Medieval Fashion

 Fashion has been important throughout human history, at least for those who could afford it.  By wearing clothes that are the latest fashion, one establishes oneself as the leading influencer, the person all others must copy.  The well to do of the Middle Ages were just as eager to dress fashionably as is a modern teenager who would (she claims) rather die than go to school dressed grossly out of fashion.

In the Middle Ages of course, just as now, the latest fashions were often mocked.  (Don't get me started on jeans, bought new, that come with big holes already worn in the front.)  In the English royal court at the end of the eleventh century, long, pointed toes on shoes were fashionable for men.  Churchmen roundly attacked them as being "girlie" and a sign of weakness, which did not keep men from wearing longer and longer points, until one day they were suddenly unfashionable.

(Court jesters are often depicted with toes on their shoes so long they have to be spiraled around.  They wore them after everyone else had given them up, proving they were fools.)

As well as establishing that one is "in the know," fashion can mark your identification with a certain group.  The white wigs of the eighteenth century (think of pictures you've seen of George Washington or Mozart) were supposed to show that one was wise, like an old person.  Jeans came into college students' wardrobes in the 1960s as a way to show solidarity with workers.  (Workers who would have thrown out jeans once they had big holes in the front, but that's a different story.)

And fashion is a way to flaunt one's wealth, to show off that one has enough money to buy new clothes whenever the fashions change, to stop wearing perfectly serviceable clothes just because they're out of style, and to employ servants to keep the delicate white bits clean and free of stains.  In the court of Louis XIV, when the French aristocracy flocked to Versailles, clothing was the single biggest expense for members of the court.

In the late Middle Ages, there was a major fashion trend in women's hats.  The tall, pointed hats that one sees in many images, hats often with trailing veils, were completely impractical, and that was the point.  No one would wear a hat like that to work in the fields or brew beer.  One wore a hat like to prove one was a person of leisure.

 

And then in the early modern period there was a great fashion in enormous lace collars.  They were expensive, delicate, and extremely hard to keep clean, all the things that marked the wearer as a person of wealth.  (They were also ridiculous, but that's half the point.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Pork and Sauerkraut

 My husband makes a very good winter-time dish, pork and sauerkraut, which could also have been made in the Middle Ages.  It takes him a couple of hours to make.  Onions, apples, sauerkraut, and caraway seeds are fried up together with pork loin, then it's baked with some citrus juice (one could substitute white wine, though we don't).  These are all ingredients readily available in the Middle Ages, except for the juice (medieval people would have used wine).  Though it takes a while to make, mostly because of the time to slice everything up, he knows that by making a double batch we can have it again with no more effort than reheating.

Okay, but let's think about what he is not doing.  He's not planting, tending, harvesting, and drying the onions.  He's not tending the apple trees and picking the apples, going over them carefully before storing them.  He doesn't plant, tend, and harvest cabbage, chop it and mix it with salt, and let it ripen into sauerkraut, instead just opening a jar.  He doesn't slaughter the pig or cut it up.  He doesn't even harvest the caraway seeds.

So if you added up how much time all those things take, maybe rather than thinking of it as a 2-hour supper we might think of it as a 6-week supper.  And we aren't even including how long it would take to gather the wood for the cooking fire.

Somebody certainly does all those things so that he can go to the grocery store and get nicely trimmed pork loin, apples and onions, and a jar of sauerkraut, plus juice and a little jar of caraway seeds.  If they're working all day in the sauerkraut factory, how do they ever have time to do anything other than eat sauerkraut for supper?

Now in fact it's not as amazing as it may seem.  Part of it is the increase in what the economists call worker productivity, how much each worker can produce in an hour, which has been increasing steadily for over two centuries, largely due to machines that do a lot of the labor.  Part of it is also division of labor, where people who are just doing one thing can do it more efficiently than those who do that thing occasionally.

Now in fact in most pre-modern societies, including parts of the Third World today, people basically spend a major part of their waking hours involved in food:  finding it, cultivating it, harvesting it, storing it, cooking it.  Ha, ha, you say, reaching for a bag of chips and a tall cool one, I spend much of my day involved with food too.

