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Medieval(ish) matters #15: What's lurking in the background of medieval maps? And what did medieval people really know about the wider world?
HistoryExtra content director Dr David Musgrove gets the lowdown on the latest research into the Gough Map and the Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi to find out what they tell us about medieval English aspirations on the world stage
Consider maps, and you likely think of them as tools to get from A to B without the inconvenience of getting lost. You might not dwell on any underlying political context to your cartography. So, let’s talk about medieval maps. I had a fascinating chat the other day with Dr Catherine Delano-Smith, who is heading up the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history’. You can follow the project's work through its splendidly droll twitter feed. The Gough Map (named after the 18th-century antiquarian Richard Gough, who purchased the map and bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library) is one of the most important medieval maps. It shows Britain, with a somewhat different – but recognisable – outline from that on modern maps, and lots of interesting details of towns, rivers and other features. It is large (around 55 by 116 centimetres) and fills two pieces of sheepskin parchment. Under the sheep skin Dr Delano-Smith’s collaborative project is an interdisciplinary effort to get under the (sheep) skin of the map. Various scientific tests on the map have been carried out, including an instructive 3D scan, which sheds light on the pin-holes that seem to have been used to prick outlines of prominent places or buildings. These pin-holes were noticed in the 19th century, but the scanning work has enabled a better understanding of what they are about: “We have come to the conclusion that the pinholes are likely to relate to the first production of the map and that they record a hitherto unknown, arguably unorthodox, form of transferring information onto the map by means of replicating a template, although not every place marked on the map has associated pinholes; many were just inserted into an appropriate space,” noted Dr Delano-Smith in the 2017 article New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain (Imago Mundi 69). The research team has further established that the map is an amalgamation of three successive layers of work: layer one shows the whole of Britain from Scotland to the English Channel; layer two is a reworking of that map south of Hadrian’s Wall; and layer three is a re-inking of place-names in the south-eastern/central quadrant of England. That’s the general stratigraphy of the map, and it looks like these reworkings took place over the course of a century or so, but dating is difficult, as Dr Delano-Smith explains: “It is such a hotch-potch that it's very difficult to work out precisely. On the whole, the map seems to come from the decades just before and just after c1400, with some later additions.” Fossilised features The pinholes, it’s proposed, reflect the copying of a now lost proto-map from the reign of Edward III – which itself probably incorporated some information dating back to Edward I – onto which new material was added in the second half of the 14th century and later. In this way, it could be said that the map we see today contains a number of fossilised features, making the chronology the map represents all the more tricky to disentangle. Wales, for example, did not attract much interest from the English crown after c1300, while for Edwards I to III, Scotland was arguably the overriding political concern up to 1335 as they tried to make good the English claim, conducting a number of campaigns. All sorts of events and interests, though, might account for a particular place being marked on the map. So it is the complex political context of that period in British history that’s going to be an area of focus for the Gough Map project team now. Certainly it seems that the map had a long working life, though exactly what it was used for, and by whom, is still very much a matter for research. Useless for getting from A to B “One thing to squash is the idea that it's a map for travelling or a map with pilgrimage routes. If you've got places on a map, you can always work out the general direction in which your destination lies and create an itinerary -assuming the places are shown in correct spatial order – but until modern times, for finding the way as you rode or walked you relied on local information gained stage by stage. In fact, travellers would have found the Gough Map useless both for way-planning and way-finding. It’s hopelessly inaccurate in that respect," says Dr Delano-Smith. This leaves the question of what the map was for. If it was used by different people over a long period of time, it could of course have had various purposes to match their particular interests. At present Dr Delano-Smith does wonder if it might have fulfilled the role of an office document of some sort. Something to use and be referred to by the growing body of bureaucrats and administrators working within the apparatus of government in England. It certainly shows evidence of wear and tear from being rolled and unrolled over the years, and of being pored over: as “Over the years readers and users of the map […] looked at it from the same side," the 2017 article notes, "their garments gradually rubbed out the markings in southwest England and Wales to illegibility and occasionally invisibility.” One line of thought that Dr Delano-Smith’s team is considering at the moment, as she is going to outline more fully in a forthcoming article, is that it might be more profitable to attempt to assess the map’s usefulness as a strategic document connected to the crown’s need, at a time of heightened military and economic pressure, to move resources about the kingdom on an unprecedented scale. Wondering about Hadrian's Wall It’s interesting that the line of Hadrian’s Wall is described on the Gough Map as the Pict’s Wall. As Dr Delano-Smith points out, this name was taken, like the crenellated line itself, from one of Matthew Paris’s maps of Britain (c1250). But as I was looking at that, I was reminded of a conversation I’ve had recently on our podcast with Professor Gordon Noble and Dr Nick Evans about the Picts. In that podcast, we talked about the phasing out of Pictish language and identity in the ninth century AD, so I was curious about why this wording was still in play several hundred years later, and I dropped Dr Evans an email to ask him if this might be some sort of slight from an English scribe. It appears, though, that the association of the Roman walls in Northumbria with the Pictish inhabitants to the north had a long history. The name could have come, Dr Evans explained, from “late Roman writers and Bede, who attributed the building of the Roman walls to Septimius Severus, although I don't think the Picts were specified as their enemies”, as well as from “Gildas's De Excidio Brittanniae, which had both walls being built against the Picts by the Romans near the end of Roman Britain". From these texts, Evans adds, "the idea went into ‘Historia Brittonum’, which got a relatively wide circulation in England and the Continent from about 1100 onwards. In addition, in the 12th century, the Gaels of Galloway sometimes were called Picts (for instance in Aelred of Rievaulx's account of the battle of the Standard in 1138), and were regarded as savages.” The Anglo-Saxon world map One way or the other, the Gough Map is a map with a possible political context. Another is the Anglo-Saxon world map, otherwise known as the Cotton map from its location in the British Library, where it is preserved in MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. It’s thought to date from 1020–1050, and to have been produced in England (in Canterbury perhaps) in the reign of King Cnut or his successors. As the British Library description notes, this world map “contains the earliest known, relatively realistic depiction of the British Isles, seen in the bottom left hand corner of this map”. At the top of the rectangular, full-page map, we see the east of the inhabited world, and a lion standing over part of Asia. The ocean surrounds the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. Incidentally, this rather splendid map has just won the Twitter 'world cup of maps', in a bit of fun orchestrated by the British Library on social media. View oEmbed on the source website I noticed that Dr Helen Appleton at Balliol College, Oxford, has written an interesting analysis of this map recently in her article The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi (Anglo-Saxon England, v47), so I dropped her a line to talk about it. She explained to me that it’s an outlier in the tradition of medieval mappae mundi (maps of the world), for the simple fact that it’s earlier than most of the others (the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi is dated to c1300 for instance). Also, however, it differs in content: “In most of the later larger mappae mundi, you will have an episode from the life of Christ somewhere in the map. So you'll get the crucifixion or maybe the nativity shown. And so there's a very obvious Christian overlay on world history that's being presented visually by the map, and this map doesn't do that. So compared to these other maps, it's very unusual. But on the other hand, it's a couple of hundred years earlier than them. So it may be representative of its time.” What it does do is pay particular attention to the British Isles, as Dr Appleton points out in her article: “The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is notably rather independent of other cartographic traditions. In particular, it is unusually accurate concerning the shape and inhabitants of Northwestern Europe and offers an exceptionally exact depiction of the British Isles – not until the 13th-century work of Matthew Paris is a better representation made." Anglo-Saxon interests So why is that? Dr Appleton has carried out a detailed inspection of what’s in the map and concluded that “the geography represented on the Anglo-Saxon Map can be seen as an expression of later-Anglo-Saxon interests in the arrangement of space and power”. She sees the map as “the product of an island culture keen to emphasize its connections to Rome, its place in the history of empires, and its links to the rest of the world. The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is a fundamentally outward looking document, albeit one that declares its vantage point to be in the north-west. The place of Britain on the map asserts its prominence; it occupies the north-western corner of the map, surrounded by sea, rather than squashed against the boundary, as it is on later maps such as the Hereford mappa mundi.” So this is where the political context comes in again, and once more it relates to a fossilisation of political ideas from an earlier proto-map. Dr Appleton continues: “I'm arguing that the map, as we have it, is almost certainly a copy of a larger map. And so I was trying to think about when and where and why the larger map would have been produced. So I looked at the history of cartography and how and why maps were used in Europe in the early medieval period. And they very much associated with political power and ideas of control. "So it made sense to think about the 10th century in England as a kind of logical place for production, because we know that you've got the kings Edward the Elder and Æthelstan. They were very politically ambitious rulers who were wanting to assert England's place at a moment of decline in power of the Carolingian empire. This creates an opportunity to become more politically influential," continues Dr Appleton. "We know that Athelstan was acquiring a lot of material associated with Charlemagne and the Carolingians, and imitating that sort of mapping is a kind of statement of imperial power. It's pretty speculative, and unprovable, but it would be a logical point really.” Two maps, two different expressions – perhaps of English attempts to have more of a standing on the world stage. Silk Route of the Sea As an addendum, it just so happens that I’ve been talking to Professor David Abulafia recently for the HistoryExtra podcast about his Wolfson Prize-winning book The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, and particularly the connections engendered by oceanic travel and communication in the earlier medieval period. Looking at a map like the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, produced in England but showing the world, it does make one wonder how far someone living in Europe or the Middle East in the Middle Ages would have known about China and the East, the places that feature on the top of the map. I asked Professor Abulafia precisely that, and you can listen to the podcast to hear his reply to that, and his evocative description of the Silk Route of the Sea. David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the full medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #14: What did an aristocratic household eat in the Middle Ages? And who was Eleanor de Montfort?
