Brunhilda

 Nobody names their daughter Brunhilda anymore.  Yet the name is familiar, perhaps as the cartoon witch "Broomhilda," or more likely a fat lady opera singer in a winged Viking helmet wailing away in some parody of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen."

 

 

But the real Brunhilda was a formidable personage, a queen of Francia in the early Middle Ages who not only ruled beside her husband but was regent for her son, grandson, and great-grandson over the following decades.  She became a symbol of great cruelty (at least to her enemies) and was said to have been responsible for the deaths of ten Frankish kings and lots of ordinary folks.

Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess, growing up in the sixth century in what is now Spain. At that time Spain was Christian (this predates the rise of Islam), but Arian Christian, that is Arians did not believe in the Trinity.  There was only one God, they believed, and Jesus was divinely inspired but not God Himself.  However, in 567 Brunhilda married Sigibert, king of Burgundy and Austrasia (that is, the eastern part of what's now France, going into Switzerland) and converted to trinitarian (Catholic) Christianity, her new husband's religion.

Marrying a princess was a new experience for the line of Merovingian kings (of which Sigibert was one).  The kings had mostly taken low-born women as their wives and given them little authority, which has proven very irritating to modern historians of medieval women, as we often have very little information on these wives.  But not long after Sigibert married Brunhilda, Sigibert's brother Chilperic decided to marry a princess himself and chose Brunhilda's sister.

For reasons that, after 1450 years, aren't exactly clear, Chilperic soon tired of his Visigothic bride, and he and his mistress Fredegund decided to kill her. Fredegund, who had started life as a slave, was now crowned queen of Neustria (basically western France).  Brunhilda was distraught over her sister's murder for reasons that are quite clear, and she and Fredegund immediately became sworn enemies.  Their rivalry went on for decades.

The next forty or fifty years of Brunhilda's life were filled with plots, treachery, betrayals, and murders that put A Game of Thrones to shame. You can read all the thrilling details in the Historia by the sixth-century author Gregory of Tours.  She did manage to outlive Fredegund as well as establishing a number of monasteries (and having a few bishops killed).  But in her early 70s she was finally captured by her enemies and put to death by being dragged and pulled apart by wild horses.  (The Merovingians, like the Romans before them, thought "cruel and unusual punishment" was a swell idea.)

But Brunhilda was not forgotten.  Memory of her lingered for six centuries, until around 1200 she appeared in two different though clearly related epic tales, the Volsung Saga of Scandinavia and the Nibelungenlied of Germany.  In the first she was a daughter of Odin, served as a Valkyrie, and she had an affair with Siegfried the Dragonslayer (notice the Sig-) before he married someone else.  In the latter she was queen of Iceland and a real athlete, whom Siegfried defeated in a sporting competition before she married someone else.  Soon Attila the Hun appears (let's just say it's complicated).  In both versions of the story Brunhilda was responsible for lots of betrayals and dead bodies.  Wagner loved it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

Boys learning Latin

 Medieval literacy required knowledge of Latin.  Being able to read Latin was one thing (hey, even I can do it!), but anyone in the church, and for that matter many in government or commerce, would have to be able to carry out a conversation in Latin and to write it.

 Thus there were handbooks created to help those who did not know Latin learn it.  It was easier for those whose native language was one of the so-called Romance Languages (Old French, Old Spanish, Old Italian, and so on), because until the eighth or ninth century they assumed they were in fact speaking Latin.  A refresher on case endings and verb conjugations was going to be necessary.  It was a bigger challenge for those speaking a Germanic language, including Anglo-Saxon, because the vocabulary was different as well as things like noun declensions.

We have a very interesting handbook put together by a man named Aelfric Bata, intended to help boys in Anglo-Saxon England learn Latin.  It was built around handy phrases that the boys might use.  Presumably, as in modern language training, these were phrases that were meant to be memorized, then modified in use as appropriate.