But it's different.  We don't have to think about food because we know it will be there when we want it.  Our relationship with food, for most people in the modern West, is that we have too much of it and "need to cut down."  We're all living like high medieval aristocrats, not having to work to get our food, just making sure the "little people" are producing it, even eating more than we need.

An ordinary grocery store would have been beyond the dreams of avarice for even wealthy medieval people.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Violent Overthrow of the Government

Today seemed like a good day to blog about the violent overthrow of the government in the Middle Ages.

Now of course this was not an everyday event.  Most governments carried on perfectly peacefully.  New mayors were elected, new counts came to power, new kings inherited without any sign of violence.  Pippin the Short, first Carolingian king, took the throne in 751 after (apparently) persuading his Merovingian predecessor to go off and be a monk.  (Were there threats if he didn't go peacefully? maybe.)  Boso became the first (and almost the only) Bosonid king of Burgundy in 879 by persuading the local bishops and counts to elect him, after his Carolingian predecessor had died (a death in which Boso played no role).

But violence often was involved.  The Scandinavian kingdoms had a very rapid turnover of kings during much of the Middle Ages, many of the kings being murdered by their opponents—who were sometimes their brothers.  The French kingdom in contrast experienced peaceful transfers of power from the late tenth century until the fourteenth century, which everyone agreed was unusual.

In the Middle Ages, as now, fighting was considered an appropriate way to get what one wanted when other methods failed.  Although the Middle Ages was not nearly as violent as often portrayed, as I have discussed earlier, combat was a recognized way of proving one was right–even according to the church, before the thirteenth century.  A battle could be construed as a "trial by combat," with God showing who was in the right by allowing that person to win.

Nonetheless, slaughtering a lot of people always seemed at least somewhat suspect as a Christian deed.  After William the Conqueror made himself king of England in 1066 by winning the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold (the former king) was killed, William and his wife founded a monastery and a nunnery to try to make amends.

Even when a new person had become king, that did not mean they were safe from attacks.  King Boso spent much of his short reign fighting against those who thought he should not be king, including his own brother.  King Charles the Simple was defeated in battle in 922 and locked up for the rest of his life (some have suggested he should be called Charles the Straightforward, taking his Latin nickname, Simplex, to mean not cunning or devious, but I like just plain old Simple, because he really was an incompetent king).

The English kings continued to have violence part of royal transitions after William the Conqueror.  His son became Henry I in 1100 because Henry's older brother Robert was off on Crusade, and when Robert, furious, came home, Henry defeated him in battle and locked him up for the rest of his life.  After Henry I died in 1135, his daughter Mathilda and nephew Stephen spent the next two decades battling each other over who was the rightful king of England.  The English barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 with threats of violence, and they did rebel violently against his son, Henry III.  English historians take the end of the Middle Ages in Britain to arrive in 1485, when King Richard III was defeated and killed in battle by Henry VII.

We now honor Joan of Arc, the only Catholic saint to have been burned at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic church, but her legacy is one of violence:  she defeated the English armies in order to put King Charles VII on the throne in 1422.

Even the leadership of smaller units of government might be determined violently.  Bishops ran their cities all during the Middle Ages, usually in concert with or in tension with the local count, but during the twelfth century the inhabitants began to insist on a role in governance, usually with an elected mayor.  Agreement between all the interested parties was usually reached (fairly) peacefully, but in the 1120s disagreements in the French city of Laon between bishop and townspeople turned into violent riots, with the bishop killed and his body left in the street.

The United States of America is a young country.  We do not have fifteen hundred years of history of Europe's countries during which there were numerous violent changes of government (though 1776, never forget, was an armed rebellion).  Our biggest example of trying to overthrow the government violently was the Civil War, 160 years ago.  Then there's the effort of one year ago, which fortunately failed, but might not next time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval political history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Desert Fathers

 I've discussed before how monasticism began in the third century, when Saint Anthony decided to become a hermit and headed out into the desert of Egypt.  Monasticism, that is leading a life separated from society, devoted to prayer and contemplation, quickly developed two main versions:  eremetism, that is being a hermit by yourself, and cenobitism, living in well-disciplined groups.

Saint Anthony was soon joined in the desert by other men, and even a few women, trying to lead a holy life of prayer and privation.  Egypt was a good place to do this, because once you get away from the Nile you're out in the desert and could be miles from anywhere, even though you're only a few hours' walk from town.  And this is important, because if someone is living alone and praying all day, he needs people to bring him food and (if he didn't have the sense to set up by a desert spring) water.