HistoryExtra content director Dr David Musgrove talks to Professor Louise Wilkinson about the dining habits of Eleanor de Montfort and her household in 1265, a key year in English medieval history
A lot of herring, more than the odd glass of wine, and not many vegetables – that’s basically the diet of Eleanor de Montfort in 1265. Professor Louise Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln has recently translated and edited The Household Roll of Eleanor de Montfort for this year (for the Pipe Roll Society). This document, which is basically a great roll of parchment on which was recorded the day-to-day expenses of the household, is rich in detail about the daily menu on offer for Eleanor and the people around her, and I interviewed Professor Wilkinson about this for the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen | Professor Louise Wilkinson talks about her research into the household accounts of Eleanor de Montfort, a key figure in the mid-13th century civil war First things first, who was Eleanor de Montfort? “She is one of the most important women in 13th-century England. She was a major political player. She was the youngest daughter of King John by his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. And she was also the sister of one of King Henry III, who reigned over England between 1216 and 1272,” explains Professor Wilkinson. “Beyond that, she was also married to a tremendously important individual, her second husband, Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. Simon is a very interesting figure in his own right because he led what's widely considered to be England's first revolution against the crown in 1258. He was also involved with his wife in helping to start a major civil war in England against Henry III. So Eleanor was really at the heart of a tremendously turbulent political period.” War and (not many) peas Her household roll is a fantastically informative source, not only for context to the political events of the year it covers (1265 was a tumultuous year, pivotal in the civil war, and notable for the escape from Montfortian captivity of Lord Edward – Henry III’s son – and the future King Edward I, as well as the battle of Evesham, where Simon de Montfort was killed) but also for an insight into the workings of one of the great households at the time. Each entry in the household roll begins with the quantity of grain used for making the bread that particular day. Then it records the amount of wine and/or ale consumed by Eleanor, her visitors and her household. It has the kitchen accounts, stating the amount spent on items such as fish, meat, eggs, dairy produce and vegetables. It also records the household’s movements around the country in 1265, from Wallingford Castle to Odiham Castle, then to Portchester, and finally to Dover Castle. Because expenditure is documented with scrupulous detail, we can see very clearly what was consumed: “We learn that bread was one of the great staples of Eleanor’s diet, as it was in other great households in this period, and different grades of bread were probably served to different tiers of people within the household. So Eleanor would have eaten particularly fine white bread, presumably, and then those lower down would have had much more dubious breads to consume.” Bad news for vegetarians In Eleanor’s household, there was a considerable amount of meat and fish on the menu, as Professor Wilkinson explains: “Some of the things that were served up don't look altogether different from what we eat today. So, for example, Eleanor eats lots of mutton and pork and chicken, and some beef. She also eats a phenomenal amount of fish because fish was served usually on Fridays and Saturdays in the household, and usually as well on many Wednesdays. You weren't meant to eat meat on those days in the Christian calendar. During Lent, when you weren't meant to eat meat at all, vast quantities of herrings were eaten. So can you imagine a household consuming between 400 and 1700 herrings a day between late February and early April?” I’ve blogged about the fishy medieval diet previously, but here’s a sample entry from the Household Roll, for 10 March 1065, to prove the herring point: On Tuesday following [10 March], for the countess and the above-mentioned; grain, one quarter, 6 bushels, from the stock of the castle. Wine, 3 sesters, one gallon. Ale, for 55 gallons, 2s. 31⁄2d. Kitchen. Herrings, 500, from the stock. Fish, purchased at Newbury, 13s. 4d. Marshalsea. Hay for 34 horses. Oats, 2 quarters, one bushel, from the stock. It wasn’t just herring however: “All sorts of fish were consumed on feast days when they had to observe this abstinence from meat. And so you get references to bass, bream, cod, ling, conger eels, hake, mackerel, mullet, salmon. Pike was served up on special occasions. It was incredibly expensive. Pike was almost the medieval equivalent of having venison in the fish world,” explains Professor Wilkinson. So pescatarians were well catered for, but there was much less interest in vegetables. “We see purchases of peas and beans and onions, but not much else. So it must have been an incredibly meat- and fish-intensive diet. Eleanor did buy in spices in bulk, which her cook would have used to enliven dishes; cumin, saffron, those sorts of things. It would be nice to know exactly what dishes were served. We always get the ingredients listed in the accounts, but not the end product,” comments Professor Wilkinson. Fruit seems to have been similarly low-profile in the kitchens: “There were lots of pears purchased from Canterbury, which is still famous for its orchards today. And there's also reference to some cherries that were bought. But we don't see vast quantities of fruit, which is surprising because you would expect to see that in the summer months.” Sugary snacks This heavy focus on animal products might jar a little with modern health advice on the need for a varied diet. Today’s dentists might also baulk at their use of sugar, which we can see being purchased for the household. Plus they were eating gingerbread, and lots of dried fruit as well. As mentioned above, not everyone in the household was getting the same food and drink. “It’s a little tricky to trace in the household roll but the ale was probably consumed more often by the lower tiers of the household. And we know that cider was given to the paupers whom Eleanor fed. We know that pottage, a sort of vegetable soup, was sometimes given to them. And they also had lots of herrings as well. “Sometimes different rates of wine were dished out. There's a rather ominous reference to bastard wine, which is actually a very sweet wine. It seems to have been given to the lower tiers of the household rather than the fine wine. So we do get some sense of gradations of rank,” continues Professor Wilkinson. Wine and ale Speaking of alcohol, we can see that a lot of this was bought for the household: “Ale was brewed and purchased in vast quantities. It was much safer, of course, to drink ale than water in the Middle Ages as the water was untreated. And vast quantities of wine were also purchased. Eleanor and the more elite members of her household seem to have drunk quite a lot of wine, both red and white. Interestingly, there are also some quite amusing references to the quality of the wine; on one occasion, the household is referred to drinking the good wine and some of the other.” Listen | Chris Woolgar presents a broad survey of what, when and how people ate during the middle ages From this particular source, we have a very detailed picture of what was consumed by Eleanor and her household through the course of the year, but also we get a sense of how wider political events consumed the nation and impacted on her. England's chief political hostess “At the beginning of the 1265 roll, the Montfort family fortunes were rising tremendously high. They ruled England essentially in Henry III's name, Eleanor was the leading woman in the country. The queen was in exile in this period trying to raise mercenary troops. So it was Eleanor who was the chief political hostess in England. “Then with the Lord Edward's escape from Montfortian custody at the end of May, you start to see their fortunes crumble, so you really get a sense from this roll - which you don't get necessarily in other sources - of the panic that Lord Edward's escape instilled in the Montfortians. You also see the growing threat that he posed to them as he gathered royalist forces, brought them to battle at Evesham and killed Earl Simon, Eleanor's husband, and their eldest son,” explains Professor Wilkinson. “You see the impact of Evesham and all the atrocities there, because you see what happened to the family after Earl Simon's death. So in the roll, we see that Eleanor withdrew from eating in the Great Hall at Dover a week after Evesham when news reached her and the household went straight into mourning. And you get a growing sense of the pressure that they came under at Dover. “You get expenditure being cut right back because it just wasn't available as it was needed to pay crossbowmen and so on. You also get a sense of the royalists recovering their fortunes in the southeast of England because it became no longer safe for Eleanor and her family to transport food in easily to Dover. And they had to go out and acquire food by booty, by plunder, from the neighbouring countryside. And so you get a sense of the build-up to the final great siege of Dover, which sadly isn't included in the roll because it cuts off just before that point”. Now, to conclude, there’s one question that I didn’t ask Professor Wilkinson in the podcast, but which was posed by Dr Sophie Ambler on Twitter, who wondered how different our perceptions of medieval (noble)women would be if more of these household rolls survived. This is an important point because, as Professor Wilkinson mentioned in the podcast, we only have a dozen or so other household accounts surviving in England before 1250. I’ll finish with Professor Wilkinson’s tweet in reply to the question: “I think perceptions might be quite different, and highlight the central and usually routine role of elite ladies in managing great households, estates and familial interest in medieval society.” View oEmbed on the source website David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the full medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #13: Why aren’t monuments to medieval figures included in the statues debate, and was there racism in the Middle Ages?
HistoryExtra content director Dr David Musgrove talks to Dr Simon John about the equestrian statue of King Richard I, and whether it’s right that it stands in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament
Statues are very much in the news. The footage of Edward Colston’s monument being dumped unceremoniously into the harbour in Bristol is one for future history books. Figures associated with slavery, the slave trade, and racism generally across the globe have come under close inspection from people questioning whether they should still stand as commemorative artefacts. Most of these statues are of figures from the 18th century and later, though the conversation has drifted back in time to the likes of Sir Francis Drake and the 16th-century development of the Atlantic slave trade. Globally, statues of Christopher Columbus have also been drawn into the debate. However, little has been said about statues in Britain depicting medieval figures, some of whom may be equally problematic when viewed through a modern lens, as the likes of Colston. Why is that? I recorded a conversation with Dr Simon John of Swansea University for the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen | Simon John considers whether we need to include medieval figures such as Richard the Lionheart in discussions around historical statues Dr John is both a medievalist (an expert on the socio-cultural impact of the Crusades in Latin Christendom) and an authority on statuary; his current project is ‘Contested Pasts: public monuments and historical culture in Western Europe, 1815-1930’ (funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust), which explores the political uses of public monuments and statues in 19th-century European states. We particularly talked about the statue of Richard the Lionheart, which stands directly outside the Palace of Westminster in London. Dr John has studied the circumstances in which this statue was erected in 1860, and also considered whether it is an appropriate monument to stand at the heart of British democracy (many in the 19th century did not think so). Statue-mania Along with many of the statues that are proving to be objects of contention today, its origins lie in the mid-19th century, an age of statue-mania, when they were springing up in capital cities across the continent. Many of the people honoured with statues at this time were associated with European imperialism, but there were also a number that depicted people from the medieval past. “There's a real fashion in creating monuments to medieval figures, and it’s continental-wide,” explains Dr John. “So Charlemagne, for example, we see statues of him created in both France and Belgium. Joan of Arc is commemorated by numerous statues in France and figures like Frederick Barbarossa have statues created in their honour in the German-speaking lands. So we can connect this on one hand to a far wider 19th-century interest in the Middle Ages, which manifests itself in other ways. “In Britain, for example, we have the novels of Walter Scott, and the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites. What we’re seeing is a society that’s reaching toward the Middle Ages for a very particular reason. The 19th century witnessed great societal upheavals caused by industrialisation. For many, this brought about spiritual anxieties. And in this context, the Middle Ages was idealised as a simpler, more pious age, as a soothing antidote to the societal changes that industrialisation was bringing around.” Many commentators have noted that these statues do speak more of 19th-century attitudes, in terms of state-building and positive attitudes to imperialism, than they reflect the activities or legacy of the people actually commemorated. That is the context in which Richard I came to be commemorated in Westminster. Were there slaves in Elizabethan England? Muscular monarchy The statue was the work of the Italian-born, French-raised sculptor Carlo Marochetti. His muscular King Richard, raising his sword aloft and sitting astride a noble horse, caught the attention of no lesser figures than Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who championed the statue, the first version of which was created for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Dr John’s research has shown that it was partly due to their patronage that the statue was funded and erected outside parliament, though it faced some opposition from those who were against a foreigner getting such a prominent commission. Others felt that a man known principally for his martial achievements was not appropriate for a place of government and seat of industrial progress, and particularly not a monarch who spent most of his time outside of England campaigning in foreign lands, funded by taxes on his English subjects. This indeed reflected a more critical analysis of Richard I in academic circles at the time. The life of Richard I Dr Simon John gives a potted history of the life of King Richard I “He was born in Oxford in 1157, the third son of the incumbent king of England, ruler of the Angevin empire, Henry II. This was an empire that encompassed about half of what we would today call France. So he wasn’t just king of England, he had authority over this great continental empire as well. “So Richard spent his early years in England, but then from 1172, he was active almost exclusively on the continent because in that year, his father appointed him Duke of Aquitaine. So basically for the rest of his life, the most dominant feature of Richard’s life was warfare. His two older brothers both died before him and their father, which meant that when Henry II died in 1189, Richard was the successor. “Richard succeeded to be king of England and ruler of the Angevin lands. But even before his inauguration as king of England in 1189, he had been planning to go