The Sign of the Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the opening to whet your appetite.

Chapter 1 - Sir Kunz

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

Except that he did not find the Roman road again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

Ethnic Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I haven't even mentioned the indigenous Americans.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Food Waste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Church and State

 In the US we believe in the separation of church and state.  It's written both into the Constitution and into law.  There is no state religion, and people are not told that they can or cannot follow a particular religion.  Employers (other than churches) cannot refuse to hire someone based solely on their religious beliefs.  And yet many people feel that their own beliefs ought to be enshrined in law.  How did we get here?  And hey! isn't this supposed to be a blog about the Middle Ages?

 

Of course it is.  To understand why our founders wanted to separate church and state, one has to look at history going back to the eighteenth century and, before then, back to the Middle Ages.  The American War of Independence was fought against England, where the king (or queen) was (and is) the official head of the English (Anglican) church.  The seventeenth-century pilgrims came to North America because they could not worship as they wanted back in England.  No wonder our founders wanted to ensure separation of church and state.  (Modern Britain has freedom of religion now, even though it still has a state church.)

England and the rest of Europe had had extensive religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as first Catholics and Protestants went to war with each other, then different Protestants with each other.  A semi pause in all the fighting was the idea that each ruler got to declare the religion for his territory, "Cuius regio, eius religio" (His region means his religion).  If you didn't like the local state religion, tough, move somewhere else.

(Some of my Protestant ancestors left the little German state where they lived because the ruler was Catholic. They settled in France, because at the time Protestants, called Huguenots, were tolerated.  When the French crown decided everyone had to be Catholic, their descendants moved to Ireland, where at the time the English crown encouraged Protestantism.  You can see where this is going.)

But how about the Middle Ages?  There the separation of church and state would have made no sense.  Part of the responsibility of a ruler was supposed to be to bring his people to God, and that was understood to be by making sure they followed the True Religion, whatever that was.

Now in the Middle Ages there was not the wide mix of different versions of Christianity we have now, with all the Protestant denominations and variations of Catholicism and orthodoxy.  Everyone in the medieval West was supposedly following the same version of Christianity.  Of course in practice there was lots of variation, as different areas might well be different without even realizing they were, and there were reasonably sized communities of Muslims and Jews in Europe, who alternated between being persecuted and being tolerated.  Western Catholicism supposedly was open to Greek Orthodoxy (and its variants, like Russian Orthodoxy), but Eastern and Western Christianity declared the other heretics in the eleventh century and never made up.

The apparent unity of western Europe's religion was indeed often broken by certain groups being declared heretical, that is (as it was understood then) following deviant Christianity even though they ought to have known better.  Heretics of course always believed they were the true Christians, and the other guys were the heretics.  The wars of northern France against southern France in the thirteenth century with the support of the crown, the Albigensian Crusade, were efforts to overcome heresy.  With examples like this from history, it's not surprising that America was founded on the idea of not imposing a religion on anyone.

In recent years this has become complicated by some people arguing that their religious freedom is violated by other people doing things that their own version of religion considers Wrong, and that laws allowing them to do so are oppressive on their own religious freedom.  Examples of countries like Iran, where there really is a state religion enforced on everybody, ought to give such folks pause.  Suppose they discovered they were the ones the state declared heretics?  The overall level of religious tolerance in the modern US (and modern Europe for that matter) has made it too easy to forget what can happen when church and state really are united.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Medieval orphans

 Medieval parents, like modern parents, loved their children (one sometimes hears that they didn't, but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of medieval society, as I have discussed previously).  But who is going to raise the children?

Even today an awful lot of children are not brought up in the stereotypical way, by Mom and Dad (married to each other of course).  Single parents and divorced parents are raising a lot of children.  But these days there aren't many widowed parents raising children.  With the much lower life expectancy of the Middle Ages,  on top of single parents and divorced parents, the chances were much lower of a child being raised by her two biological parents.

In the Italian Renaissance, for which we have at least some good glimpses into demography, children might lose a parent to the Black Death (a feature of the Renaissance) or another disease, have the surviving parent remarry, then lose the second biological parent, and end up being raised by a married couple, to neither of whom the child was related.

Because few medieval adults made it very far out of their 50s, there were an awful lot of orphans among adults, but it was the orphan children who were worried about.  One hears the phrase now, "It takes a village to raise a child," and medieval people certainly would have agreed with that.  Relatives would routinely take in a child who had lost his parents.  If there were no nearby relatives, neighbors would take in the child.

For the powerful, it was considered an appropriate act of charity to take in an orphan.  The child might end up doing menial chores, but that was true of all children unless they were the pampered heirs.  For most of the Middle Ages, Europe was underpopulated, and children were thus valuable.

Medieval Europe did not have orphanages or formal systems of fostering or adopting.  If one took in a child to raise, he was part of the family (though often on a lower rung than the biological children).  Romans had had formal adoption systems among the elite, intended to clarify inheritance, but medieval people did not bother with that.

For that matter, formal adoption processes are quite recent.  Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had "Homes" for orphans and abandoned children, including one large one in Nova Scotia.  If someone in the eastern part of the country wanted a boy or girl to help on the farm or around the house, they would send off to the Home and be sent one, pretty much no questions asked, no wait time or home inspections or anything.  In the Anne of Green Gables stories, Anne is a "home-girl," and she lucked out in ending up with the Cuthberts.  A lot of home-boys and home-girls essentially became servants, fed and clothed and given a place to sleep but certainly not paid.  Medieval orphans might well end up in a similar situation, but they would not first have to take a long train ride to somewhere they'd never been.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Failure of prophecy

 The other day the national emergency system was tested, with sirens and alerts sent to people's phones.  The announcement that it was coming was greeted with a whole panoply of wild conspiracy theories, primarily that the sound would trigger the microchip (or perhaps the evil virus) that the Covid-19 vaccine had supposedly planted in our bodies, thus either giving us all some dread disease or even (best yet!) turning us all into zombies.