Soon there were a lot of desert fathers, mostly leading solitary lives, though an oasis might support a group.  They were greatly admired for their holiness, their radically simple lives, and indeed became tourist attractions.  Accounts of their lives, their holiness, and their miracles were written up.  People would come and visit them and ask for their wisdom.  Some of the hermits hid in their cells and wouldn't answer the door when pilgrims came by.  Others welcomed pilgrims and sold them sandals or prayer mats woven from palm fronds.

By the fourth and fifth centuries, regular tours of the Egyptian desert fathers were organized out of Jerusalem.  Jerusalem, like the rest of the Roman Empire, was thoroughly Christian at this time.  One surviving traveler's account recounts all the different hermits they visited, the sayings and wisdom of each, and the travelers' various adventures, like being chased for miles by a hippopotamus.

Long after Egypt, along with the Middle East and the rest of north Africa, had become majority-Muslim regions, Christians remembered the desert fathers and read their stories.  Monasteries in western Europe liked to say they were founded "in the desert," meaning not a sandy place but somewhere desolate, wild, deserted by anyone before they showed up.

One particular monastery, Saint Martin's of Tournai (northern end of the French kingdom), had an especial attraction to the desert fathers.  It was an old monastery that had become abandoned during the time of the Vikings.  In the eleventh century, it became simply a parish church in town, served by a small group of canons (priests).  In the twelfth century, the priests read their Bibles and heard about monasteries being founded and decided to become monks, living a much more austere life than did priests:  a strictly vegetarian diet, simplicity in clothing, no personal possessions.

As a parish church, Saint Martin's had been very much part of the community, with people popping into the church to pray or ask for blessing or attend mass or to have a child baptized or a wedding performed or just to chat with the priests.  All this continued after the priests became monks.  As monks, they started to feel that maybe they had not sufficiently distanced themselves from society, especially as people were always talking and laughing and going about their business right outside the church.  But they loved their community and didn't want to drive them away.  Some community members had themselves decided to become monks, bringing a few children with them.

Reading the stories of the desert fathers, the monks had a brilliant idea.  They would head off to Egypt and become desert fathers themselves!  In the dead of the night they packed up all their books and whatever food they had on a wagon, put the little boys on top of the load, and headed out, bound for Egypt.

They didn't get far.  The townspeople discovered their absence the next morning and were distraught.  It was as bad as having Mom and Dad decide that you were so naughty they would run away from home.  Fast riders headed out on every road out of Tournai and soon caught up to the monks.  The bishop was summoned to talk sense into them.

The bishop explained to them that they could be perfectly good monks right there in Tournai, ministering to their parishioners.  For good measure, he threw himself on his face at their feet, telling them he was not worthy to be the bishop of such holy men and boys.  At this point they had no choice but to throw themselves on their faces themselves and swear they would never do it again.

The townspeople were delighted to have their monks back.  The monks indeed never tried running away again, and one has to wonder what would have happened if they actually had managed to make it to Egypt on foot.  But their experience indicates the strong hold the stories of desert fathers continued to have on monks' minds.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Winter in the Middle Ages

 We in the west with good furnaces probably don't appreciate how lucky we are.  It's cold outside, but who cares?  Set the thermostat to a pleasant springtime temperature, the furnace does its thing, and we're comfy warm (this assumes your furnace is working right).  This was of course not the case in the Middle Ages (or for that matter much of the twentieth century, when furnaces were coal-fired and you had to go down to the basement and shovel).

Humans evolved in the nice warm climate of Africa.  But humans like to go places and find new things, so before you know it, off some of them went, heading north.  Neanderthals' skin pigment decided this was stupid, since there was after all an ice age going on, and headed home to Africa, but the Neanderthals stayed.  Hide in caves and hunt woolly mammoths across the glacier, that's the life.  Before too long, Cro-magnons joined them in Europe.  And winter has been a challenge to Caucasians ever since.