Many of us in first-year French (or whatever) learned to say such scintillating phrases as, "My pen is blue," or "Where is the restaurant?" or even "I am happy to meet you."  More darkly, some modern phrase books teach us how to say things like, "I have injured my arm/ my foot/ my head," or "Please call an ambulance." 

Aelfric Bata's phrase book provides a window into what an Anglo-Saxon teacher thought his boys might need to say.  The book begins, "Master, please teach us boys how to speak Latin correctly."  The boys continue, "We don't want to seem silly or shameful when we speak."  They even ask to be beaten if they don't learn properly, which seems like an editorial emendation.

This opener suggests the boys were already speaking Latin pretty well, but there was lots to come.  Some of the dialogues suggest a rather strange scene.  "Do you have something to say to me?  Well, plowman, what do you say?  What kind of work do you do?  Have you had something to eat?  Have you had something to drink? Do you have any comrades?  Is this person one of your comrades?"  (For starters, why would a novice monk assume a plowman would converse in Latin?  And where did the comrades come from?  Did they bring lunch?)

Interestingly, if the answer to one of the questions was Yes, Aelfric Bata represented it as "etiam," which literally means "indeed."  By the twelfth century on the Continent Yes in Latin was "sic," meaning "so it is."  Fun fact:  classical Latin has no word for Yes.

A section that was meant to teach verb tenses (present, past, future, and so on) has a desperate note.  "I am doing nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I will do nothing wrong, God willing."

And then there were the boys at play.  There were dialogues about baseball (or "rounders," a pre-baseball version of a game with bat, ball, and runnng the bases), batter-up, run faster, you're out, and the like.  There were also phrases like, "Watch out! The teacher's coming back!"  Sounds like Aelfric Bata was having some fun here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

The Starlight Raven

 As well as a medievalist, I'm a fantasy writer, whose fantasy ranges from pretty-close-to-real-medieval-settings (other than the introduction of magic and zero effort to place the story among real historical events) to what might be termed medieval-adjacent.  In the latter category is the series that begins with The Starlight Raven.

 

It's medieval-adjacent in that the setting looks vaguely how Europe would have looked in the Middle Ages, cities widely spaced with mostly farming villages in between, lots of woodland, castles here and there, cathedrals with bishops, knights who fight with lance and sword, heating provided by fireplaces, and countries ruled by kings.  It's lacking a lot of what we think of as defining the modern world, including no New World (no Americas), no Protestant Reformation, no guns, and rather minimal industrialization, and that run by magic.

On the other hand, in many ways the setting is nineteenth-century.  They don't have electricity, but they do have magic-run telephones (land lines) and magic-run printing presses.  Houses have running water.  There is sort-of universal education for young people.  I'm a historian.  If I'm anachronistic, I do it on purpose.

Like all good fantasy, it's actually about themes that are important today, semi-concealed in a story that includes wizards and dragons.  It's about growing up, about finding your own identity.  It's about being a teenager, somewhere between needing a hug when you're frightened or have messed up, and wanting to do everything independently.  It's especially about coming to terms with gender expectations and not accepting that girl-stuff and boy-stuff have to be totally separate.

The series is a "next generation" series, following on the Royal Wizard of Yurt series, which began with A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel.  However, it can be read on its own without reading the previous series.  There are currently three more novels in the series after The Starlight Raven, with more on the way.

Click here for the link to the US Amazon sales page.  It's available as both an ebook and a paperback.

Here's the opening to whet your appetite:

_________________________________

Of course I knew my mother was a witch.

She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.

But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.

That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.

But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Villard de Honnecourt

 Much of what we know about medieval building techniques is due to the so-called sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt.  We know very little about Villard himself, other than his name, and the fact that he lived in northern France in the thirteenth century.  But his sketchbook (perhaps better called a "portfolio"), is packed full of drawings of details of the buildings going up around him.  It also includes images of people, animals, siege engines (catapults and trebuchets) and an idea for a perpetual motion machine.

