Medieval History

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

Nowadays, we’re used to having access to a variety of foods all year round. Most people in the western world have access to fresh and frozen food from around the world that our medieval ancestors could only dream of. Starvation and malnutrition were real possibilities for many ordinary people in medieval society.

A bad harvest didn’t just mean the crops had failed, it meant facing months of existing on whatever food could be foraged from the fields and forests. It was difficult to preserve food in an age before refrigeration and so stock-piling food in case of bad times was almost impossible. And whatever the economic situation, a family still had to pay its rents and tithes or face eviction.

Medieval people were very much ruled by the weather and the changing seasons and temperatures. The long summer days must have seemed such a blessing, after months of evenings lit only by candles or rushlights. The joy of a good harvest would have been intense; not only was there plenty for everyone to eat for the coming year, there was also the chance of extra money from selling on surplus goods at market or to a travelling merchant. Medieval records show that a good harvest, where yields were up at least 15% to a normal year, came only once every two decades. A person would be lucky to see a record-breaking harvest three times in their life.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

Archery had mixed fortunes during the medieval period with laws sometimes banning the use of bows and arrows and at other times, dictating that it should be practised. From one point of view, a bow and arrows was seen as a dangerous weapon, which in the wrong hands, could cause death and injury, either by accident or design.



At other times, medieval authorities valued the potential of an army of skilled archers who could be drawn from the ranks of ordinary men. Many castles and villages had their own butts, where anyone could practise their aim and compete against others. This was usually just a fun sport, but had the serious purpose of developing the archery skills which may some day be needed in battle. A man who had practised archery from childhood could be a formidable enemy on the battlefield.



As with the Viking warriors, most archers would use whatever armor and weapons they possessed when fighting. Armed and uniformed forces did exist, but many soldiers had to pay for and provide their own equipment.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

Working only from official records, it would seem that women played no part in medieval trade. But here, as in so many other aspects of medieval life, women played a part in the trade of their family or husband but usually received no recognition.

Business records for the middle ages record women buying and selling, producing goods and carrying out business transactions alongside men. However, it was rare for a woman to be permitted to register as a guild member. There are occasions where a widow is recorded as a ‘femme sole’, or female trader, normally a guild was male only.

However, many businesses could not have operated without a woman helping in the background. A medieval trader would depend on his wife’s help in order to run his business and children were also involved in the work of a family’s trade. An unmarried teenage girl would be expected to work as hard as the rest of the family.

A young girl did not usually follow an official apprenticeship, but would learn the family’s trade as she grew up in a working household. Even in the countryside, women and children were involved in farm work, such as helping with the harvest and planting crops.

It could be hard to earn a living in medieval Europe and every hand was needed. Women may not have been officially recognised in a guild, but their contribution to medieval trade was invaluable.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

The medieval calendar seems to have an abundance of feast days and festivals, with a celebration occurring every few weeks. But medieval life, for the majority, was tough, mundane and often short.



Before electricity, quality of life was largely determined by the weather and the changing seasons. Cold winter days made outdoor work difficult and winter evenings were lit only by candles, for those who could afford them. Food was scarce and harvest must have seemed a long time off.



Little wonder then, that communities took every chance to celebrate. Feast days and festivals were a way of cementing local loyalties and remembering what was good about life. Local rivalries, such as who could bring in the biggest maypole, or who had the largest bonfire, made people work together for a common cause. And they might certainly need each other in the case of attacks or famine.



Most of the major medieval festivals are still celebrated today. Easter, Christmas, May Day, Midsummer’s Night can all be seen on the modern calendar. But I wonder if we enjoy them as much as our medieval predecessors did? Most of us take for granted a good supply of food and a warm house. And treats can mean so much more when something has been in short supply, as many things were in medieval times.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

Viking tales, like other sagas and legends, were told around the fireside and legendary warriors gained a cult status.

But the Vikings weren’t an official, recruited fighting force. They were paid to fight as and when needed and for the rest of the year, carried out their normal occupations. They used whatever clothing and weapons they could afford and often believed that the characters and symbols on their weapons offered them magical protection.

Vikings used fear to make their raids easier and to create less resistance from those they were attacking. For example, when approaching a harbour, they would line all their shields along the side of their longboat, to appear as well armed as possible.

Viking raids often took place during the summer months, perhaps so that they could use anything that they snatched to see them through the long winter season. Often, they wouldn’t even need to fight for what they intended to snatch. There are medieval records showing payments made to Viking forces to bribe them not to make any further raids on a particular region. But the raids did continue, with the Viking forces gaining in confidence and moving from small raids, based on little more than good fortune, to the seizure of huge tracts of land and the colonization of large foreign territories.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

Programmes devoted entirely to medieval times are rare, so this is a real treat for UK viewers. The season includes hour-long shows by Professor Robert Bartlett, a leading medievalist. His four programmes are titled knowledge, sex, belief and power and will aim to understand the medieval mind and how people in the Middle Ages interacted with each other and viewed the world around them



There will also be a drama based on villains stealing a king’s treasure, a show about the oldest surviving road map in Britain and a documentary on the world’s first commercial printing press, an invention which changed the world.



