Brother's Blood (37 page)

To our somewhat jaded modern sensibilities it may be difficult to understand just how strange and frightening some phenomena were to medieval people who had no way to explain them. Think about it: if you had never in your life seen a pair of identical twins, and you had no idea that they existed, how would you react? Twins were not unheard of in the thirteenth century, but they were certainly much more of a rarity than they are now. The rates of conception of twins were probably similar to those of the 1970s (before modern fertility treatments became available), but very few of them survived. A woman pregnant with twins was more likely to suffer complications resulting in miscarriage; and bearing in mind that approximately one in six of
all
newborns died at birth or shortly afterwards, we can extrapolate that mortality rates among twins were even higher given that they were generally smaller than singleton babies and were liable to be born earlier. Even riches and the best medical care available at the time could not save most of them: Prince Louis, heir to the French throne and the man holding much of England in 1217, was both the brother and the father of twins, but all four babies died at birth. Thus it is entirely plausible that a less-travelled man such as Edwin has never seen an adult pair of twins at all – never mind an identical pair – and that he is unfamiliar with the concept.

Other seemingly inexplicable phenomena were also attributed to divine intervention. It was believed, for example, that a corpse would bleed in the presence of its murderer, and that the saints had intercessory powers of healing. The descriptions in this book of Brother Richard and his sufferings are based on a real case reported in 1172 where one Gaufrid had three teeth extracted and then ate too much supper, resulting in a horrendous reaction:

His whole head swelled so much that he presented the appearance not of a man but of some portentous and horrid monster: his skin was stretched like a bladder so that those who saw him wondered that it did not break. The prominence of his nose was reduced to flatness; the eyes were sunken and dimmed; the mouth closed by the swelling of the lips and the power of breathing obstructed. His friends inserted a reed into his mouth to enable him to breathe.

(From
The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth
)

Gaufrid, a native of Norwich who was at that time in Canterbury, was taken to the tomb of the recently martyred St Thomas Becket; prayers were said to St William of Norwich, and candles put all about the sick man's head, after which: ‘on the left side of the throat the skin cracked and burst as if pricked by an awl, and a great discharge came out. The swelling subsided with extraordinary quickness; the pain departed and the sick man recovered.' Modern research has put the swelling down to post-operative infection causing the formation of a massive abscess which subsequently burst, possibly related to the heating of the skin, but Edwin would have had no way of knowing this as he watched events unfold, so it would be natural for him and for others to put it down to divine intervention. There is, incidentally, plenty of further reading available on medieval dentistry, but it is not for the faint-hearted.

Also not for the faint-hearted was the ongoing war in England, although the common people could not escape it and had no choice but to live with the consequences if it came near them. Some lands, particularly those in the south and east of England, were fought over time and time again, the inhabitants pillaged, murdered or tortured for their money and goods. The abbey of St Albans was looted several times by men of both sides. Louis's quest for the English crown had stalled a little after the defeat of his forces at Lincoln, but his wife had been active on his behalf and in the summer of 1217 she was building and equipping a huge fleet of reinforcements on the other side of the Channel. William Marshal, the regent acting on behalf of the boy king Henry III, gathered an armed force to try to prevent the landing of this fleet, and it is towards this muster that Edwin is about to ride …

The Cistercians in Yorkshire
online research project,
http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/
index.php

The Rule of St Benedict
, trans. Abbott Parry OSB (Leominster: Gracewing, 1990)

Birkedal Bruun, Mette (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Burton, Janet, and Julie Kerr,
The Cistercians in the Middle Ages
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011)

Lloyd, T.H.,
The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)

Moorman, John,
Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945)

C.B. H
ANLEY
has a PhD in mediaeval studies from the University of Sheffield and is the author of
War and Combat 1150–1270: The Evidence from Old French Literature and Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England
, as well as her Mediaeval Mystery series
, The Sins of the Father
,
The Bloody City
and
Whited Sepulchres
. She currently writes a number of scholarly articles on the period, as well as teaching on writing for academic publication, and also works as a copy-editor and proofreader.

First published in 2016

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