For medieval people, the twin challenges were staying warm and having enough to eat.  Staying warm required fire, which meant burning wood, as they did not have gas or oil (and had not started mining coal).  As I have discussed previously, fireplaces really only appeared in the thirteenth century, as a luxury for the rich, so people before then, and lower status people throughout the Middle Ages, would have open fires in the middle of the room.  It's more efficient, because you don't have heat escaping up the chimney, but it's bad for your lungs.

Besides fire, the best way to stay warm is to snuggle up to other mammals.  Medieval peasants, living close to everybody in their family, and with a heat-producing cow right next door, would have been better off than those in a big, cold, drafty castle.  Let's just say that stone is not a good insulator.  Then everybody would have wanted furs and wool blankets to preserve the warmth.

To stay warm of course requires spending minimal time outside.  Fortunately there weren't many farm chores to be done in the winter.  On the other hand, there wasn't a whole lot to do inside either.  Images of winter done in the Middle Ages mostly show people sitting by the fire.  Christmas provided a nice festive high-point, even though it came in what we would call January (those pesky leap years mess up a calendar), as I previously discussed.

The other big challenge was having enough food.  Castles and peasant cottages alike would try to put aside enough food to last the winter, because if there weren't enough beans and wheat and cheese and root vegetables and smoked meat or salted fish in the larder, one would be awfully hungry come spring.  (Try to guess where the word larder comes from....)  The image above is a twelfth-century representation of November, the period in which one essentially stored up fat like a bear getting ready for hibernation (that's what the well-dressed gentleman  is doing, looks like he has a fish and a big chunk of bread).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Church of the Sepulchre

 The church of the Sepulchre is one of the holiest spots in Christendom.  This church, located in the old city of Jerusalem, originally built in the fourth century and added to over the centuries, is built over what is believed to have been Jesus's tomb, from which He rose.  It was naturally a holy spot for medieval Europeans, and many churches in the west adopted elements of its style in deliberate imitation.

The church is noted for having a rotunda, with a dome over it, rather than adopting the standard basilica pattern of most early churches, a long central aisle with side aisles on either side, and a crossing perpendicular to the aisles toward the end opposite the main entrance.  The rotunda encircles the site of the tomb.  This circular style was adopted by Charlemagne's palace chapel at Aachen and in the crypts of many other churches.  For example, the early eleventh-century crypt of St.-Bénigne of Dijon has a circular chapel, as seen here.

 There is a real mix of architectural styles in Jerusalem, even before you get into the modern city which is now Israel's capital.  There are buildings whose roots go back to the Hebrew kings, though mostly those have been built over.  There are plenty of structures from when the Holy Land was part of the Hellenistic world (after Alexander the Great had conquered the area), then  buildings dating from the Roman empire, then Byzantine buildings, then Muslim structures built from the seventh century on, then Crusader structures from the twelfth century, and finally Turkish architecture.  The church complex has been influenced by all of these.

Christians from Europe made pilgrimages to the church of the Sepulchre from the time it was built.  Even when Jerusalem was under Muslim control, it was usually possible to visit the Christian holy sites.  Such a trip would be a trip of a lifetime, with the Sepulchre itself the high point, though all of the Holy Land was thick with places mentioned in the Bible.  It was not a trip to be undertaken lightly, as it would probably take a couple of months just to get there, but some went there several times, usually to try to get out of a particularly bad situation, where volunteering to go on pilgrimage would forestall plans to put one to death for one's crimes.

Originally the area had been a stone quarry back under the Hebrew kings, then, once no longer in use as a quarry, it was used as a cemetery, with burials in little caves cut into the quarry walls.  The emperor Hadrian thought it a great place for a Roman temple.  But when the emperor Constantine made Christianity legitimate in the fourth century, he had this temple torn down.  The local Christian community told him that Jesus's (temporary) burial place had been there, and while tearing down the temple a cave tomb was discovered which has been identified as Jesus's ever since.

The circular rotunda was built over the spot.  Further rebuildings were done in the eleventh century, after the church was partially destroyed by the caliph during a period in which the Muslim rulers of the area decided to get rid of both Christian and Jewish holy sites.  Twelfth-century Crusaders rebuilt again, but the present structure has not been radically changed since.