The image above shows a detailed rendering of a clock tower.

The portfolio is divided into several sections, sculpture, architectural features, masonry, and so on.  However, it is clear that some pages that were originally part of it are missing.  Architectural historians now think that the missing section was on carpentry.  Nonetheless, the parts that we do have include so much detail on how pieces of wood can be used and how they are attached together that it seems likely that Villard himself was primarily a carpenter.

The portfolio is a great boon to historians of medieval architecture, because we basically now have 800 year old buildings that have had 800 years of rebuilding and "improvement," so that it's almost an archeological exercise to figure out all the original details.  But Villard gave us, for example, the layout/floor plan of Cambrai cathedral while it was still being built, so we know exactly what the original architect intended.

Modern builders can also learn thirteenth-century techniques from the portfolio.  There are a number of sketches of Reims cathedral, which was brand new at the time.  The detailed drawings would have been a boon to the builders restoring the cathedral after it was gutted during World War I.

Other aspects of the portfolio pique our interest for different reasons.  He included a drawing of a lion (with a sketch of a porcupine off to the side).

In the caption Villard notes that he has drawn the lion "from life."  Okay, we ask, where did someone hanging out in northern France see a lion?  One has to assume it was in a cage, or Villard, standing right in front of it with his parchment and pen, wouldn't have been able to do a nice drawing.  Most likely this lion had been captured in Africa (maybe as a cub?) and sent along the trade routes until it ended up with some rich person, who kept it as a curiosity.  There were plenty of heraldic lions in the Middle Ages, used as signs of boldness and strength, but they didn't look as concerned as this lion seems to (and I'm not at all sure lions have eyebrows).

And let's not forget his perpetual motion machine, where a series of mallets would theoretically keep a wheel turning indefinitely once it was given a push.  (In fact it would not have worked in the thirteenth century any better than it would now.)

The portfolio is available in facsimile with commentary by Carl F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Ashgate, 2009).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

 

Countess Judith of Flanders

 When authors decide to write historical fiction about a strong woman of the pre-modern period, they tend to go for the old favorites.  How many novels have you seen about Anne Boleyn, for example?  Or for the medieval period, Eleanor of Aquitaine?

But there were lots of interesting, strong medieval women who are worth studying for what they reveal about medieval society who would also make the great basis for historical fiction but who have been undeservedly ignored.  One of them was Judith of Flanders.

Judith was a Carolingian, oldest child of the king Charles the Bald of France and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne.  Like all people of the upper nobility, marriage for her was not based on things we take for granted, like love and shared values and compatibility.  Instead, as I have discussed earlier, politics played a major role in such marriages, which could strengthen alliances or resolve disputes.

Judith was first betrothed in 855, when she was probably twelve or thirteen, to the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelwulf of Wessex, who was about fifty at the time and was a widower.  Æthelwulf, as a good Christian king, was on his way to Rome on pilgrimage and stopped at the royal Frankish court.  There the marriage was arranged.  By this time the consent of both the future husband and wife was required for a valid marriage, but a young princess, who had been brought up knowing she was going to be married to someone rich and powerful who her parents wanted to make an alliance with, was not about to raise objections.

In this case, both King Charles and King Æthelwulf wanted to work against the Vikings, who were harassing both England and the French coast.  A marriage of the princess with the widowed Anglo-Saxon king was intended to ensure that alliance would last.

It is important to note that Judith's parents were not simply disposing of her.  When Æthenwulf returned from Rome a year later and they were formally married, Judith underwent a very elaborate, formal ritual marking her as queen of Wessex.  Anglo-Saxon queens had never had any particular crowning rituals, but King Charles wanted the best for his girl.  Lacking any Anglo-Saxon precedents, the Frankish bishops created a brand new ritual just for her.  (It may have been inspired in part by Anglo-Saxon rituals for the crowning of kings.)

