Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US, so it's a good time to blog about the holiday.  It's a harvest festival, which of course has a very long history, a time to celebrate the harvest being successfully brought in and settling down for winter.  They had harvest festivals in the Middle Ages even though not Thanksgiving as we know it.  A common day for such festivals was Saint Martin's day, November 11.  (Incidentally, Canadian Thanksgiving comes earlier than the American one, usually celebrated on the day Americans celebrate Columbus Day.)

In the US we focus on the arrival of those we call the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts in 1620. The grocery store today, where people are coming to the realization that a 35 pound frozen turkey probably won't thaw by tomorrow, has adorable pictures of boys in buckle shoes and Indian maidens in buckskins interacting with cooked turkeys.  Well, it wasn't quite like that.  There's a reason that the descendants of the Massachusetts Indians of 1620 have been holding Days of Mourning at Plymouth on the last Thursday of November for fifty years now.

Initial interactions between the white arrivals and the local native Americans were (fairly) peaceful in the 1620s.  They do indeed seem to have celebrated together in 1621, after the Europeans had managed to survive for a year (or at least half of them did) and even get in a harvest.  They knew all too well that the first English settlers in Virginia, which was where they were heading before being blown off course, had all died, so just being alive was worth celebrating.  But the legacy of European-native American interactions, as the Massachusetts Indians learned soon enough, was one of oppression and genocide, as vast swatches of  the natives were killed off, either deliberately (right up through the later nineteenth century) or by disease.

Miscellaneous fun fact:  the people we know as Pilgrims didn't call themselves that.  That term only became applied some two centuries after their arrival in Plymouth.  The term (common in the Middle Ages) meant taking a trip to a holy site, which the Americas were not.  The English folks of 1620 were dissenters, people who disagreed with the Church of England and wanted a place where they could force their own beliefs on people without anyone telling them not to.  The term Puritan may work better.

Other miscellaneous funk fact:  the Puritans didn't call it a Thanksgiving.  Their feast only started being called that in the nineteenth century, when there was an effort to bring it out, buff it up, and present it as a time of Europeans and natives getting along well, as the realization started to dawn that maybe killing off all the "savages" had perhaps been the tiniest bit cruel.  In 1621 the Europeans called their feast a festival (and included such events as foot races and target shooting), because to them a "thanksgiving" would have required prayer and fasting, hard to do when you're eating a lot.

Now we've lost track of most of that history (or transmogrified it into adorable pictures), but Thanksgiving has become a good holiday in its own right.  It's important to take time to think about all the good things in one's life.  Even though Christmas decorations have been in the department stores for weeks, and Black Friday deals are all over the place, Thanksgiving is a good day to pause before getting all Christmas-frantic.  It's become a holiday without a lot of fanfare, but one where  families get together, eat special foods, and talk to each other.

Thanksgiving foods are almost all from the New World.  Turkeys of course are--the Puritans brought domestic turkeys, descendants of Mexican wild turkeys, on the Mayflower with them.  The corn for the cornbread stuffing is New World.  So are the cranberries in the cranberry relish, the potatoes, and the pumpkin in the pie.  Medieval people had feasts of course, but their dishes would have been very different.

The conversations around the Thanksgiving table are part of the holiday.  Grandparents are urged to pass on family stories.  There is great concern about how families are going to deal with sensitive political issues with weird old Uncle Frankie.  It's interesting that "conversations around the Thanksgiving table" are a big thing, but no one worries about conversations around the table at Easter or Christmas, much less around the barbecue on Fourth of July.  (Turkey makes one talkative?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Heretic Wind

I've got a new ebook!  It's called "Heretic Wind," and I wrote it with my husband, Robert Bouchard.  It's a fantasy set in an alternate version of southern France in the thirteenth century.  Mystery, passion, sword fights, conflicts between heresy and orthodoxy, and lots of magic-working.

The following is the book's description, and here's the link to read the first chapter and to download it from Amazon.