on crusade in response to the loss of Jerusalem to the forces of Saladin in 1187. Between 1190 and 1192, he was away from the west participating in what historians call the Third Crusade. It was this above all that propelled him towards legendary status because it was the crusade that brought him into conflict with the legendary figure of Saladin. “The Third Crusade ended, but the Christian forces and Richard didn’t recover Jerusalem. They did shore up the Christian presence in the Holy Land, making a bridgehead that their 13th- century successors would use to try and recover Jerusalem. Richard left the Holy Land in 1192. But on the way home through Austria he was captured by an enemy. For just over a year he was held captive at the behest of Emperor Henry VI. He was moved through various locations in Germany while his subjects back in his lands were raising the necessary ransom. “The money was finally raised, and in 1194 Richard was released and went back to his lands, briefly to England, but for most of the rest of his life from 1194 he was on campaign in his continental lands, trying to restore the position that he’d had before he left. While he was away, his younger brother, John, of Magna Carta fame, had been in cahoots with Richard’s enemy Phillip II, king of France, and undermined Richard’s position in his lands. “So it was in the context of this effort to recover his position, as he was taking part in a siege in 1199 in his old duchy of Aquitaine, that he was struck by a crossbow bolt. The wound turned gangrenous, and a week or so later, he died.” As Professor John Gillingham notes in his entry for Richard in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “Although works of literary fiction, most notably Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825) by Walter Scott, continued to present a glamorous image of Richard I, one given lasting visual form by the equestrian statue of the king by Carlo Marochetti which was financed by public subscription and placed outside the houses of parliament in 1860, virtually all historians came to think of Richard as ‘a bad ruler’, an absentee king who neglected his kingdom”. Wider public perceptions of Richard in England in the 19th century were less critical and tended to associate him more with muscular Christianity, chivalry and honour, and for many he probably carried with him broader notions about the importance of morality, religion, and the monarchy in Victorian society. Should we judge historical figures by the morals of today? The contemporary conversation Richard I was, of course, a famed warrior and an enthusiastic crusader. It’s his actions on campaign and in the Third Crusade, upon which he embarked not long after his 1189 succession to the throne of England, that for Dr John, make Richard a candidate for inclusion in the current statue conversation. The reaction of his contemporaries to his martial activities is particularly instructive. “He is a figure that even in his own lifetime evoked very strong reactions, both positive and negative,” says Dr John. “There are contemporaries, including his critics, who really emphasised his bravery and his abilities as a leader, his qualities as a fighter himself, as a man of war. He was known as the Lionheart while he was still alive, and the kernel of his legend came into existence while he still lived. “In the centuries after his death, it evolved and developed. However, there was a sense amongst some contemporaries that sometimes he waged war in a way that went beyond normal levels. As part of his efforts in Aquitaine, for example, in the 1170s, some of his opponents saw him as acting in an overly brutal, cruel way. Some critics wrote that he spent much of his time chasing around the wives and daughters of his subjects – hardly behaviour that was going to endear him to his subjects. And in terms of the financial issues, contemporaries complained time and again about the financial demands he was placing on his subjects, first to raise money to go on Crusade and then to raise funds to pay for the ransom that would see him released from the captivity of Henry VI of Germany”. Your top questions about the crusades – answered There is one particular incident that is often overlooked in modern public assessments of Richard I: his treatment of hostages after the siege of Acre in 1191, as Dr John outlines: “Richard arrived in June 1191 and the crusaders captured the city in July. In the process, they captured several thousand hostages: some reports say around 3,000 Muslims were taken captive. And in the period afterwards, these hostages became bargaining chips in the negotiation between Saladin and Richard. The crusaders made several demands from Saladin for their safe return. When Saladin failed to meet them in time, this prompted Richard to take a fateful decision. So on 20 August he ordered these hostages to be marched out of the city, placed in front of the Muslim camp and executed. “Again, this comes down to the question of perspective. Richard himself, in a letter sent back to the west in October 1191, said this was quite proper because Saladin defaulted on his agreement and, therefore, he was completely within his rights to order the deaths of these hostages. “What’s crucial, though is that as we saw with some of Richard’s activities in Aquitaine earlier in his career, there were at least some contemporaries who believed that this was beyond the pale and exceeded normal standards. On the one hand we have Islamic chroniclers, the biographers of Saladin, who, as we might expect, saw this as a barbarous, treacherous act. But there are some Christian writers who outright decried it. Others were very anxious to shift blame away from Richard saying that this wasn’t his fault but Saladin’s, for failing to follow through on the agreement. “In terms of where this fits in to our collective understanding and memorialisation of Richard today, I would say that this event is almost completely overlooked. What comes to the fore, what is embodied in the statue in Westminster, is the glorious, heroic, chivalrous figure. So there’s almost a collective amnesia to put to one side the bits that don’t fit that narrative and instead to focus on the aspects that do match up to it.” Was there racism in the Middle Ages? King Richard I’s actions after Acre, and the 12th-century reaction to it, opens the question about how far he stands up to the 21st-century moral compass. It also leads into the wider question of our view and understanding of the Crusades in general, and whether they should be seen in the context of racism in the Middle Ages. The work of Professor Geraldine Heng has been ground-breaking in this debate, particularly in her 2018 book The Invention of Race (a very thought-provoking read, also helpfully summarised to some extent in this online article.) “I regard Professor Heng’s research as a really important contribution to a subject that needs to be treated very carefully,” says Dr John. “Her work is important is because it encourages us to consider not only what people did or didn’t think in the Middle Ages, but also how modern historians have gone about approaching this topic as well. So an argument that she makes that I find very convincing is that a form of racism did exist in the Middle Ages, but that modern historians writing about the Middle Ages have been very unwilling to refer to it in those terms. “She says that historians have used euphemisms such as chauvinism or xenophobia to describe what actually we should call racism. It’s clear from the start of human history that people have noted differences between different groups and in some contexts, those differences have given grounds for discrimination. What Professor Heng points out is that while in the Middle Ages the key grounds for discrimination were indeed religion and religious difference, in some contexts those differences were seen to include physical differences as well. In other words, particularly hated groups were ascribed particular physical characteristics as part of the process of discriminating against them. “I think we should speak of racism in the Middle Ages, while accepting that racial difference was construed in a way that doesn’t fully map onto how it’s construed today. But what Professor Heng would say is that if we use a word or term other than racism, arguably what we’re doing is an injustice both to the period of the Middle Ages and our own conversation about the relevance of that period to our own modern-day discussions on race.” Anti-Semitic attitudes Placing Richard I’s enthusiasm for the Crusades within the context of racist attitudes puts an entirely different spin on his reputation today. But he wouldn’t be the only medieval monarch to come under the microscope. Professor Heng’s thesis about medieval racism is particularly focused around anti-Semitism and the way that Jews in England were discriminated against, in a very extreme fashion, as a group. As she says in the web article noted above, “Rather than oppose premodern ‘prejudice’ to modern racisms, we can see the treatment of medieval Jews – including their legalised murder by the state on the basis of community rumours and lies – as racial acts, which today we might even call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalised kind.” The persecution of Jews in medieval England With that in mind, how should we view statues of King Henry III, the great re-builder of Westminster Abbey, who also presided over an attempt to convert the Jews of England to Christianity? Or indeed his son Edward I, who infamously expelled England’s Jews in 1290? None of these figures have yet come under the microscope of the current debate, though it should be said that there has been some discussion around a statue of Henry III’s close contemporary, King Louis IX of France, in St Louis, USA, for his role in the Crusades and his persecution of Jews. Also, a statue of Robert Bruce at Bannockburn was recently defaced, though the circumstances of that are somewhat enigmatic. Why, then, are these medieval figures and attitudes not for the most part included in this conversation? “On the one hand, there’s potentially the same kind of cultural dynamic that we talked about in relation to the 19th century, a tendency to regard the Middle Ages as a safer, simpler time associated more with qualities like chivalry, moral values rather than some of the more complex issues that we’ve started to talk about,” says Dr John. “I think there’s a wider issue that Geraldine Heng’s work might help us to push through, namely the fact that premodern discrimination – racism – in the Middle Ages isn’t seen in the same kind of continuum as subjects like slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Whereas if we’re to have a conversation about the impact of subjects like the Crusades and the treatment of Jews in the Middle Ages, we might be raising some of the very same issues that are so vital in our own conversations about statues now, statues of more modern figures involved in the slave trade and so on.” Specifically, as regards King Richard and the Westminster statue, Dr John wonders if his very English appeal is appropriate: “If we are to have a conversation about Richard in the 21st century, we might well discuss whether an icon of Englishness fully encapsulates the ideas and values of all the peoples of Britain and Ireland who are represented at Westminster. I see this issue from the perspective of someone who isn't English. And I can see the case for arguing that, actually, an icon of Englishness in the home of British democracy might not be all that in keeping with the ideas of everyone to whom that building is important today.” Henry VIII’s “black trumpet”, plus 5 other black faces of Tudor England Finally, to sum up, Dr John proclaims a call to arms for us all to engage more fully with, and seek to better understand, the place of Richard I and his contemporaries within the current important conversations: “From the very start, the act of creating a statue is political. It’s a symbolic act. And above all, it’s designed to create a group identity amongst a particular set of people designed to bring a group together. So in instances like those we’ve been seeing recently, certain statues have caused controversy. The real debate behind this is the fact that these statues of past figures are invoking history in a way that causes division in the present, and that division ultimately stems from the fact people have different interpretations of the past. “What history will tell us is that when such examples arise, when controversial statues become part of a wider conversation, it’s only right that society’s response is to hold a conversation about whether these artefacts still merit their status as cultural symbols. So we come back to our case study of Richard I and his statue at parliament. I think it’s only natural that we as a society might want to ask whether this 19th-century statue of a 12th-century figure fully matches up to what we hold to be dear about our own 21st-century society.” David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the full medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #12: secrets of the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
HistoryExtra content director Dr David Musgrove takes a look inside the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicles with Professor Pauline Stafford to find out why King Alfred is crucial to their creation and what story they are really telling
Read any historical book about the early medieval period in Britain – about the Viking raids, or the rule of King Alfred and the centuries after that, up until the Norman Conquest and a bit beyond – and like as not, you’ll come across references to a source called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Professor Pauline Stafford, one of the leading experts in this period, has just written a fascinating book about this, entitled After Alfred: Anglo-Saxon Chronicles & Chronicles, 900-1150 (OUP). I had the pleasure of interviewing her for our podcast – listen to an exclusive, extended version here: Note that her subtitle talks of chronicles in the plural. One of the first tasks that Professor Stafford takes on in her book is to remind us that there were various vernacular chronicles produced during the period, all of which have been bracketed together into the source that is now commonly described in the singular as the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. Anonymous annals She explains: “They are a group of chronicles all in the form of annals [a chronological record of events]. They are all written in the Old English language, between the end of the ninth and the middle of the 12th century. There are seven of them surviving, and we've got a fragment of another. We also know that there are some lost chronicles, three or four certainly. They're anonymous. Nobody signed them. Nobody claimed authorship. We don't know who wrote them, so we can't attach a name to them. And they're usually called now by letters, so chronicle A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and the fragment is H. They're often called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as if they're somehow all the same one. And there is a lot in common between them. But you have to recognise that they're all individual chronicles – and that really is the basis of my book." 10 things you didn’t know about the Anglo-Saxons “They're written at different times and places. But there's no statements about where they were written. And they all grow in some way out of a chronicle that was written at the court of Alfred, King of the West Saxons, at the end of the ninth century. And like Alfred's, they all go back to the arrival of Julius Caesar. So they all cover centuries long before they were themselves written. Some of them go beyond 1066, beyond the Norman conquest. They've all finished by the middle of the 12th century.” As Professor Stafford notes, these chronicles are written as annals, so they read a little like yearly national diary entries. For example, here’s a typical reference, this one from chronicles C, D and E for the year 986 (translation by Professor Michael Swanton, from his 1996 edition of the chronicles): 986: Here the king did for the bishopric at Rochester; and here the great pestilence among cattle first came to England. Rewriting history? Professor Stafford notes that this seemingly straightforward, matter-of-fact, layout can lead us into accepting them at face value too easily: “The danger with these chronicles is we just read them as one damn fact after another. We might think someone is just writing it down year by year. But that's nonsense because whole chunks of these are written retrospectively or sometimes rewritten.” In fact, you can see an example of such retrospective writing in the 986 entry above, because the use of the word ‘first’ to describe the cattle pestilence informs us that the author must have been aware of at least one subsequent example of pestilence. “So there will be agendas and there's a danger we might miss them. The big advantage of chronicles like this is that they are open ended. You can just add bits on; add a few more pages, add a bit more history on at the end. They grow organically in that way,” continues Professor Stafford. 