When Judith got to England, her new husband gave her a wealthy dower.  This was money and property that would be hers even after he was gone.  In her status as queen, she sat next to her husband in council and witnessed his documents, something the wives of Anglo-Saxon kings had not done before.  Many at court thought this a little disturbing, but there was nothing they could do about it.  There was also nothing they could do about it when Æthelwulf died only about a year and half after his marriage (858), and Judith promptly married her step-son, Æthelbald, born to Æthelwulf's first wife.

However, this marriage lasted no longer than her first one, and in 860 Judith was widowed for the second time.  The English were probably starting to suspect a pattern.  (Æthelbald was succeeded by his brother Alfred, one of the most successful Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who united all of England against the Vikings, but that's a story for another day.)  Judith quickly sold all her dower property and headed back to France as a wealthy woman.  She was still only in her teens and had had no children.

Her father Charles was probably concerned that a rich Carolingian princess would become the prey of fortune hunters.  While he tried to decide on who to marry her to next, or whether it might be better for her to become a nun (and while he tried to deal with issues like rebellious nobles), he sent her to the royal palace of Senlis, where she was carefully guarded.  Her younger brother Louis, the future King Louis II of France, was also living at Senlis at the time.

The guarding was inadequate.  Judith by this time had a mind of her own.  She decided to remarry, this time choosing her own husband, and she chose Baldwin, young count of Flanders.  Flanders (now part of Belgium, the Dutch-speaking half, then part of the French kingdom) was at the time a fairly small and unimportant county, but Baldwin had ambitions.  He came to Senlis in 862 to negotiate with Judith's brother Louis over some territorial issues, and there he met the young dowager queen.

Did he abduct Judith?  Or did she willingly elope with him?  Did Louis help the couple?  The Flemish in later centuries had all sorts of stories about their elopement.  At any rate, there is no indication that she objected.  Judith now is usually taken as a good example of a noble woman with the ability and determination to shape her own life, though in earlier accounts she was often portrayed as a disobedient daughter or, alternately, as a helpless maiden carried off by a rapacious count.  There was even a strain in English history of Judith as a sex-mad slut who lured her step-son into an incestuous coupling.

King Charles at any rate was furious with his daughter, with Baldwin, and with his son Louis.  (It didn't help that Louis and his brothers decided on a brief rebellion against their father at this point.)  Charles had the archbishop of Reims excommunicate Judith and Baldwin, saying that he was a rapist and she was no better than she ought to be.  The pair fled to the court of her cousin Lothar II, king of the "middle kingdom" between France and Germany, who helped them persuade the pope to lift the excommunication.  (Lothar was officially king of Italy, part of the middle kingdom.)  Charles grudgingly agreed to a formal wedding ceremony in 863.

With this marriage, the next generations of counts of Flanders gained Carolingian ancestry, of which they were intensely proud.  (Judith did have children with Baldwin, in spite of having no Anglo-Saxon offspring.)  Flanders became a wealthy county, especially with the growth of trade in the twelfth century, as the area imported raw wool from England and spun it into cloth for the Champagne trade fairs.  When Charles the Good of Flanders was murdered in 1124, as I previously discussed, there was a great deal of competition for this rich county.

There.  Wouldn't Judith make a better subject for historical fiction than another book starring Anne Boleyn?

For more on Judith and how she has been portrayed over the centuries, see the new book edited by Steven Vanderputten, Judith of West Francia (Brepols, 2024).

 
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on medieval kings and queens, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval German and Latin

 Many of western Europe's languages are derived from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, plus the regional variations like Sicilian, Occitan, and Provençal.  But many are Germanic, derived from the language (or languages) Germanic peoples spoke as they wandered west into the Roman Empire and its outskirts.  The dividing line between Latin-derived and Germanic languages is roughly the Rhine river, which also formed the eastern boundary of the Empire.