"Galoran, scarred count of Peyrefixade, believes things are finally going well for him when the duke's beautiful daughter Arsendis agrees to marry him.

But heretics threaten the duchy, and the conflict becomes deadly when they kidnap Arsendis. Galoran and his magic-working spiritual advisor Melchior face treachery and betrayal as they pursue the kidnappers into the high mountains. They must make alliances with their enemies to try to rescue Arsendis, but before they can, even darker plots are revealed.

Set in an alternate version of southern France in the Middle Ages, the story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the two main characters. The outcome turns on mystery and passion, as they are forced to question their very beliefs to determine where true loyalty lies."

The book is the sequel to Count Scar, a book we wrote together about twenty years ago.  But we thought there was more story possible and decided to write and publish it.  This book can be read without reading Count Scar first, though it's the same characters in the same setting.  (We figured even if people had read the first book a long time ago they probably wouldn't remember it, so we made sure it wouldn't be necessary to read that one first to enjoy this one.)

The geography is essentially southern France along the Pyrenees, though we've moved a few things around.  The people however are our own invention, inspired in some cases by real medieval figures by not meant to represent anyone.  The social setting however is mostly historically accurate—other than the fact that there's magic!

Because real medieval priests studied all sorts of knowledge, including works of classical (pagan) antiquity, we decided to have magic studied by priests in this world.  Makes it different from most other fantasy books (including mine!), where magic and religion are on different sides, if religion appears at all.

The political machinations are simplified from real medieval political history, though some people who read Count Scar thought there was a lot of politics there and will probably think the same here.  In fact real medieval political history is enormously complicated; that may be where George RR Martin has gotten stalled, trying to make his "Game of Thrones" world be as complicated as late medieval England really was.  The biggest simplification was to leave out the fact that northern French forces invaded southern France in an effort to wipe out the heresy that informs a lot of the background for the story.  (There was enough going on already without bringing in the Albigensian Crusade.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

Dragons

Medieval-themed fantasy often includes dragons (mine does).  But where did the dragons come from?  The fact that western Europe, India, and China all have dragons in their folklore has made some speculate that dinosaurs somehow survived in hiding until a few centuries ago, coming out just often enough to be seen and join the folklore.  This is of course wildly improbable, but it's fun to imagine.

But let's look at what dragons are supposed to look like.  They are now usually portrayed as having four legs plus wings, as in the above image from 1890.  (Does this mean they are a form of insect?  I'll say No.)  This makes them quite different from Chinese dragons, which while long and snaky and (usually) four-legged do not have wings.  They do however tend to have big floppy ears.  The image below shows the Chinese flag from the Qing dynasty (c. 1900).  Chinese dragons are not nearly as ferocious as western ones, but you still wouldn't want to tangle with one.

Medieval dragons in the west might have neither wings nor legs.  They were indeed often called Worms.  Twelfth- and thirteenth-century images of Saint George or Saint Michael overcoming a dragon (such as seen below) usually showed a long, scaly creature closer to a snake than anything else.  Our modern word dragon indeed comes from Latin draco, meaning a huge serpent or sea-serpent.

By the late Middle Ages distinctions were sometimes made between dragons, which had four legs, and wyverns, which had only two (plus wings), but really they were all dragons the whole time.  They became common in heraldry, and kings and armies adopted them as symbols of courage and might (as in stories of Arthur Pendragon).  For that matter, Roman legions had often used dragon-heads on their standards.

In medieval Norse culture, a common man's name was Orm, meaning literally worm (related to our modern English word) but really meaning dragon.  The Vikings put dragon-heads on their ships.  (You may recall that in The Hobbit Tolkien had Smaug called a worm as well as a dragon.)

Dragons appeared in occasional medieval stories, most notably in Beowulf, where the hero went out as an old king to defeat one and save his people, which he did but died in the process.  Siegfried/Sigurd, in both the Norse Saga of the Volsungs and the German Nibelungenlied, got his start by killing a dragon, who had originally been a human before greed for gold turned him into a dragon.