7 medieval kings of England you should know about She stresses the importance of trying to get past the anonymity of authorship. Because we don’t know who actually wrote the records, it’s easy to consider them as a sort of anodyne record, when the reality is more complicated. “We've got to remember there were people behind them," she says. "The danger is that we read them as if they are just lists of obvious facts. We've got to almost ignore the anonymity.” Seeking out the audience The way to pull back the veil of anonymity is to try to understand who was writing them, and of course that also leads into the question of who was reading them. According to Professor Stafford, they were probably written by ecclesiastics: "We shouldn’t rule out some lay people, but mostly ecclesiastics. They're written at places like Winchester, Canterbury, Peterborough, probably York, Worcester. They're written by church people, usually connected to the royal court. And this is right from the beginning. Alfred's own chronicle is written close to his court by people who come regularly there. “Because they're anonymous, we assume very often that means that they're written by men. One of the things that I wanted to open up in this book was that some of them might be written by women – at least to consider that possibility. I'm pretty certain, for instance, that in Alfred’s own chronicle, they used a group of annals that were written at the nunnery of Wimborne. Nunneries were often full of educated women. There are women here who write and who can compose annals. “It looks as if the language would make them accessible to a wider audience, but it could be that they're very much aimed at people at court. My best guess is that the audience wasn't very big; that these are not things that were going to be read very widely, or even heard very widely. I think we’re talking about the court and the great bishops and episcopal households, perhaps some religious communities, too.” Kings and Christians So, given that possible courtly audience, what if anything is the underlying theme of these chronicles? Professor Stafford says: “The main theme is kings: kings, and especially their military activity, including their struggles against the Vikings or Scandinavian invaders. That's what seems to have prompted Alfred’s chronicle at the end of the 9th century. It’s changing a bit in the 11th century and especially after 1066, but is still very focussed on royal figures and kings. "Another theme is Christianity, and this is especially true of Alfred's chronicle, which, of course, they all include. There is a lot about the conversion to Christianity. Alfred’s chronicle also has a skeleton story of the other kingdoms apart from Wessex: Mercia, Northumbria, Kent. But the focus is kings, Christianity, and especially Wessex and West Saxon history. “I think just as interesting as what’s there is what's not there. There's very little about politics as we would understand it. So there's a lot about kings, but there's very little about their relationships with great nobles, the discussions and factions at court, the kind of political tensions that must have arisen as West Saxon kings expanded north of the River Thames. There’s very little of that, and very little of what I would call family politics, the struggle for the succession to the throne. Even though I think some of them are actually written in the context of struggles over the throne, they don't talk about it much explicitly. Instead of that, they are pushing kings, and especially West Saxon kings, and their claims to rule. “There's also very little about what we call foreign affairs: not much about foreign rulers, and not much even about the rulers of the rest of Britain. They don't get much more than walk-on parts. I think maybe I should call them 'kneel-on parts' because they often only come in when they're bowing to the West Saxon kings or to the kings of the English – especially in the 10th-century chronicles. So they're written about kings, and through the history that they tell, they're legitimising them as kings of a Christian people. They are legitimising them as successful military rulers. I do think that changes a bit over time, and the 11th–12th century chronicles start to look a bit different (more for example on events outside England). And also they do get a bit more critical than the early ones are.” Writing in Wales It’s interesting here, in the light of that point about the inward-looking focus of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, to pause and consider what was happening elsewhere in Britain in chronicling terms. Happily, a new book has just come out called The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March (edited by Ben Guy, Georgia Henley, Owain Wyn Jones, and Rebecca Thomas, published by Brepols). In the opening chapter, Professor Huw Pryce of Bangor University introduces Welsh chronicling. He talks about the Harleian Chronicle (otherwise known as the A-text of Annales Cambriae), which records events up to the year 954AD, and was probably composed at St Davids in West Wales, using chronicles kept both there and in Gwynedd in north-west Wales from the late eighth century onwards. It take a similar interest in the themes of Christianity and secular events as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do, but also provides rather more focus on matters beyond Wales, as Professor Pryce explains in his chapter: “Unsurprisingly, in view of the text’s clerical authorship, one prominent theme is the progress of Christianity and the history of individual churches, witnessed not only by annals concerning the adoption of the Roman Easter, but by obits of numerous Irish and British religious figures, including Brigit, Patrick, Columba, Gildas, and David, by references to the conversion of the English and the death of Bede, and by notices of destruction suffered by the church of St Davids. The world of secular politics also receives considerable coverage, with annals recording conflicts among the Britons and their neighbours and the deaths of secular rulers in the kingdoms not only of the Britons but also of the English, Irish, Picts, and, in one case, the Franks.” Another interesting point that Professor Pryce makes is that all the early chronicles composed in Wales during the same period as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were written in Latin, rather than the vernacular. I dropped him an email to ask why that might be the case, and this is his response: “Most chronicle writing in early medieval western Europe was in Latin, so you could argue that it’s the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’ use of the vernacular that needs explaining. As Professor Stafford suggests, those chronicles probably used English because they were aimed in part at lay elites in the royal court. The Welsh chronicles seem to belong to a more purely ecclesiastical environment. Their chronological framework shows they started to be kept after the Britons of Wales accepted the Roman Easter in 768. And, though they include some individual words and phrases in Welsh, they were clearly intended as Latin texts, reflecting the cultivation of Latin learning in Wales – as shown by Asser, recruited by Alfred from the church of St Davids as one of his court scholars and author of a Latin Life of the king.” Back to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Professor Stafford thinks that the chronicles are more about backing up the royal line of kings (the Wessex dynasty) rather than pushing the theme of the rise of a nation of the English or an idea of Englishness, though they are linked: “They're especially pushing the dynasty. I really wouldn't see them as being attempts to form the English, as it were. But the tenth-century ones especially are products of the period when West Saxon kings were extending their rule northwards into Mercia and Northumbria. They're likely to reflect all that's going on at this time. I think England is emerging. England is being made. And the chronicles are part of that process. But I don't think we should think of them as a kind of propaganda that is being produced to achieve that. I think it's much better to think of them as very much attached to these kings, at least the 10th century ones especially, because they're made for an audience and read by an audience and patronised by people who are signed up to this wider project. They are part of the story.” David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #9: Do early medieval Irish texts shed light on prehistoric incest?
HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove asks two scholars for their views on what, if anything, we can learn about attitudes of Neolithic people in Ireland (particularly about incest) from studying much later early medieval documents
Royal incest is always going to grab the headlines. And so it proved last week when a fascinating study was published in Nature revealing the results of a project, whose first author is Dr Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin, sampling human bone remains from Neolithic Irish sites. The most eye-catching of several interesting results came from analysis of an adult male, whose cranial remains were found inside the famous 5,000-year-old Newgrange passage grave in Brú na Bóinne, the world heritage site in Ireland's Boyne valley. His genome indicated that he was “the offspring of a first-order incestuous union” (born to parents who were either siblings, or parent and offspring). The bones of this individual were found in what is assumed to be a prestigious position in the inner chamber of the Newgrange monument. Read more medieval matters blogs from David Musgrove: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown Back to Braveheart, Viking river boats, & the Crusades The salmon of knowledge & rolling Roman mosaics Chivalry, medieval killer rabbits and prisoners of war in the 15th century Dr Cassidy and her co-authors observed that sibling-to-sibling incest has been recorded among elites in other societies (including the Inca Empire and ancient Egypt), and that “this behaviour co-occurs with the deification of political leaders and is typically limited to ruling families”. Thus the headline of the story in the Daily Mail began “Ireland's ancient kings married their sisters and fathered inbred children to maintain dynastic bloodlines”. Medieval mythology That is a pretty newsworthy story in itself, but in addition, Dr Cassidy and her team also noted that: “The Brú na Bóinne passage tombs appear in medieval mythology that relates their construction to magical manipulations of the solar cycle by a tribe of gods, which has led to unresolved speculation about the durability of oral traditions across millennia. Although such longevity seems unlikely, our results strongly resonate with mythology that was first recorded in the 11th century, in which a builder-king restarts the daily solar cycle by copulating with his sister. Fertae Chuile, a Middle Irish placename for the Dowth passage tomb (which neighbours Newgrange), is based on this lore, and can be translated as ‘Hill of Sin’ or ‘Hill of Incest’.” I've been in touch with Dr Cassidy, and she additionally notes: “As we are clear in our paper, it is always going to be controversial when you suggest oral longevity across millennia. However, it is not unprecedented. Some Indo-European fairytales are estimated to be 2,500-6,000 years old. Aboriginal Australians have stories of exploding mountains concerning volcanoes that haven't erupted for thousands of years. Importantly, there was already a prior discussion of this myth in this context and it is entirely reasonable for us to add our result to this. Note we make no strong conclusion in this regard.” Stories to explain places Nonetheless, that apparent piece of documentary corroboration from medieval mythology drew some criticism on social media from Dr Elizabeth Boyle, Head of the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. The story in question here is found in the Metrical Dindshenchas, a compilation of stories that dates to the 11th century AD concerned with the origins of place-names in the Irish landscape. Composed by learned scholars within a Christian context, these stories look back to pre-Christian times to explain how places got their names. I called Dr Boyle to find out about her reservations about the usefulness of this source to the argument in the paper. “This is the story of the placename Dowth, one of the three Neolithic monuments in Brú na Bóinne [along with Newgrange and Knowth]. In Old Irish, the place-name Dowth is dubad, which would literally mean ‘darkness’. The story says that the king of Ireland at that time is called Bresal. In his reign Ireland is struck down by a cattle murrain [disease], and the cattle die. So everyone gathers at the court of the king and they decide that they are going to build a tower to heaven, like the Tower of Babel [the Old Testament origin story in the Book of Genesis]. Presumably the aim is to ask God to stop killing the cattle. They decide that they will spend the length of one day building this tower up to heaven. And they start building. The king's sister is a sorceress. And she's going to create some magic in order to stop the sun from moving so that the day will last long enough for them to build the tower. "The story says that she goes off somewhere to do her magic. And her brother follows her. He has sex with her, and because she's now committed incest, her magic fails. And the place where they're building falls into darkness. And so it is called dubad. Further, we're told that wherever they went to go and have sex with each other, that place gets called Fertae Chuile, the burial mound of sin or the burial mound of violation or incest. And that's what they're seizing on in the article, that wherever the brother and sister have sex in the narrative is called the burial mound or the mound of sin or incest. But, as I say, it explicitly says in the story that they are trying to build a new Tower of Babel. They're trying to build a tower to heaven. And so that even in itself is enough to say that this isn't a story that goes back to the Neolithic period because it's borrowing directly from the Bible. And in any case, it's not clear where this place, Fertae Chuile, is located, because wherever they're having sex, it's not in Dowth itself, because that is where the tower was.” So, given that the story in question here appears to be derived from Biblical stories, it’s unlikely, in the view of Dr Boyle, to correlate with any sort of cultural practices that may or may not have been ongoing in the Neolithic, several millennia previously. Whatever fascinating cultural practices are implied by the scientific analysis, an early medieval literary source, composed within a Christian milieu, does not add weight to the argument. The problem is compounded by the actual language used in the source in question. “The key thing that wound me up about the article is that the people who built Newgrange and built those nearby monuments were not Celtic-speaking people. The Celtic language and Celtic-speaking peoples were only introduced into Ireland probably in the early Iron Age, maybe around 500 BC, so thousands of years after Newgrange was built,” notes Dr Boyle. “Almost all of the place names in Ireland in the Old and Middle Irish periods are