(I'm leaving aside here languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which come from a very different tradition, as well as English, which in its modern form is a mix of French/Latin and German vocabulary, and I'm not discussing today the Nordic languages, which are a different version of Germanic.)

In the early Middle Ages, in the area that had been part of the Roman Empire (excluding Britain), everyone assumed they were speaking Latin.  But as time went on the spoken language simplified, dropping Latin's case endings in favor of more use of prepositions, and using what we now consider the normal subject-verb-object sentence structure, rather than the classical Latin version where the verb often ended up in the final spot.  Pronunciation also varied, so Latin "quatuor" (meaning 4) began to be pronounced more like "katre" (as in modern French).

The different "romance" languages (those derived from Latin) all evolved in different directions, depending on region.  In Italy, where different regions had already developed different versions of their language before Rome conquered the whole peninsula, the different versions of what one might call Old Italian were as different as between, say, Spanish and Portuguese.

In the ninth century, Latin, real Latin, became a learned language.  It was after all the language of the Bible in the West, so it was important to get it right.  People studied the vocabulary, declensions, and verb forms and tried to write and speak using them.  In the monasteries and, from the twelfth century on, in the universities, Latin was the normal spoken language.  It was used for all legal documents until the thirteenth century, when occasionally a legal document would be written in the vernacular, though Latin persisted through the end of the Middle Ages.  Sentence structure however was usually that of the romance languages, and new words were added for things where there was no classical Latin term (like the mould-board plow).

Also in the ninth century, those in regions where Germanic languages predominated started trying to write down their language.  In Anglo-Saxon England, King Alfred had law codes and even parts of the Bible put into Anglo-Saxon, so everyone could understand them.  The priests and learned folks in ninth-century England knew that their spoken language was very different from Latin, so they adhered more closely to real Latin than did many of their counterparts on the Continent, who were doing mix-and-match with Latin and (for example) Old French.  The Carolingian court welcomed Anglo-Saxon scholars to improve their Latinity.

Meanwhile, over east of the Rhine, as the area was finishing being Christianized, it was important to have good Latin, but it was also important to be able to write down the local language.  There were multiple versions of German in various regions, as is the case even today, where the Bavarian dialect is not the German taught in schools, and Dutch (Flemish) and Letzburgh (the vernacular language of Luxembourg) differ again.  Those trying to write down Germanic languages had to deal with the various sounds, like -th- or -w- which have no appropriate letters in the Latin alphabet.

Even today we use T plus H for a sound that doesn't sound like T plus H, and W is made up of two U's put together (think of the name of the letter -- ever notice that before?).  A Merovingian king had tried, three centuries earlier, to come up with new letters for sounds not used in Latin, and been mocked for not speaking pure Latin where you wouldn't need such letters.  Anglo-Saxon England, less dismissive, came up with the "thorn" for the -th- sound, unfortunately not now used.

The ninth-century German priests trying to write Old German also had the problem that since spoken German varied from place to place, written German would too, unless they could figure out the "correct" spelling -- which one was it?

Most modern languages are relatively easy to pronounce if you see a word written out.  Spanish and Italian have direct correlations between letter and letter-sound.  French has a lot of letters that are not pronounced, but if you see a word written out you can say it, if you know some French.

Not modern English!  Spelling and pronunciation are unrelated.  Why do "frown" and "blown" not rhyme?  Why are the present and past tenses of "read' spelled the same but pronounced differently?  Why is the -g- treated differently in "finger" and "ringer"?  Why are "sew" and "sow" pronounced the same, except when "sow" means a female pig, when it's pronounced differently?  No one knows.  And don't get me started on the six pronunciations of -ough- : "though, thought, through, rough, cough, bough" (oh, aw, oo, uff, off, ow).  Don't bother having a first-grader try to "sound it out."  Just teach them the dang word with its pronunciation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval language and other aspects of medieval history and culture, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.