Dragons, you will notice, are bad in these accounts, deserving to be killed.  George RR Martin has kept the ferocity of medieval dragons in his Song of Ice and Fire (inspiration for "Game of Thrones"), even though they can be befriended.  But medieval dragons could take other forms as well.

One medieval monk said that he had seen a dragon (the only account we have of someone saying he really had seen one, rather than telling a story that included one).  His doesn't match any of the stories.  He described it as what we would think of as a blimp, hundreds of yards long, legless, floating in the air.  He was understandably surprised and observed it for an hour or more.  For him, its principal issue was as a sign or portent, and he had to figure out what it portended.  He ended up deciding it was like Leviathan in the Bible.  Leviathan, principally known from the Book of Job as a huge, horrible monster did breathe fire (as do modern depictions of dragons), though the monk's floating dragon did not.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Medieval Allegory

Medieval thinkers loved allegory.  For them it was more than an explanatory technique, or a form of colorful language, as it is now.  "Her eyes were like limpid pools of deep blue water" (that sort of thing—that's actually metaphor, as technically allegory is one thing just standing for something else, but you get the idea).  Rather it was an insight into the way that the universe functioned.

Medieval people wanted to believe (as do we all) that life and the universe have some purpose, some meaning, that it isn't just a series of random events.  Allegories could help us figure it out.  At the most basic level, medicinal objects might contain clues as to their purpose.  So caraway seeds could stand for human "seed" or semen, and a woman trying to get pregnant might stick some on her thighs.  We know this, because priests told women not to do so, as it was pagan superstition (and told them often enough and loudly enough that it must have been fairly common).  But even herbalists in monasteries knew that visual appearance carried clues.  If the Middle Ages had had kidney beans (they didn't, as kidney beans are New World), everyone would have known they were good for treating diseases of the kidney.

In a broader sense, good and evil were associated respectively with beauty and vileness.  So a saint appearing in a vision always had a beautiful face, and devils routinely were accompanied by horrible smells, even if they were not found actually lurking in stinky latrines, which indeed they often were.  When a medieval author wrote that someone suddenly came to face to face with a huge black horse, ugly and with fiery eyes and decayed (but sharp) teeth, it wouldn't be a big secret that it was the devil in disguise.  Surprising how many slow-learner heroes in the stories hopped on anyway.  Were they in for a shock!

On a more serious theological note, medieval thinkers read the Bible allegorically.  In spite of some modern efforts to say that the Bible must be taken literally, that's actually impossible, as there are too many things in it that either contradict each other (like big pieces of the Old and New Testament) or else present unedifying spectacles, like Noah being drunk and naked (they leave out that part in the Noah's Ark stories), or Old Testament patriarchs having children with their handmaidens/slaves.

But allegory presented an excellent way to deal with the parts of the Bible that were problematic if read too literally (some sections, of course, especially the life of Jesus, were read very literally).  The "Song of Solomon" could be a challenge, given that it is a long love poem, in which the lover speaks of kissing his beloved behind the knees and the like.  But as soon as it was decided that it could be read as an allegory of the love of Christ for His church, all the problems vanished away.

Medieval literature also used allegory in a religious sense.  You may have been exposed to "Pilgrim's Progress," a slightly post-medieval work in which the hero, Pilgrim, makes a journey through life, meeting people with names like Good Advice.  Real subtle it's not.  But medieval people would have loved it.

On the other hand, you have the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose (not to be confused with "Romance of the Rose, or Guillaume de Dole").  It starts as a delicate allegory of the would-be lover in a garden, and there's a special rose within a wall, and as he tries to decide how to reach it he has to deal with people called things like (again) Good Advice or, alternately, Bad Advice.  The original author never finished it.  A slightly later author decided the young hero had been hanging around being delicate far too long.  So this later author had the hero pick up a battering ram, with two big sacks slung over it near one end ("for balance"), and ram his way straight in to where the rose was.  Talk about subtlety!