The season begins on Thursday 10 April at 7.30pm on BBC Four with ‘A Journey Through Britain in the Middle Ages with Dr Alixe Bovey. For more information see TV listings on the BBC's website.

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

We all have our own image of a medieval knight, perhaps a courageous fighter, mysteriously hidden behind the metal visor of his helmet. Or maybe a professional soldier, who traveled the country fighting for pay. A knight is probably one of the first things people think of when asked to describe the Middle Ages.



In some ways, it must have been a lonely life, being cheered on by hundreds, and fighting for the honor of a lady way above you on the social scale. She’d go home to her castle and you were left to go back to your lodgings. No one might even recognise you as the hero of the tournament as you’d been covered by your armor during the joust.



Yes, it was probably exciting to prepare for and take part in a medieval joust, but at what cost? If you lost, you might have to give up your expensive horse and even if you won, your injuries could be bad enough to keep you away from tournaments for months. And how would you feel, preparing to ride out, knowing you could be in the last few minutes of your life? If you did survive, when you were too old to fight, how would you feel to see younger, stronger men getting all the glory?



Being a knight has been a dream for boys down the centuries. But I wonder how many of us would actually have liked the life of a knight?

Posted by Rachel Bellerby

All of us are familiar with turning on the news bulletins and hearing constant references to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, civil war, the list goes on. This gets me thinking, is it more dangerous to live nowadays or would life have been more perilous in medieval times?

News gets to us very quickly in the 21st century. If there’s a disaster we get to hear of it sometimes just moments after it happens. Information is fed to us on a minute-by-minute basis and so perhaps sometimes the threats to us individually seem magnified.

Medieval life had its own dangers and just as today, life could be very uncertain. Life spans were short; a person who got to the age of 40 could consider themselves to have lived to a good age. Many women died in childbirth and only around half of children born lived beyond the age of five. Medicines were primitive and often, to our modern eyes, dangerous.

Medieval people could face great personal dangers, settlements could be torched by enemies, or invaders arrive and take over an area. Add to this the fact that men who worked for a master could be expected to fight in that master’s wars whenever and wherever these were.

It’s a fascinating question and one that everyone will have their own view on. For me, medieval life was more dangerous on an individual level and life nowadays is more dangerous on a global level. Human nature hasn’t changed very much over the centuries.

Posted by Paula Stiles

Eric van Lustbader's The Testament (2006) feels like a cross between The Da Vinci Code and a Clive Cussler adventure. It's better than Dan Brown's turgid potboilers, but not as good as Dirk Pitt. The hero, Braverman (Bravo) Shaw, loses his mysterious father in a terrible explosion. Soon, he's caught up in a race between two secret societies (the Order of the Gnostic Observatines and their papacy-backed enemies the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood) to find a cache of artifacts. His only ally, Gnostic Observatine "Guardian" Jenny Logan, may also be his worst enemy.

This is a straightforward modern Grail story after the pattern of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (see this week's film review). The idea of a "testament" written by Christ (hence the title) isn't new. Nor is the idea behind the "Quintessence".

Lustbader writes good action scenes and keeps the plot moving, though he drones on with too much background. Unlike Brown, who not only had his wife do his highly derivative research for him, but also cynically exploited the genre with an "I'm going to make a bestseller for people who don't read" attitude, Lustbader did his own homework. Some of the best melding of setting with plot occurs in Venice, which Lustbader appears to have both visited and loved, unlike Brown's Paris, which is unrecognizable to anyone who's actually visited that city.

The good plot stuff mainly involves the female arm of the Order of the Gnostic Observatines, led by a Venetian anchoress named Arcangela, whose agent in the world becomes Jenny. There's a lot of intriguing background hinted at about Renaissance Venice's whores spying for God across Europe. The book might have been really something had it centered around Jenny. It's high time we had a Grail story with a female protagonist.

Alas, the highly competent Jenny exists only to help Our Hero, the clueless, naïve and self-involved young Bravo. Whenever a book's protagonist has a silly nickname like "Bravo", this is a bad sign. The fact that just about every character in the book is movie-star beautiful or handsome is another one.