clearly identifiable as Irish place names. Every place name in Ireland had therefore been renamed since the Neolithic period in the Celtic-speaking period because the place names are all in a different language: they are all in Irish. There were no Celtic-speakers on the island of Ireland when Newgrange was being built. I think it's improbable enough to have something like a folk memory that lasts for four thousand years, but it would also have to last across a language change, the introduction of a new culture into Ireland, and this very clear renaming of the Irish landscape, because all of these place names in the Dindshenchas are Irish place names and not whatever language preceded Irish in Ireland.” A fuzzy, vague Celtic past So, if the Dindshenchas do not provide a viable witness to Neolithic practices, why do they get employed here? “For me, it’s flagging up a problem with perceptions of Irish history, where everything prior to the arrival of the Normans in the 12th century is often seen as some fuzzy, vague Celtic past where it's all the same,” comments Dr Boyle. “And it doesn't matter if it was something built in 4000 BC or something written in AD 1100, it's all perceived as being kind of the same. She continues: "But there is so much radical social transformation continually underway in Ireland. There are technological developments. There are language shifts and language changes. There is conversion to Christianity. There is introduction of literacy. A lot has changed in that period. This misconception reflects, I think, a wider perception that Ireland doesn't really have any ‘history’ until the English turn up and everything else before that is just some vague, ahistorical, stuff about druids and warriors.” This isn’t to say that the people alive in the 11th century AD weren’t interested in these prehistoric monuments, as shown by the very documentary sources that we’re talking about here. “In medieval Ireland there is a very complex awareness of landscape as a whole, both manmade features on the landscape and the natural landscape in general. And this is reflected in the Metrical Dindshenchas,” suggests Dr Boyle. “This is a genre of learned literature, but it’s a very dynamic tradition and you can see them creating new stories for places that are interacting with the landscape. They know that these monuments are incredibly old. They don't have any connection with the Neolithic culture that built them. But they know that this is something the construction of which could be projected into their prehistory. Oftentimes they're not projecting it that far into prehistory. To take an example of one Neolithic tomb at Knocknarea, the story around it is that it's the tomb of a queen, Maeve (Medb), who is depicted in literature as having lived maybe only about a thousand years before they are writing, when actually the tombs themselves are about 5,000 years old. So they're projecting them back into a past, but not a past that's as old as the monuments actually are.” Whose afraid of the prehistoric past? We ran a feature on this site on Anglo-Saxon fear of prehistoric barrows and I've blogged previously about early medieval attitudes to prehistory. Thinking about all this did remind me of the work of Professor Sarah Semple at the University of Durham, who has done much work on changing perceptions of the prehistoric in early medieval society before and after the conversion to Christianity. For example, in a paper in the journal World Archaeology in 1998, Professor Semple noted that: “The late Anglo-Saxon attitude to prehistoric barrows was one of superstitious wariness; emotions also connected with boundaries. Both places were portrayed as the haunt of monsters, spirits and evil creatures in the eighth century and after. The poetic sources are the product of a Christian world and represent a Christian perception of the landscape. The root of this perception may be the remembrance of early Anglo- Saxon pagan activity which took place at barrows.” Now, of course, I wanted to check in with Dr Cassidy to get her take on Dr Boyle's thoughts. She replied as follows: “I need to stress that the mythology did not feed into our conclusions on the political form of these societies. That was based on the son of a first degree union interred within one of the most prestigious burial structures known for prehistoric Europe, the long distance patterns of relatedness with other passage tomb sites, the diet and the material culture of passage tomb cemeteries, which shows high investment in public ritual and monumentalism. “It is well accepted that biblical narratives and local pagan mythology were woven together in works like the Dindshenchas. Untangling the two is a complex task. I would avoid speaking in certainties about it and we were sure not to in the paper. Unfortunately, we can't control the tabloids.” The Celtic question With regards to the question of language, Dr Cassidy has this to say: “Our team is very aware that Ireland has undergone radical transformation since the Neolithic. In fact, in 2016 we were the first to demonstrate a transformative population migration to the island in the Early Bronze Age (~2,200 BC). Another result in that paper challenged the outdated paradigm that Dr Boyle repeats 'Iron Age Celtic-speaking people arrived in Ireland 500 BC'. There has never been any substantial archaeological evidence for this transition and there is also no current genetic evidence. “In fact, we see very strong genetic continuity between the modern Irish people and the Early Bronze Age population. This feeds into a growing body of work called "Celtic from the West" (a set of volumes by Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch), which argues that precursors to Celtic arose in the Late Bronze Age across Atlantic sea networks from an Indo-European substratum [this is a topic explored by Professor Barry Cunliffe on this site]. Indo-European languages are now widely believed to have been introduced to western Europe by the continent-wide migrations in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age. although a small contingent argue that they were already there in the Neolithic. I would advocate the former, but the debate is not fully closed. Either way, it is very probable that some form of Celtic Language was in Ireland long before the Iron Age imaginings of romanticists in the late 19th and early 20th century. “The next phase of our research will actually be focussed on the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition in Ireland and how these two different peoples consolidated with one another over time with respect to their genes and cultures. For example, we see continued use of older megalithic sites and the construction of a new megalithic tomb type (wedge tombs) for many centuries after the end of the Neolithic. There is potential at this interface for the exchange of folklore.” The question of how far back you can project values or attitudes from early medieval documentary sources onto prehistoric societies is no doubt one that will continue to drive debate. Dr Boyle has one last comment, for now, on the question of language: “I reject the idea that the Celtic language arriving in Ireland c500-c.100 BC is ‘outdated’. Rather, it represents the best accepted consensus of the situation on the part of experts in the history of the Irish language and the ‘Celtic from the West’ model is at best a fringe opinion.” Linking literature and science Finally, although Dr Boyle did note on Twitter that “if a medievalist had cast their eye over the paper pre-publication, this unfortunate methodological error could have been avoided”, she did conclude to me by saying “I'm not blaming the scientists. Science-wise, it’s a really good paper. It's a really important paper telling us all sorts of things about the Neolithic period. I just don't think 11th-century Irish literature tells us anything about the prehistoric period.” View oEmbed on the source website So, clearly this conversation has some way to run. I’ll leave the last word on it for now to Dr Cassidy: “Overall, my take home would be that the question of oral and linguistic continuity in Ireland is very much an open one. It will require an interdisciplinary effort to address. In that spirit, it would have been remiss of us not to highlight a potential new piece of evidence in the paper, especially given the previous speculation regards Brú na Bóinne itself. We did not start the debate and I do not believe it is anywhere near finished! It's an exciting time to be in the field. Dr. Boyle's point about a 'fuzzy Celtic past' is very apt, with ancient genomes we are hoping to do some defuzzing!” David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. If you've got any subjects you'd like him to try to defuzz in this blog, drop him a tweet to tell him what he should cover. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #8: Did medieval people care about the time? And did they get bored?
HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove ponders on the nature of medieval time, bored monks, bored peasants, and fish markets
It’s pretty hard not to know what the time is these days. If your watch, phone, or computer can’t tell you, your fridge probably can. Medieval people did not have ready access to such gadgetry, but they did still need to know about time. One of the more notable changes in the approach to time through the Middle Ages, was that up until the 14th century, days (and nights) were measured in temporal hours (when the hours of available daylight were divided into 12, and thus hours varied in length between seasons), but this then shifted to equal hours, with 24 units of time that were all the same length. Time in the Medieval World, edited by Dr Chris Humphrey and Professor Mark Ormrod, is a great read if you want to track the changing face of time through the medieval period. It details how people did need to know what time it was for their day-to-day activities, particularly in urban contexts. The sound of medieval life Church bells provided the rhythm of the day, alerting people to the regular religious services that occurred at set times, but also for secular life. Dr Humphrey tells us that in York, for instance, an ordinance of 1301 dictated that no fish could be sold between vespers being struck at the church of St Michael on Ouse Bridge on one day and prime being struck at the Minster on the following one. Dr Humphrey, who has called time on academia and gone on to launch a careers consultancy for post-PhD researchers called Jobs on Toast, also notes that "the widespread introduction of mechanical clocks into Europe in the 14th century laid the foundations for our modern sense of time". I asked him to elaborate on that and he emailed me to say: “While mechanical clocks were introduced in the 14th century, there wasn’t a uniform take-up of clock-time by all people or institutions. It seems so natural to us now that everyone should use clock-time - but just imagine a medieval town, with its competing bells and chimes ringing out, some sounding the monastic hours, some sounding out clock hours. Looking at the evidence from civic records, it appears that citizens in towns were adopting clock-based time as a part of broader strengthening of their own civic identity, prestige and control.” The significance of clocks is a theme further explored by Professors Nancy Mason Bradbury and Carolyn P. Collette in their interesting article Changing Times: the mechanical clock in late medieval literature in the Chaucer Review . Curiously, they have a fish-related example too, but I’m sure time-related strictures extended beyond piscatorial trading hours. “Two London proclamations issued by the mayor and aldermen in 1383-84 indicate how accustomed the citizens of London were to governing their activities by clocks and how careful a watch they kept on the hours. One, a proclamation about the selling of fish, regulates trade in this commodity by time: "And also that no denzeins ne non other ne bigge no manere fissh ne other vitailles for to selle a-yen for-to ten of the clokke be smyte vp-on peyne forsaid" (that is, 'up-on peyne of enprisonement at the Maires wille and forfai ture of al that he may forfaite a-yens the kyng').” That’s just a couple of examples of how keeping an eye on the hours of the medieval day mattered. But so too did longer-term time-keeping. Dr Charles Rozier of Durham University has just published a fascinating volume Writing History in the Community of St Cuthbert c700-1130. In it, he talks about the historical material produced by the monks of the community of St Cuthbert, who were famously first based at the holy island of Lindisfarne, and then moved to Chester-le-Street and then finally to Durham. Talking time in Durham One of his themes revolves around what happens in the early 12th century, when the scribes of Durham produced at least five different historical chronicle texts. These, as Dr Rozier explains, allow us to “see a clear intellectual focus on exploring abstract notions of time, and of placing known historical events within measurable frameworks of chronology, royal genealogy, geography and theology. These chronicles show how Durham audiences used historical knowledge to negotiate heated contemporary debates on the measurement of time, and in so doing, made original contributions to an international discourse on this subject.” But, as he explains: “Medieval audiences did not solely engage with history on an intellectual level, simply because they wanted to know about the past. The contents… demonstrate that among the Anglo-Norman community, the past was of fundamental importance to the ritual commemoration of saints, martyrs, church leaders, confraternal partners and secular patrons.” I found this all very interesting, so I asked if Dr Rozier would be willing to film a very brief guide to the medieval concept of time for us, and rather brilliantly, he agreed. As he says: “Most chronicles were written by a small group of high-level intellectuals working in medieval monasteries or cathedral schools. They cared about time, because it was their job to pray in the right ways at the right times and on the right feast days, all through the year.” View oEmbed on the source website “The essential concern of their audiences was that two defining elements of the Christian faith, the celebration of Easter and the eschatological framework of salvation history, required an advanced understanding of time among persons directing the rhythms of worship,” continues Dr Rozier. “The ability to calculate the date of Easter required a complex process of computistical work on which were composed several influential treatises throughout the Middle Ages, often accompanied by supporting diagrams and schematic tables of remarkable ingenuity and complexity.” Deep-thinking and head-scratching So, time was a concept understood on several levels in the medieval period, and one that required a lot of deep-thinking and head-scratching analytical work to get to grips with. But I also wanted to know if there was a such a thing as clock-watching in the Middle Ages, if these medieval scribes and monks ever found the process of calculating and chronicling just a little bit hard work and dare I say it, dull. I asked Dr Rozier if he could see anything like that from his in-depth research of these manuscripts. He replied: “On boredom, there is not really anything manuscript-based, but there's a very nice description from a twelfth-century chronicler called Orderic Vitalis about how writing can be used as a balance against your sins after death. A scribe-monk dies and his sins are put on scales, and when all of the words he wrote in his life are placed on the other side, the words written tip the balance and allow him into heaven. The story is told in the context of encouraging young monks to be diligent and not lazy!” Scribes at snail's pace Moving forward again in time though, but back to one of my favourite subjects, medieval marginalia, I was enjoying a BBC radio programme on the subject presented by Dr Alixe Bovey called Knight fights Giant Snail. Incidentally, Dr Bovey wrote about the medieval Gough map for historyextra a few years, and I note there is a research project going on about that now, which sounds exciting. Anyway, back to the snail programme, one of the contributors, Professor Paul