, primarily fuel as well as building, and as the population grew and with it the appetite for wood, trees were not given much of a chance to grow very big.  It didn't help that an increased population meant a greater need for food, which meant clearing new fields for crops.

But even buildings constructed primarily of stone needed wood.  A house with a slate or tile roof (much less a thatched roof or one with wooden shingles) needed beams to support the roofing.  A castle would generally have wooden floors, supported by corbels in the stone walls.  Both castles and churches needed large, heavy pieces of wood for their doors.

 

A stone church with a lead roof needed roofing beams just as much as did a barn or simple house.  The beams for Notre Dame of Paris were made from tall oaks, gathered over a number of years in the twelfth century and stored in the Seine until they had enough.  When the church burned in April of 2019, the dry, 850 year old oak went up like tinder.  It's taken several years, but those rebuilding Notre Dame, trying to make it as much like what it was before the fire as possible, have managed to find enough tall oaks to reproduce the rafters.  Many had thought it impossible, but eastern Europe had more big oaks than originally thought.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Courtship

 Courtship, as the name implies, is something that is done at court.  We are talking here not about a law court but about a king's or great lord's court, where he (or she) would gather all their powerful men and women around them.  Now in fact a law court and an aristocratic court were essentially the same thing in the Middle Ages, as the great lords were the law-givers, but let's focus on courtship for now.

At its most basic courtship meant making a case to a powerful person that one's position should be supported.  There might be only a small difference between asking for a grant of property as a favor (in return, of course though probably unsaid explicitly, for loyalty) and asking for a favorable ruling in a legal case.  All great lords were surrounded by petitioners, and the lords' wives often in effect had their own courts, with petitioners of their own.  Someone who feared a duke might not look kindly on their petition would start with the duchess, in the hope that if he could persuade her, she might persuade her husband.

In a broader sense, "courtship" applies to men seeking the affection and favor of women.  Women were petitioned for their love in the same way that a petitioner might ask a count for the revenue from a toll bridge.  We in fact still use the term courtship in that way, asking for a woman's love, even though the idea of sweet-talking a great lord into making one gifts has fallen by the wayside.  As scholars have recently demonstrated, women, especially aristocratic women, had a great deal of authority in the Middle Ages, so such courting made sense.

At a great lord's court a number of young people might be assembled, some hoping to rise in the world through association with the powerful, some there as hostages for a parent's good behavior.  With few responsibilities day to day, these young men and women enjoyed hunting and hawking, playing games like chess, and especially having romantic entanglements.  As a student of mine once said, like college without the muss and fuss of going to class.

The women gave every sign of having had a blast.  They could act coy, or allow an embrace, or give way to jealousy, or have secret trysts, or gossip mercilessly.  Because the men were asking for anything from a sweet smile to a kiss to a whole lot more, they were in a subservient position, the humble petitioner, making gifts in the hopes of winning that smile (or something more).  Women at the court of Champagne in the twelfth century made up a whole lot of arbitrary rules for the men to follow (which has led some scholars who ought to know better to suggest that there were clear mandates for "courtly love" throughout the Middle Ages).

Financial transactions as a part of romance may seem odd to us today, but not to the wealthy who now routinely draw up pre-nuptial agreements.  Not just among the well to do young people at court, but among all of medieval society, marriage arrangements involved discussions about money.  There was the dowry to decide on, what the bride would bring to the marriage, and the dower, what would be settled on her if her husband died.  Potential inheritance and very cost of the wedding required discussion.  So a man of whatever status looking for a wife would engage in courtship that might begin with a gift of something like a ring or a puppy to engage the woman's affection but quickly became much more financially serious.

Such courting was not restricted to men looking for a wife.  The duchess being "courted" so that she would persuade her husband to grant someone a toll bridge would receive gifts and asked for her "love" as well as her agreement, such love not being actually romantic, though it used the same language, but rather something closer to a friendly business deal.

The single women found in many late medieval cities, running businesses or working in crafts and trades, would also be courted, by men looking not necessarily for a wife but for female companionship, of a variety of possible sorts.  The poverty in which many of these women lived could be alleviated by allowing men to court them -- as well as providing entertainment and friendship.  The January 2024 issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum has a good article about late medieval single women being courted in cities.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

 

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.