Jenny is ruined as a character by falling in love with Bravo, even though he's a complete twit with daddy issues. Bravo is the worst part of the book, and since he's in most of it, that's a problem. He abuses and rejects Jenny, for example, based on the word of a misogynistic priest he himself admits is an idiot and of someone who later turns out to be a major villain with a sinister interest in separating the young couple. Until quite late in the book, if Bravo trusts someone, it's a guarantee that person is a villain. His character judgment is that bad.

Lustbader bases his mythical secret military religious order, the Gnostic Observatines, on two historical groups: the Fraticelli, a radical arm of the Franciscans who insisted on St. Francis' original aim of apostolic poverty and were declared heretical in 1318, and the early medieval Gnostics. The Gnostics believed every human had a spark of God inside him or herself and could therefore arrive at the truth of Scripture him or herself. The Gnostics rejected Church authority as corrupted by a Satan-dominated material world and advocated a life of the spirit. They were also anti-war pacifists, which would make them antithetical to the philosophy of a military order.

The Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood, as Lustbader himself admits in his Author's Note at the end of the book, are based on the Knights of St. John (Hospitallers). The Hospitallers were the second great international military religious order, after their rivals, the Templars. They were also known as the Knights of Malta and the Knights of Rhodes, due to their having headquarters at various times on those two islands.

Lustbader avoids the traditional use of the Templars as guardians of the Grail. Unfortunately, the Franciscans are not a good group on which to base a military order like the Gnostic Observatines, either, especially one tolerant of Jews, as Lustbader makes his Gnostic Observatines in politically correct fashion. The mendicant orders (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) made up the bulk of the Inquisition, and as such, were hostile to the military orders, heretics and Jews. Lustbader also betrays an ignorance of the basic nature of military religious orders when he calls his inner circle of Gnostic Observatines "priests". These orders were monastic orders where the priests had a very auxiliary role. Those in such an inner circle would all be monks.

The Hospitallers are also a bad model for anti-gnostic pro-Catholic heavies the Knights of St. Clement. Lustbader ignores a truly gnostic group from the 12th and 13th centuries--the Cathars (or "Albigensians") of southeastern France. Northern French forces led a nominally religious crusade (more a papally sanctioned naked land grab) against the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade during the early 13th century (mainly 1208-1225). Neither the Hospitallers nor the Templars supported such "internal" crusades against enemies at home, since they diverted badly needed funds, supplies and personnel from the struggle to hold onto Palestine. Some local Hospitallers during the Albigensian Crusade even supported the Cathars, drawing censure from Pope Innocent III. Why would the Hospitallers then actively persecute another gnostic group later on for the Papacy?

This book isn't perfect, but a fan of the genre should still find some good in it. Someday, hopefully, Lustbader will write a story centered around the women of the Gnostic Observatines. They're much more interesting than the men.

Posted by Paula Stiles

As an oral history, the Mande Epic of Son-Jara suffers from the same problem as Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon literature and The Song of Roland in French literature. Written down centuries after the fact (The Epic of Son-Jara was finally set down in print by Mandinka bard Fa-Digi Sisoko 1968), it recounts a tale that has been told and retold and polished and changed around a thousand times, much like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. However, unlike the Iliad and Odyssey, or Beowulf, we know for a fact that some of the figures in the Epic are historical, not mythical.

As this week's article shows, Son-Jara was a real king, the founder of the Mali Empire over a century later. We know this because the North African traveler Ibn Battuta mentions Son-Jara's victory over his enemies in the next century. As in The Song of Roland, the basic events appear to be true. This therefore makes some of the aspects of Son-Jara's story quite fascinating.

We can approach with considerable skepticism the claim in the Epic that Son-Jara (historically known as Sundiata) was descended from Bilal, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, through his father. However, a look at how Son-Jara survives childhood and builds up his power base against the occupying Susu King Sumamuru (also an historical figure) in the Epic explains why his descendants would make the claim. His mother is a powerful sorceress in her own right; she and Son-Jara's other female relatives bring their considerable and formidable family connections to his side in his revolt. In Son-Jara's society, family is everything. Though the society is becoming nominally Muslim, even Islam must bow at this point in Malian history to family ties and therefore, Son-Jara's connection to Islam in the epic must be familial to have any legitimacy.

Recent research indicates that the epic might have begun as a series of praise songs for Sundiata by his descendants. Praise singing is a quite old tradition in Africa that is slowly dying out. A traditional (i.e. pre-colonial) African leader's public image is largely based on the number, reputation and skill of his praise singers. Praise singers walk ahead of the leader, announcing his presence with epithets of praise. However, they might also list histories of his forbears along with descriptions of their main accomplishments. Hence the possible origins of the Epic of Son-Jara in songs of praise for his descendants.

Beverly Mack has studied praise singers (zabiya) of the Emir of Kano in northern Nigeria, and included some of their songs in an accompanying CD in her book "Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song" (2004).