Married Life in the Middle Ages

I have previously blogged about how marriages were arranged in the Middle Ages and the way that weddings were held.  Today I want to talk about married life, what happened after the wedding.

As I noted before, marriage as a sacrament required the free consent of both parties.  It doesn't count as a sacrament if you're forced to do something against your will.  Families and powerful neighbors might exercise powerful suasion, but medieval marriages all started from the assumption that both parties, the man and the woman, had agreed to it.  (They did not have same-sex marriages.)  Marriage thus was a constant impediment to any attempt to establish a thoroughly patriarchal society.

Still, families with political agendas would try to make sure that their children agreed to marry who they were supposed to.  Betrothals of children to other children could cement an alliance.  In such a case the girl was often sent to live with the family into which she was expected to marry, to learn the customs of the region (and the language in some cases), and to grow up with the boy who, it was hoped, would be her childhood best friend as well as future spouse.

People lower on the social scale had more freedom to pick out their own spouse than did members of the high aristocracy.  But anyone who determinedly said No would be supported by the priests.  The church generally thought that parents should guide their children in the correct path, but forcing someone's will was never acceptable.

As this suggests, in spite of all the official talk about how a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband (a lot of it with biblical backing), couples recognized that the wife had a great deal of free exercise of will within a marriage.  There are plenty of examples of wives "disobeying" their husbands, and even more of men being guided by sound wifely advice.  Couples normally shared a bed, both for intimacy and to keep warm at night, and wives were often described as giving their husbands useful advice as they snuggled down.

In practice, husbands and wives needed each other.  If a great lord was going to be away (say on Crusade), the normal practice was for his wife to run the castle in his absence.  She would have been familiar with what was required to do because of having been involved in it since the beginning of their marriage.  Much of running a castle was a woman's prerogative anyway, so she just expanded what she was doing.

For peasants, farming chores really worked better with two adults (as any modern farmer will tell you), and a woman had to know how to plow, cultivate, harvest, and take care of the animals as well as to cook and sew and raise the children.  Among merchant and artisan families in towns, husband and wife typically worked as partners, and widows of guild masters could become masters themselves.

Married couples were assumed to love each other, even if they had not known each other very well before the wedding.  The physical consummation of their union was quite literally portrayed as making love, intensifying their emotional ties to each other.  Letters from Crusaders writing back home to their wives are full of terms of endearment and statements of how much they missed their wives.  In practice, a certain number of wives accompanied their husbands on these expeditions, if there was someone else to keep the home place running in their absence.

Marriage was still oriented more toward the husband and his family than toward the wife, however.  Husbands with concubines were treated relatively indulgently in the early Middle Ages (though by the twelfth century this was increasingly frowned upon), but a wife with lovers was shocking and horrible.  A new couple would typically move to the man's house (or castle or country, depending on social status).  If a husband died, and the wife remarried, she would typically leave her children behind to be raised by her late husband's family.

A lot of widowed people of both sexes, however, never remarried.  A widower with young children might find it expedient to do so, and a young woman still of child-bearing age would be sought after.  But a lot of people who became single, either through death of a spouse or through divorce, just decided to stay single.  One could enter the church as a monk or nun or just carry on in the world.

A good recent book on medieval marriage is by Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2019).


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Cider

One of the things you can do with apples is make cider.  It's the taste of fall (much more so than pumpkin spice latte.)  Cider was certainly drunk during the Middle Ages.  In fact, because medieval apples were much smaller than modern apples, they were more likely to be made into cider than eaten raw.

That's a picture of a modern apple.  Medieval apples would have been closer in size to what we call a crab apple.

Making cider is not very difficult.  Chop the apples coarsely, press the pieces (as in a cider mill), catch the juice as it comes out, strain it to get out seeds, stems, etc.  That's it!  Now you have good raw cider.  It needs to be kept cool or drunk immediately.  This is the cider you get at a cider mill today, and the cider that medieval people made.