Binski of Cambridge University, made the comment that one of the reasons why we start to see some of the more unusual marginal illustrations in medieval manuscripts in the 13th and 14th centuries was because “what we recognise as a bureaucratic state is just beginning. You have an immense expansion of people who sit in offices and wield pens and get fed up. The people doing it are young men who have Latin and are bored sick of the tedium of bureaucracy and they start to make marginal corollaries”. I dropped Professor Binski a line to clarify this, and he replied: “Boredom I see as a stimulus to ludus, serious play and unruliness, ie it's a counterpart to delight. In medieval aesthetics varietas is the counterpart to tedium - they go together. I don't think its coincidental that big copying industries in the secretariats from c 1200 witness the earliest doodles of this type. There are all sorts of scribal notes in medieval manuscripts added by copyists out of their minds, for example; 'Mary, help me!' - 'Maria hilf!' or 'Time for Lunch'.” He goes into considerably more detail into this in his excellent book Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style and very interestingly opines on the idea that the amusing marginalia, perhaps borne out of boredom, in otherwise serious tomes may have been commercially valuable in making products that the intended audience wanted to own: “The borders became a genre only slowly (if at all), especially when it became clear that they conferred an advantage in the market for books. That market was inherently geared to social elites. But without a sense of the delight – and the boredom – of writing and decorating anything, a true sense of the richness of the margins is lost in turn.” Are you bored yet? Professor Chris Dyer, emeritus at Leicester and Birmingham, is an expert on medieval economic and social history (he wrote a great piece for us about deserted medieval villages, which is a worth a read). His book Everyday life in Medieval England is a classic text, so I wondered if he might know anything about whether boredom prevailed amongst the peasantry at all. “The term boredom emerges in the 18th century and I suspect that the idea is a modern one. Not that medieval people were not bored, but they did not think of it as a state of mind and therefore did not name it or discuss it. "The nearest to a state of boredom might be melancholy, but that is more akin to our depression, though not the same. "People did have empty time, as there was much underemployment (e.g. people employed in aristocratic households without a lot to do). Labourers and other living on wages for whom there was not enough work. We think of a working year of 240 days, with enforced break from lack of work, bad weather, religious feasts which were not filled with feasting if you were poor. But in a bad year the amount of work filled only 100 days. "I am always struck by medieval people's capacity to endure tedium. We get bored on a two hour train journey- but medieval traveller were on the road for 3 or 4 days. "Work involved the repetitive performance of manual tasks, like weaving or threshing corn. "Monks went through a repetitive cycle of prayer and services, and most of them were not doing creative jobs such as reading and writing. "There was very limited range of entertainments, like Nine Men's Morris, or playing simple musical instruments like pipes. Making your own entertainment was difficult for people without much education. "But perhaps we, with masses of stimuli and opportunities to read, see, hear etc are still bored!” If you are bored this week, let me recommend a new podcast episode that's just out on our feed. It's a treat for medieval enthusiasts, because we have Professor David Carpenter talking about King Henry III, in the light of his recent new biography of the somewhat overlooked 13th-century monarch. Listen to the podcast, and read his feature in the July 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine, and you'll learn that Henry was a lazy sort, who craved a quiet and comfortable life, but whose story was certainly not boring and who deserves to be better known, as Professor Carpenter reminded me in an email: "King Henry III was a king in a new age, the first to confront the restrictions of Magna Carta and the power of parliament. Thanks to his extraordinary letters recorded on the chancery rolls we can get closer to him, on a day to day basis, than to any other medieval monarch. Warm hearted, open handed, pacific, deeply pious, a connoisseur of the arts, and craving a comfortable life, he gave England many years of peace and built the great Abbey at Westminster we have today. Alas, he was also politically naive and in 1258 a baronial coalition, led by Simon de Montfort, stripped him of power. But Henry's reputation as a good and pious man helped him in the end win through. He lies today within a splendid tomb in the Abbey beside his patron saint, Edward the Confessor." David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. He is not bored of writing this blog yet, but if you are, drop him a tweet to tell him what he should cover instead. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #7: what it meant to be 'blue' in the Middle Ages (and more killer rabbits)
HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove discovers what it meant to be 'blue' in the Middle Ages, why food and cathedrals were brightly coloured, and continues his search for the truth about medieval killer rabbits
Was it a bad thing to 'feel blue' in the Middle Ages? No, is the answer, because the colour wasn’t always associated with sadness – as it often is today – but with loyalty. I’ve been enjoying a recent article in the Journal of Medieval History by the University of Nottingham’s Dr Matthew Ward about the association between the colour blue and the concept of loyalty in the Middle Ages (True blue: the connection between colour and loyalty in the later Middle Ages). He details how in later medieval English and continental texts, particularly in heraldic or chivalric literature, blue is the colour of the steadfast and faithful. Dr Ward does make clear that “many colours have had a range of attributes associated with them, some of which are far from consistent and "vary according to time and place”, but he sees a particular link between blue and loyalty in the later medieval period. He describes how the French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377) was one of a number of authors at the time who “espoused the relationship between azure and loyalty in a deliberation over the significance of a variety of colours: White denoted joy, green changeability, red passion, black grief or mourning, and blue was without doubt attached to loyalty”. Green for the devil, blue for the loyal He also notes how Geoffrey Chaucer (who you can hear more about on this recent podcast) relates blue to loyalty in the Squire’s Tale. Meanwhile in the Chaucerian contemporary tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he suggests that “the colour blue could also be used ironically to expose the disloyalty of an individual”. Why the knight is green in that story is another matter, and if you listen to the In Our Time podcast on that topic , the University of Bristol’s Professor Ad Putter explains there that “the colour green is associated with nature in the poem, but green is also the colour of the devil”. Read more about the history of colour – from 'baby blue' to royal purple Back to Dr Ward. “Every colour was attached to an assortment of attributes during the medieval period and blue was no exception," he explains. "Even this colour, predominantly connected with positive virtues, could in some cases be used in a negative sense, for example as the colour of demons. That said, a connection between the colour and loyalty developed during the later Middle Ages, couched in the languages of courtly love, knightly virtue and heraldry.” This got me thinking about how important colour was in medieval everyday life. Southampton University’s Professor Chris Woolgar (who is also editor of the Journal of Medieval History), pointed out in his lecture on medieval eating habits for our recent Medieval Life and Death week that if the colour of a certain food, in the course of its preparation, was altered, it might have been seen as deceiving the consumer. Bright red food: tasty Professor Woolgar talks extensively about colour in his book The Senses in Late Medieval England, so I asked him to distil for us what colour meant to the medieval man and woman in the street, and how colourful everyday life was: “Colour was important in so many ways to medieval people, but not necessarily in ways that we might expect. So, a shiny colour made an immediate connection to light as a beneficent substance (light originates in what shines, not as we understand it, as a reflection). That virtuous quality meant that a shiny red was to the medieval mind more like a shiny blue than it was a matt red. It almost has a miraculous quality – in one of the miracles of St Wulfstan a white (albus) horse, belonging to Eustace of Powick, near Worcester, was bitten by a snake or had eaten something bad with its grass, and had turned black; Eustace vowed a penny to St Wulfstan, and made the sign of the cross over the animal, and its head turned back to white – but in Latin to a shining white, candidus, that is, a white that was full of virtue (and from which, as you can see, we get ‘candid’, with its connotations of truth).” In the panel discussion at the end of our Medieval Life and Death week, we did talk about the most admired personal attributes in the Middle Ages – but sadly we failed to attribute colours to them. Nevertheless, loyalty was one of the qualities that we discussed (which you can still watch here on the website), and that brings us around to chivalry, which I’ve talked about in a previous blog. As Dr Ward tells us: “The fact that loyalty became identified with the colour blue suggests that the virtue was conceived as a most significant quality. This was certainly the case in the sphere of chivalry. From the time of Chrétien de Troyes’ romances of the late 12th century, authors had been discussing the essential knightly virtues: prouesse, largesse, courtoisie, franchise (the outward manifestation of good birth and virtue: prowess, generosity, courtesy, nobility of character) and loyaulté, to which other virtues were sometimes added including hardiness and humility.” A good colour for chivalry So being true blue was certainly a good thing for a late medieval chivalrous knight, and it’s not surprising that blue features prominently in heraldry and coats of arms from the period. However, that wasn’t always the case. Dr Ward makes one further particularly interesting observation, noting that in the earlier Middle Ages, blue wasn’t necessarily seen as prestigious or important: "By the ninth century, the colour was becoming more popular in manuscript illumination and it took on positive symbolic resonances; once linked with darkness in some instances, the colour was more often associated with heavenly light and majesty. A major turning point in the fortunes of the colour resulted from Abbot Suger’s rebuilding of the basilica of Saint-Denis, which commenced in the late 1130s. Blue and red stained glass windows were installed, flooding the church with blue-violet light. The deep blue luminosity was intended to denote the boundary between the earthly and celestial realms.” Shiny, gaudy places That did remind me of the fact that paint conservators have been able to demonstrate that medieval cathedrals used to be fantastically bright and vibrant places, with rich colours in stark contrast to the bare stone we have nowadays. Dr Emma Wells in this recent piece on Canterbury Cathedral tells us that: “Entering a medieval cathedral would have been a complete assault on all the senses. The smell of incense; the noise of chatter and music; the vast expanse of space above and the feel of the stonework beneath your feet and hands… it would have been very different from what pilgrims would experience in their local parish church. And, in contrast to the plain stone we see today, every inch of the cathedral would have been painted in bright primary colours, even the exterior.” Exeter Cathedral’s West Front has had a lot of detailed work done on it to show what it looked like once for example, and there used to be a fun game on the BBC website where you could repaint the front of Wells Cathedral, though it’s not been updated for a while Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in the Second World War, but no doubt in its medieval heyday, it was a riot of colour too. Dr Ward tells us that the phrase ‘true blue’ – in the sense of a completely loyal person – might have been born out of Coventry’s colourful past: “It is thought that one of the origins of the phrase in England was from the blue thread used in the Coventry cloth industry during the medieval period. The town was known for its woad-dyed blue cloth, the phrase ‘true blue’ referring to the blue as a fast shade, a colour which would never fade… True blue’ may also be a legacy of the connection between the colour and treuth, a Middle English term used to denote fidelity, loyalty, constancy, allegiance and faithfulness.” I suppose one obvious question is whether everyone in the Middle Ages would have been in on the meaning of the colours they were seeing. Happily, Dr Ward has the answer: “To suggest that all individuals thought of loyalty on every occasion they witnessed the colour blue in literature or in works of art is of course fanciful. However, those who had read heraldic or chivalric literature, or were familiar with Machaut, Froissart and Chaucer, would have been accustomed to some degree of colour symbolism and allegory. The evidence suggests that during the fifteenth century the association between blue and loyalty was sufficiently well established for it to have been reasonably well appreciated, although not all agreed with what was written.” Anyway, there’s a few hints there that the Middle Ages was probably a pretty colourful place, but also one where colours had meanings. So I for one will be mindful next time I see a medieval illuminated manuscript or stained glass window, and wonder whether there’s a meaning that I might be missing. More killer rabbits Now, on a concluding note, I spotted this excellent blog post from Dr Thijs Porck of Leiden University on strange Anglo-Saxon beheadings. That might sound slightly tangential to what I’ve been talking about here, though of course the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as mentioned above, is all about a strange beheading and the consequences thereof. But actually, the reason I mention it is that I discussed medieval killer rabbits in an earlier blog, and I notice that Dr Porck includes a fine image of a homicidal grinning bunny wielding an enormous axe in his blog. Read more medieval matters blogs from David Musgrove: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown Back to Braveheart, Viking river boats, & the Crusades The salmon of knowledge & rolling Roman mosaics Chivalry, medieval killer rabbits and prisoners of war in the 15th century I had a quick word with Dr Porck about rabbits, and he suggested I have a look at late medieval misericords (the ledges on folding seats in churches to support you when you’re standing up for a long bout of prayer), particularly in Manchester Cathedral. And sure enough, there is an excellent carving there. I’ll quote the description to you from the Historic England website: “The choir stalls in Manchester Cathedral date from around 1505-1510. This misericord, in the fifteenth stall from the west on the north side of the choir, depicts a hunter bound to a spit, being turned by a rabbit in front of a fire. On the fire sit four pots, in which are placed the head and limbs of the hunter's dog, and which are attended to by another rabbit. This scene is supported in either side by roses. The carving is meant to "teach the lesson of retributive justice done to sportsmen and others by their victims." Kent State University’s Professor Diane Scillia has written about this particular carving in a chapter in Parody and Festivity in Early Modern Art and pointed out that the design is based on an ornamental panel made by Israhel van Meckenem, a contemporary of Hieronymous Bosch, who also had a hellish rabbit carrying a naked human on a pole in his famous Garden of Earthly Delights painting. Professor Scillia suggests that these depictions might have taken inspiration from Carnival or Shrovetide plays that included performers wearing animal masks. So, the plot thickens with these dastardly, devilish rabbits, and now we have them in manuscripts, carvings and maybe even in live performances. I know a lot of you were interested in this topic, so I’ll be sure to keep you updated in this blog on any further malevolent leporid-based material that I come across. David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #6: Viking military mind games, Anglo-Saxon mind maps, and embroidery before the Bayeux Tapestry