As one of Christendom's most holy sites, all major Christian groups have claims on the church.  It is currently divided up between Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox denominations.  Part of the difficulty of during further renovations is that everyone has to agree.  There is a ladder against one of the upper windows that has been there for three centuries, because the ladder belongs to one group yet is on the part of the church controlled by another, and they cannot agree on moving it.  (Interestingly, it was briefly moved at one point recently, probably by a workman cleaning windows or the like.  Everyone pretended it hadn't happened.)

The church and its complex stand on a site over an acre in size, including numerous other chapels and buildings.  Archaeologists working at the site are discovering much of the site's history.  The spring 2021 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review summarizes recent findings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval religion and pilgrimage, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Leprosy

 Before the Covid pandemic, people would often try to understand the horrors of the fourteenth-century Black Death by saying it must have been like AIDS.  Actually, no.  Even though AIDS has, over the last 35 years or so, killed a lot more people than have been killed (so far) by Covid, it's not particularly like the Black Death (on which see more here).

The actual Black Death (first outbreak in medieval Europe in 1347) was very infectious and transformed society abruptly, with people going from infection to death in a very short time, whereas AIDS is not very infectious, requiring contact of bodily fluids, and, now that the medical profession has worked out treatments, not a death sentence.  (Well, life is a death sentence, but we're not going into that right now.)

Actually the Black Death was more like Covid-19, in its abrupt appearance, rapid spread, and impact on all of society.  But we're not going to have a third of our population dead in a few years, as in the fourteenth century, and there actually are treatments and vaccines, which they did not have then.  (Note:  there were no "Black Death Deniers" in 1347.)

AIDS is more like leprosy, in that it infected a fairly small proportion of the population, and those infected were avoided both as (potential) spreaders of infection and as people considered morally as well as physically compromised.

But let's talk about leprosy itself.  The disease appears in the Bible, called "unclean" in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament Jesus cleansed lepers.  Now it's not entirely clear if all these people in ancient times actually had what we now call leprosy, or if some might have had some other skin disease, but DNA tests have shown the bacterial disease we now call leprosy has been around for thousands of years.  It is also now called Hansen's disease, after the Norwegian doctor Hansen, who in the late nineteenth century first identified the bacterium that causes it.

As a bacterial disease, it can be cured with modern antibiotics, but there was no cure before the mid-twentieth century, and it is still fairly prevalent in some parts of the world, especially India.  The disease attacks the skin and the nerves, so that the infected person may not notice they have wounds, leading to loss of digits especially.  Someone with discolored skin, missing fingers, and maybe shuffling along half blind was frightening.  (Leprosy often infects the eyes.)

Medieval people both feared and pitied lepers.  Although leprosy was (and is) hard to catch, medieval people didn't want to take chances.  Thus lepers were isolated and were supposed to avoid the general population, ringing a bell if they had to go somewhere, to warn people to get out of their way.  The "unclean" of the Bible gave lepers a moral and social stigma, so they were not just frightening but despicable.  The disease has always spread more easily among those living very close together, especially the poor, and encampments of outcasts were "unclean" in the full sense of the word.

But medieval people also pitied lepers and wanted to be Christ-like and, if not actually cleanse them (heal them completely), at least help them.  Just as many hospitals were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hundreds of leper-houses were set up, essentially sanitariums where lepers would live isolated but properly taken care of.  These were called Lazarus houses, due to the belief that Lazarus, who Jesus brings back from the dead in the Bible, had died of leprosy.  (The Bible doesn't actually say he was a leper, but it's a good story.)

Fun fact:  The abbey of Fontevraud had a leper-house associated with it in the twelfth century, called appropriately St.-Lazare.  It has been remodeled into a luxury hotel.  I bet the Americans who stay there have no idea.  The Paris train station St.-Lazare is located on the site of a medieval leper house.

Leprosy reached the Pacific islands in the nineteenth century.  A leper colony was established on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian islands, on a lava beach at the bottom of steep cliffs.  Lepers were rowed to nearby, pushed overboard and told to swim to shore.  A Catholic priest, Damien De Veuster, took care of them until he finally caught leprosy himself and died.  He has now been canonized as Saint Damien.  The lepers were there until the later twentieth century, when they were finally cured, though some stayed on at the colony, which had been their home for so long.  The Molokai tourist bureau offered tourists a chance to ride a donkey down the very steep cliff to visit the lepers.  (And they wonder why their island has no high-rise hotels.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.