Most of the cider you get in the grocery store has been pasteurized so it won't ferment the way raw cider will, and it often contains a small amount of chemicals also designed to preserve it.  I personally can always taste the chemicals and consider them an affront against nature.

So how did medieval people preserve cider?  Well, it was fall, so the spring house would be fairly cool, for at least a few days' preservation.  But much of it fermented, and that was fine too.  It was drunk as hard cider, an alternative to beer.  (Like medieval beer, it still couldn't be kept very long, because pasteurization and bottling were centuries in the future.)  In Great Britain, if you now order cider in a bar you will get what Americans consider hard cider, and the Brits don't really drink what Americans consider regular cider.

Fun fact:  Cider is not the same as apple juice.  Apple juice is made not by pressing raw apples but by boiling up apples, then straining off the resulting liquid.  Perfectly OK but not as good as cider.

Another fun fact:  Johnny Appleseed was a real person, back around 1800.  His father had a cider mill.  He thought it important that, as pioneers headed west, they should be able to have apple trees.  So every year he took a whole lot of seeds from the cider mill and headed west, ahead of the settlers, and planted apple trees.  They resulting trees were all sorts of weird hybrids, but you could always make cider.  The village of Apple Creek in Ohio is so named because when the white settlers arrived, there were already Johnny Appleseed trees along the creek.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Castles in TV/movies

A challenge for American film makers and TV producers is getting good backdrops for costume dramas.  They can manage a story set in the 1950s or even 1930s.  There are plenty of small towns (and even neighborhoods in large cities) with streets where all the buildings were built before WW II, and thus all the producers really need to do is get the modern cars off the streets and make sure the people in the background aren't wearing jeans and hoodies.

But for pretty much any story set before the twentieth century, finding a good location is a challenge.  For a long time movies avoided the challenge by having everything take place on sets constructed for the purpose.  Need a trackless forest?  Paint a picture of it and stick it behind the actors.  Need a scene inside a castle's great hall?  Easy.  Build a plywood wall and paint a stone wall on it.  A little grey paint, and there you are.

This works for live drama.  People going to a play are perfectly aware that they are sitting in a theatre, watching people on a stage.  They can deal with painted plywood passed off as a stone wall.  But those watching movies or, these days, a lot of TV shows want things to look realistic.

European producers have it a lot easier because they have a lot of old buildings on hand already.  American producers will travel to Europe to find good locations.  Now, there's a lot of mix-and-match that producers use with their locations.  The hero may walk down a street in one village, walk up the front steps of a house not actually in that village, and go into an interior of still a different house.  The scenes are stitched together so it looks like the scene is all the same place, but the clever locations manager has found the best exteriors and interiors for the story, even if they aren't all actually together.

Dramatization of  Jane Austen novels, set in the early nineteenth century, can use real places like the city of Bath (a spa town then and now) and have a choice of British country houses for the homes of the heroines, either exterior or interior or both.  If one looks closely one may see the plastic plates on interior doors that are put on to keep a swinging door from being worn down by constant hands, or a sign by the front door that tells you the hours the house is open to tours, but they still do a good job of looking authentic.

Shows like "Downton Abbey" have the advantage that they can use both the exterior and the interior of Highclere castle (not actually a castle, a late eighteenth-century manor house that is in the south of England, not in Yorkshire where "Downton Abbey" is set).  But the old servants' quarters no longer exist, so those scenes at least are shot in a studio.  Highclere itself has benefited mightily from the show, and tours now go there, and you can have tours, enjoy a high tea, and buy souvenirs.

Some of the settings for the "Game of Thrones" show are hoping for a comparable tourist surge.  An example is the castle of Doune in Scotland (shown above), whose great hall was used for the great hall of the castle of Winterfell in the show.  It's smaller than the great, sprawling Winterfell of the story, and it's partly ruined, but it's still a very nice castle.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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