Now of course hardly anyone was turned into a zombie, or not that you'd notice.  But the incident does raise an interesting issue:  What are the prophets supposed to do when prophecy fails?  This was a problem in the Middle Ages too, although then it was more likely based on some prophecy out of the Bible than on vaccines and zombies.

The failure of the zombie apocalypse the other day was met with extended discussions of why this wasn't actually a failure of prophecy.  The social media gurus who started the idea began by denying they had actually said it would happen right away (even though that was of course what they'd suggested, even if the words "right away" had not passed their lips -- or the keyboard on their phones). This was met with appropriate derision.

 Struggling to find respect, today's conspiracy prophets insisted that things really had turned out just as they said, except that the dread disease (or microchip) was going to take a few days, even a few weeks, for its effects to be felt.  Or perhaps the sirens had been set to a different frequency than that required to activate the microchip.  Maybe Homeland Security had been warned of the dangers of a zombie apocalypse and changed the sirens at the last moment!  yes, that's the answer!  We're heroes!  (More derision.)

Those predicting the end of the world in the Middle Ages (an issue that came up frequently, though curiously enough not in the year 1000, the year modern textbooks like to talk about) had to deal with similar concerns.  If you predict the world is about to end, and yet sure enough there it is the next day, hanging in there, you have to come up with some rational explanation.

One of the best responses was that God had seen all the faithful people who believed in the end of the world praying away, been touched by their faith, and changed His mind, figuring to give us another chance.  This meant the prophets could call themselves heroes, even if it did make God seem rather unsure of Himself, and it always failed to persuade those who hadn't believed in the end of the world originally.

Alternately prophets could claim the end really was coming, but their calculations had been a tiny bit off, they'd forgotten to carry the 2, next summer for sure!  This only works once.  The next time the prophecy fails people start getting suspicious of the prophets.

The strongest response was to say that the apocalypse really had happened, but only the select few were capable of noticing.  This actually works well for a small, core group of believers, who essentially have given up on recruiting anyone else to their cause.  (Though even they may become suspicious after a while.)

In the Middle Ages failed prophecies quickly became heresies.  Groups like the Cathars of twelfth-thirteenth-century southern France, heretics already, had numerous prophecies, often based around ideas of three ages of the world, with things changing mightily in the third.  (It could become complicated, some Cathar theologians had each age have three divisions of its own, so the beginning of the Third Age was also the beginning of the seventh smaller age, allowing more room for different signs and events.)  Being the only ones who believed the prophecies could draw a group labeled as heretical closer together.

But for most of the medieval population, including those who at least temporarily believed in the coming end of the world, the most common response was to go home and pretend they'd never believed in anything so silly.  One assumes that those who were preparing for the zombie apocalypse this week took a similar approach.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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

Estate Sales

 In the US it is common to see ads for estate sales, where the older generation has died (or gone into a Home) and the younger generation is selling everything off: the recliner chair, the china, some old jewelry, miscellaneous vinyl records from the '40s or '50s, the canning jars, a lawn tractor, a collection of miniature toy cars.

They didn't have estate sales in the Middle Ages.  So, you ask, is this going to be a very short blog post?  No, actually, because the topic opens up a discussion of medieval material culture and inheritance.

One of the sharpest differences between a modern middle-class household and a medieval household, even a wealthy household, is how much Stuff we all have compared to medieval people.  Industrialization (made possible initially by an abundance of mined coal) means that material objects are far, far cheaper and more abundant now than when everything had to be made by hand, without power tools (and of course a lot of goods for sale in the US are made in parts of the world where labor is cheaper).

Medieval people had far less furniture, far less clothing, far fewer kitchen utensils, and far, far fewer books (plus of course fewer miniature toy cars or lawn tractors....).  This meant that when the older generation died (or perhaps went off to a monastery for their final time on earth) there was very little Stuff left behind.  And rather than saying, "What are we going to do with all this old Stuff?" the younger generation wanted it.

In fact a lot of people wanted it.  In a castle or manor house, the heir just took over, treating everything in the place as theirs now, furniture, tapestries, cooking and eating utensils, weapons, linens, and so on.  Old-fashioned or broken jewelry would not be sold for a few bucks just to get rid of it, but either treasured as it was or reset to look more modern.

Peasant households also had goods that everyone wanted.  If the heir was living with the parents, she or he would just take over everything (recalling that "everything" was a pretty skimpy selection once one got past the ox and the plow).  Landlords wanted those goods too, and although they would rarely just seize them from the heir, they would if there were no heir in sight.  After all, everyone could use another table or storage chest or cook pot, to say nothing of the ox and plow.  Some peasants negotiated deals with their landlords, that an heir would have a year to make an appearance before the landlord just appropriated the goods.

Who were these heirs?  Generally the child or children of the deceased (oldest sons had a certain priority, or at least they thought so, but like most legal requirements in the Middle Ages, any dispute started with a big discussion and usually ended in compromise).  Otherwise uncles and cousins  were usually next in line.  If a peasant had no obvious heirs, a landlord would just take over.  If a great noble had no heirs (or if the heir was a young girl) the crown would step in to take charge of the Stuff.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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