Historyextra content director David Musgrove goes for a run through several millennia of history, exploring Viking military manoeuvres, early medieval mind maps, and the power of Anglo-Saxon embroidery before the Bayeux Tapestry
As dawn began to break over Didcot and the North Wessex Downs one day last week, I found myself beside the ancient Ridgeway, shivering on the edge of the prehistoric barrow known as Scutchamer Knob. I was having a day off and I planned to spend it trail-running west along a chunk of the Ridgeway. I was going to start at Scutchamer Knob, which is a Bronze Age round barrow also known as Cwichelm’s or Cuckhamsley Barrow. It’s not much to look at now to be honest, obscured by trees and not quite the prominent lump it once was, but it still commands big views in all directions. View oEmbed on the source website I’d been to this place once before, over a decade ago, when the barrow still overlooked the now-demolished cooling towers of Didcot Power Station and I was researching a BBC History Magazine book called 100 Places that made Britain, in which I asked historians to nominate important places in British history. Winchester University’s Professor Ryan Lavelle had picked Scutchamer Knob, because of its significance in the story of the Viking assault on Wessex in 1006, when England’s King Aethelred (the Unready) failed to make much of a showing against a Viking army that was making hay in his kingdom. Professor Lavelle and Exeter University’s Dr Levi Roach have both written biographies of King Aethelred recently if you want the background to the story. But basically, the Viking army had encamped themselves at Scutchamer Knob in a direct challenge to the English, who, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, had boasted that “if they [the Vikings] sought out Cwichelm’s Barrow they would never get to the sea”. In other words, Aethelred would come and deliver them a lesson for their impudence. However, Aethelred did not come, and the Vikings in the end went back to the ships, stopping on their way to see off the Anglo-Saxon army that finally turned up. Posture and counter-posture “Warfare in this period was a series of posturing and counter-posturing, and is summed up beautifully here,” explained Professor Lavelle when I spoke to him for the book. “So the Vikings headed to this place and challenged the Anglo-Saxon army in Wessex to fight. They didn’t respond to the challenge, but there was eventually a battle in Wiltshire where the English were beaten. Probably the reason why the English didn’t respond to the Viking challenge was because it was an assembly site, and if they did respond, they would effectively have been summoned to an assembly by the Vikings. That would have shown that the Vikings held the Wessex countryside. There is a series of meanings to places." Read more medieval matters blogs from David Musgrove: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown Back to Braveheart, Viking river boats, & the Crusades The salmon of knowledge & rolling Roman mosaics Chivalry, medieval killer rabbits and prisoners of war in the 15th century So, that’s a pretty interesting story, but there’s more to it than that. Professor Howard Williams of the University of Chester has written an absorbing blog exploring why this place has the link to Cwichelm. If you’re not familiar with Cwichelm, he was a famous hero of Wessex’s early history, and was supposed to either be buried here himself or have buried some of his enemies here after killing them in battle. It’s a little taste of the apparent fascination that the Anglo-Saxons had with the prehistoric remains that they came across (Cwichelm obviously was not around in the Bronze Age, when the Knob was first thrown up on that ridge). The Anglo-Saxon myth-book As I followed the Ridgeway westwards, I passed the back of Uffington hillfort (with its famous White Horse – listen to my podcast with David Miles to find out more about that and have a read of his book The Land of the White Horse), and then straight past the splendid (though restored) Neolithic chambered tomb called Wayland’s Smithy. Wayland was the vengeful smith known in Viking and Anglo-Saxon mythology, so here is another example of the Anglo-Saxons appropriating another prehistoric monument to bring into their myth-book. As Professor Williams reminds us in another useful blog post, this place is named in an Anglo-Saxon boundary charter of AD 955, and was clearly part of the local lore, along with the Iron Age hillfort and the earlier white horse, in the 10th century. So, the Anglo-Saxons were, it seems, consciously incorporating these prehistoric monuments into both their cultural and physical landscape. Professor Andrew Reynolds and Dr Alexander Langlands have also recently dwelled on this idea in a thoughtful piece ‘Travel as communication: a consideration of overland journeys in Anglo-Saxon England’ in World Archaeology, as they talk about Anglo-Saxon long-distance routeways (of which the Ridgeway would have been one), and "introduce mythological and 'associative' dimensions to the experience of landscape as a function of travel": "An early medieval journey entailed much more than a purely physical act. Situating monuments in association with thoroughfares created maximum exposure to passing traffic and an arena for both direct and associative ideological communication with travellers. A journey laden with mental cues provided a nuanced grammar of landscape, punctuated by symbols and monuments many of which may have retained much older meanings." So that’s where the imposition of Cwichelm and Wayland into the earlier landscape features would have fitted in. Finding the way in the past I have to admit that I wasn’t considering the early medieval mental landscape as much as I might have been as I was blundering down the bright white chalk path (though it did strike me that the brightness of the bare chalk on the path itself must have lent the track quite a startling air amidst the dun of the Downs, much as the chalk-cut barrows and hillfort ramparts would have done when they were first dug out). I was more focussed on not twisting my ankle on the heavy ruts in the track, but at least there wasn’t much chance of me getting lost: I was following the handsomely-signposted National Trail route markers. Early medieval travellers (or Viking raiders) wouldn’t have been so blessed, and on that more prosaic level, they no doubt used the obvious and prominent prehistoric landscape features along the side of routeways like this for navigational purposes. If you want to know more about wayfinding in the early medieval period, making use of stones, particular trees, crossroads, and crosses and the mental imagery of the mythologised landscape I mentioned above, have a look at Dr Langlands’ recent book The Ancient Ways of Wessex. The Viking challenge I don’t know exactly how the Viking army knew where to go back in 1006, but it is assumed that they would have travelled along the same Ridgeway as I did (probably in a less sweaty and much more intimidating manner), once it became clear that no Anglo-Saxon army was going to pitch up and fight them for impugning the reputation of Cwichelm. The battle they eventually fought and won is thought to have been contested somewhere near West Kennett (home of another famous barrow, and near the equally famous stone circle at Avebury). Dr Thomas J.T. Williams (author of Viking Britain) charts the story of that campaign in his paper Landscape and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England and the Viking campaign of 1006. Again, this is a landscape lathered with prehistoric significance and as Dr Williams notes, "It seems likely that an intrusion into this symbolically rich landscape would have been profoundly disturbing to the local West Saxon population, and perhaps part of the deliberate psychological campaign that the Viking here [army] seems to have been waging in 1006". Dr Williams has also written a piece on 5 other lost Viking battles on the website. I was planning on running down into the Kennet valley myself, but I ran out of water, and enthusiasm, after 26 miles, and had to stop for a lie down and a rescue mission from my wife at Barbury Castle (another prehistoric Ridgeway landmark). I don’t suppose the Vikings would have been so irresolute, but they had silver, glory, and eventually a kingdom to win, whereas I just had to get home to make lunch for the kids. Anglo-Saxon embroidery Aside from over-exerting myself, I’ve also been reading Dr Alexandra Lester-Makin’s new book The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World. Dr Lester-Makin is an expert on the Bayeux Tapestry and has written on the subject for this website, but in this work she explores the antecedents of that most famous example of Anglo-Saxon embroidery. It’s a fascinating survey, and not just for those with a direct interest in embroidery, because she also tackles the question of what studying such embroidery as does survive from the period (not much – just 43 pieces - but enough for her to draw some thought-provoking conclusions) can tell us about the early medieval mindset. And it seems to me that there are some similarities in her thoughts with what the landscape researchers above have been finding, because as she says, “embroidery appears to have been imbued with an additional level of metaphysical meaning”. She talks about a particular kind of stitch, the looped stitch, which was used “decoratively to reinforce weak points on textiles, but in its form may also have represented the World Serpent of Germanic mythology” and so “the use of this stitch on areas susceptible to wear and damage was more than simply functional: it had symbolic power”. That sounds a little bit like the way that these same groups of people might have been enmeshing mythologised stories and practical wayfinding in their treatment of the landscape they found around them. Women at the height of their powers Dr Lester-Makin also considers who was responsible for making embroideries during this period, and concludes that “it was an art form as highly regarded as metalwork, sculpture and manuscript illumination… and it was created by women working at the height of their powers, whom society regarded with the highest respect”. I asked her to summarise for me in a paragraph how she’d come to that view: “We know embroidery was produced by women, and highly thought of because we have evidence from written sources and archaeological contexts. Taking the written sources first, there are lots of stories about female saints and biographies of women in elite and royal circles stating how good they were at embroidery. The wording in these documents show that embroidery was thought of as a form of ‘worthy occupation’ and the skill with which it was made is always highly praised, as are the embroideries themselves. Domesday Book names two female embroiderers, Aelfgyth and Leofgyth, both of whom were working as ‘independent concerns’, and they are not the only two women to make embroidery in this way. “There is no mention of men embroidering, although we are told that St Dunstan (a monk and Archbishop of Canterbury) designed embroidery for a married woman to stitch with her ‘girls’. Evidence of possible embroidery equipment, in the form of needles and small shears, have been found in many known and probable female graves, also pointing to embroidery being a female occupation. “We know that the skill of making embroidery was highly regarded because for example, embroiderers were sometimes ‘paid’ with gifts of land or estates. We also know that embroidery was highly regarded because it was used throughout society as an expression of political and religious ideas, a status symbol and to tell stories, to name but a few roles. Documentary sources tell us that the Normans were also in the thrall of embroidery made in early medieval England, and they commissioned items for places that they patronized back in Normandy, even after the Conquest. So even after 1066 embroiderers were able to continue their work, producing some of the finest embroidery that has survived to this day.” It’s inter-disciplinary studies like the ones above that are the way forward for helping us get inside the minds of these people who lived so long ago, to help us tease out the mindgames they themselves played, from the clues and traces that linger in places and objects as well as the documents they've left behind. David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
Medieval(ish) matters #5: chivalry, medieval killer rabbits and prisoners of war in the 15th century
HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove rounds up the latest medieval stories on the website this week – considering chivalry, medieval prisoners of war, and rabbits in medieval marginalia
I’ve been contemplating chivalry, violence and slavery this week. Oh, and vengeful rabbits. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in lockdown too long, though it’s more to do with the fact that I was writing up a little web piece about the practice of taking prisoners in the Hundred Years’ War off the back of my podcast interview with Southampton University’s Dr Rémy Ambühl, an expert in such matters. Last week it was, as you might have noticed, the anniversary of the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, which followed Henry V’s famous Agincourt victory, so it’s a timely thing to be thinking about. (On that, Dr Paul Dryburgh and Dr Euan Roger at the National Archives ran an informative twitter thread on the documents associated with the Treaty.) View oEmbed on the source website So, Dr Ambühl and I talked a fair bit about how combatants could actually be taken prisoner during the course of a melee (which reminded me of an interesting conversation I had last year for our podcast with Dr Lauren Johnson about the depiction of the heart of the fighting in the battle of Agincourt in the film The King). Listen | Lauren Johnson discusses the history behind The King, considering how closely it follows the real events of Henry V’s life and reign Another part of the discussion was about the legal and moral justification for taking prisoners of war, which is bound up with concepts of chivalry and the medieval law of arms. What is chivalry – and where does it come from? Chivalry, as far as I can see, is a difficult concept to define, with various ideas as to what it boils down to. What it wasn’t, according to another expert in the field, the University of York’s Dr Craig Taylor, was the romantic idea that some hold today of “knights going round treating war as if it was some kind of game”. Where chivalry comes from is complicated. One line of thought is that chivalry as a concept evolves from the aftermath of the implosion of Charlemagne’s empire. Charlemagne (c747–814) of course famously created a huge European empire, which then fragmented on his death. If you listen to the excellent In our Time podcast on chivalry (featuring Professors Matthew Strickland, Miri Rubin and Laura Ashe), Professor Strickland explains how in the late ninth/10th centuries, bands of heavily armed warriors formed around local lords and developed an ethic of war different to that which existed in the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian world (where the end result of being 'on the wrong side' of a battle left you with two choices: death or slavery). Because they were essentially kinsmen, these Frankish warriors, says Strickland, developed a 'brothers-in-arms' mentality that allowed for honourable surrender, and from that a culture of clemency and ransom began to blossom. On that point, I’ve been reading a fascinating new book edited by Professor Laura Ashe and Dr Emily Joan Ward called Conquests in Eleventh-Century England, 1016, 1066. I’m hoping to record a podcast with Dr Ward about this soon, but one of the articles, by Professor John Gillingham, is about warfare and slavery in the 11th century, and he makes some fascinating points about how the Anglo-Scandinavians up to 1066 – and indeed Vikings, Irish, Scots, Welsh and Strathclyde Britons – were generally happy to kill men during and after battle, but preferred to send women and children to slave markets. By contrast, the “only human plunder the Normans took were those who were worth returning to family and friends after payment of a ransom, i.e. nearly always men”. So there are probably both economic and self-preservation forces at play in this developing idea of chivalry. Historians of the subject these days are at pains to point out that the concept of chivalry was never a constant –nor probably that clearly defined. Dr Taylor, for instance, points out that “There was no simple, fixed set of rules or standards for how such men should behave, and certainly no sense that to be chivalrous was a black or white proposition. Princes, noblemen and knights were expected to demonstrate prowess, courage and loyalty, as well as other important qualities such as largesse, mercy and prudence, in the pursuit of honour, fame and glory.” There was a difference between killing someone on the battlefield and killing them after their surrender. Dr Taylor in his book Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood During the Hundred Years War notes that: “The legal theorists and other writers debated questions such as the way in which prisoners were treated after their capture. For example, they emphasised the important distinction between acts that were committed during the heat of battle and violence inflicted upon prisoners after they had formally surrendered and therefore been accepted into the protection of their captor. Read more medieval matters blogs from David Musgrove: The Last Kingdom, Robin Hood and how to learn Old Norse in lockdown Back to Braveheart, Viking river boats, & the Crusades The salmon of knowledge & rolling Roman mosaics “[The late medieval thinkers and writers] Honorat Bovet and Christine de Pizan acknowledged that, in ancient times, captors had been able execute their prisoners at will, and also argued that, in their day, those taken in battle could be killed. Once a man had been taken prisoner, however, canon law required that he be treated with pity and mercy, and both writers emphasised that the only possible justification for killing an enemy away from the battlefield was that he might escape and thereby prolong or escalate the war.” Could a woman become a knight in medieval times? You might assume, then, that chivalry was really for the benefit of the losers (or at least the knightly losers, not the lower classes), as a bit of an insurance guarantee that you wouldn’t automatically end up dead or sold off into slavery if you didn’t win every battle. In fact, there is an idea that chivalry would have perpetuated endemic fighting because it allowed knights to continue battling each other over and over again. However, as Dr Taylor notes in the book cited above: “The taking of prisoners in high and late medieval warfare is often assumed to be an extension of the courtliness and politeness cultivated at the court and described in chivalric literature. In reality, the most powerful argument for mercy on a medieval battlefield was financial. Prisoner-taking was an extremely profitable business during the age of chivalry, both for soldiers and for the captains and commanders above them.” Prisonnier de guerre This chimes with what Dr Ambühl has noted in his research, which is based on tracing the origins of the French phrase prisonnier de guerre [prisoner of war]. He has noted that the 'ransom culture' expressed in the 14th and 15th centuries was not so much about mercy and protection for the losers, but more about the economic rights of the winners, who wanted to be able to ensure that they got what they were owed by ransoming those they had vanquished. As he says in his article Joan of Arc as prisonnière de guerre, in the English Historical Review: “The late medieval prisonnier de guerre [prisoner of war] was not first and foremost a combatant whose life ought to be spared, but rather an individual who could be traded (like a slave), either ransomed, exchanged or sold, and for whom even the crown had to pay the master. The prisonnier de guerre was primarily defined by their economic value which derived from the manifest property rights of the master in the prisoner.” Indeed, he has found a reference in 1434 to the English knight Sir William Bucton maintaining in court that his prisoner “was nothing but a slave who was in no position to do anything without the express consent of his master.” It's quite startling, to me at least, to hear talk of slavery in the 15th century like this. Anyway, listen to the podcast and you’ll find out a lot more on the topic: Listen | Rémy Ambühl discusses his new research into the fate of captives in the Hundred Years’ War This does take me back to the subject of our conversations in the virtual Medieval Life and Death festival last week. Dr Hannah Skoda talked about violence in the Middle Ages, and what was acceptable and what wasn’t, and clearly the development of chivalric ideas plays into that conversation. The growth of chivalry with the associated concept of 'courtly love' also informed the topic of Dr Sally Dixon-Smith’s talk on medieval love and marriage. All five talks, including ones on medieval food from Professor Chris Woolgar, religion from Dr Emma Wells, and medicine from Dr Elma Brenner, are still available to watch and enjoy on our website, along with the final wrap-up discussion with all our contributors. Medieval killer rabbits Another topic we discussed in our virtual festival – and particularly in the wrap-up – was the strange place that rabbits seem to have in medieval imagery. Search online for ‘medieval killer rabbits’ and you’ll find a wealth of blog posts about the strangely violent tendencies of bunnies in the Middle Ages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/Medieval-bunnies-2-bbae5bd.jpg" width="600" height="413" alt="A scene from the Smithfield Decretals depicting a rabbit beheading a man. Rabbits seem to have a strange place in medieval imagery – and are depicted as having strangely violent tendencies. "It’s the sort of thing to give you nightmares," says David Musgrove. (Photo by Album/British Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A scene from the Smithfield Decretals depicting a rabbit beheading a man. Rabbits seem to have a strange place in medieval imagery – and are depicted as having strangely violent tendencies. "It’s the sort of thing to give you nightmares," says David Musgrove. (Photo by Album/British Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> One particular image, from the British Library, is excellent. It shows a frankly terrifying scene where some vengeful rabbits capture their erstwhile human hunter, tie him down, try him, and then kill him. It’s the sort of thing to give you nightmares. I’m glad I didn’t see it when I was a boy, because I think I’m still traumatised and scared of rats since reading Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Listen | Karen Harvey explores the unusual case of Mary Toft who caused a sensation in 1726 by apparently giving birth to rabbits Anyway, what about those rabbits? I asked Dr Skoda if she could explain why rabbits do appear in such curious guise in medieval marginalia in the wrap-up panel discussion, and she had a great answer, which I repeat for you here: “If you were to look up, for example, the Luttrell Psalter in the first half of the 14th century, you find loads of examples of rabbits depicted in the margins of this absolutely beautiful manuscript. Many of them are doing pretty vicious things – some very comical. "What exactly is the purpose of these rabbit figures riding snails, carrying lances or brutalising another creature? The answer might be very controversial – Marginalia in manuscripts in general is something that stimulates a lot of debate. People can't really decide whether it's just intended as entertainment – or whether there's a genuine kind of subversive message there. “By the later Middle Ages, breeding rabbits has become a really big thing. In many ways, by the second half of the 14th century, it is kind of a symbol of oppression. The more that breeding rabbits becomes important, the more poaching rabbits becomes tempting – and the more exploitation is symbolised by the response to poaching. Perhaps these depictions of rabbits demonstrate that rabbits embody a sense of oppression and exploitation, because of what landlords are doing. 6 things you (probably) didn’t know about animals in ancient Rome “In 1381 in the Peasants’ Revolt in St Albans, the rebels take control of the pillory. They symbolise the fact that they've taken control of the pillory by putting a rabbit on it. So you have rabbits as clearly embodying a sense of social protest. "I’ll just quickly add a few words about hares. I'm not quite sure how to recognise rabbits and hares separately in manuscripts, but hares are a symbol of cowardice. So if you get hares depicted as knights, then they are saying something really quite subversive and comical about medieval knights.” And that returns us neatly to the start of this blog, in a satisfying circular sort of fashion, from knights, to leporids, and back once more to knights. David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Do let him know if you have anything to add about medieval killer rabbits. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here
What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War?
What was it like to be taken captive during a medieval battle, and what happened to you afterwards? Historian Rémy Ambühl explains to David Musgrove…
One of the most infamous incidents from the Hundred Years’ War occurred at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, when some captured French prisoners were massacred by the English on the orders of King Henry V, as the French rear guard were preparing to make a last assault. Medieval historian Rémy Ambühl, from the University of Southampton, has been studying this subject – and was recently interviewed for the HistoryExtra podcast on how the capturing (and ransoming) of prisoners of war was a feature of the 116-year-long conflict. During the episode, he explains how a ransom culture developed with laws and practices that were designed to protect the economic interests of the captor, rather than the wellbeing of the captive. There were also some rules around how you would take, or allow yourself to be taken, captive during a battle. Listen | Rémy Ambühl discusses his new research into the fate of captives in the Hundred Years’ War “Touching the right hand and asking for ransom was a sign that would be understood in the heat of the action as the soldier giving up and handing himself over to the to his enemy,” explains Ambühl. “But that’s not the end of the story, because the prisoner would then effectively be in the possession of the person he has surrendered to. “You have his life in your hands and you are supposed to protect the prisoner at that point. So, you need to take him out of the battle. This is problematic if you are in the melee right in the combat. How does that happen? We can read that valets are there to help the knights; they take the prisoners and keep them outside the heat of the action. 9 medieval battles more significant than Agincourt The King: Henry V on film (podcast) “There were also other rules, too; these were made to avoid the neutralisation of the knights on the battlefield. Once you have taken your prisoner, you take their word and a token which proved that you had captured these prisoners, like a gauntlet or their sword,” continues Ambühl. “This would be evidence in the debate after the battle that he's your prisoner; and then you can go on fighting if the prisoners you've taken are put aside and their lives are not in danger.” Listen | Clare Makepeace explores the experiences of British soldiers who spent time in PoW camps in World War Two Battlefields were confusing places of course, and sometimes prisoners could end up being claimed by more than one captor, as Ambühl explains: “The place where prisoners are taken once the victory is secured on the battlefield… there starts the hunt, the chase of the prisoners, the chase of the defeated. And it is at that point that it becomes very dangerous in terms of casualties. If more than one person claims a captive, there are rules which share the ransom between the new captor and the former captor. There are plenty of disputes after battles because people are claiming that they took the same man.” How bloody was medieval life? A brief guide to the Hundred Years’ War – by Rémy Ambühl “The Hundred Years' War is one of the longest conflicts in history. It actually lasted 116 years, starting in 1337 and ending in 1453. It was caused by two overlapping problems. The first is the feudal issue, which was a problem involving land that the English kings held in France since the Norman conquest of England in 1066. These lands – the Duchy of Aquitaine – were held as fiefs [a piece of land usually entrusted to someone for their use that often generated income]. So, the English king was a vassal of the French king for the land he holds in France. “This became a problem between the two kings because [it meant that] the French king had a power of justice over the Duchy of Aquitaine. (Basically, he could interfere in the business of the English king ruling Aquitaine in France). This had been an issue in the 50 years before the Hundred Years' War. “There was also the overlapping problem of the dynastic issue. The English king Edward III claimed the throne of France on the basis of a claim he had from his mother, Isabella. This elevated his status from rebellious vassal of the French king to someone on an equal footing: claiming that he was the rightful king of France. “This was the origin of the war and the reason why it lasted 100 years: once Edward had claimed to be the king of France, he could not possibly settle on anything less. “The Hundred Years' War is usually divided in two phases. The first is the 14th-century phase, which saw big English expeditions. In France they are called the chevauchee (horse-riding raids). This gave way in the 15th century to more of a war of conquest and settlement. After the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 (following the English victory at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, which makes the English King Henry V heir of the French kingdom) it was more a war of conquest and pacification of the kingdom of France, which belonged to the English king. “It all ended in the mid-15th century, after Charles VII (of France) resumed war in 1449. The French reconquest lasted about five years, and the English were eventually expelled from the Duchy of Aquitaine and the Duchy of Normandy, which they had conquered 30 years before.” Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn't at the battle of Agincourt) What happened after a prisoner of war had been captured depended somewhat on their status and likely ransom value. The higher-ranking prisoners might end up in quite well-appointed quarters in castles and be reasonably well-treated. However, notes Ambühl, “you also read about prisoners being thrown into dungeons, pits, being fettered, shackled, tortured. But you don't hear much about them – the voices of lower-ranking people in general do not really emerge in the primary sources we have, and also because the prisoners who died had no voice at all. So it's actually quite tricky to see and fully grasp the bleak situation in which they found themselves.” To find out more about prisoners of war in the Hundred Years’ War and the ransom culture of the period, listen to the podcast here. David Musgrove is content director of HistoryExtra, plus its sister print magazines BBC History Magazine, BBC World Histories and BBC History Revealed