Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (25 page)

The third field was planted with wheat (called “corn” but not at all the Indian corn we designate by that name now), which requires a great deal of nutrients. Grains will exhaust the soil in a short time if those nutrients are not replaced—and that is why modern farmers are so dependent upon chemical fertilizers. The three-field system, because of its cycle of two years of nutrient replacement before a piece of land was planted again with grain, was endlessly sustainable.

A certain number of rows in the field belonged to the manor house although, managed by the lord’s steward, it took its chances in the row selection along with everyone else in many places. The husbandmen, in part payment of the “bond” for their holdings in the fief, gave service by plowing, seeding, and harvesting the lord’s crops. They also might owe a hen or eggs every now and then, especially at Christmas time.

How their debt of labor was paid was specific to the customs of each fief and was well known to the wittenmote. Much distinction was made between a water “bidreap” and a beer “bidreap” when the steward of the manor was required to serve the plowmen beer when they rested.

Regarding local law and order, the principal person responsible in the village was the husbandmen’s chosen “reeve.” The reeve had a horn that he blew whenever there was an emergency, such as when the sheep had gotten into the meadow or a cow into the corn—Little Boy Blue was a typical reeve.

For crimes, there was a system of fines. Even murder was squared with a fine, a very heavy one that economically crippled not only the perpetrator but his entire family. The amount of fine for a murder depended upon the social status of the victim, fundamentally his lifetime’s worth in earning ability, his value to the community. Except of course for aristocrats, who might be seen as having very little value to the local community but whose murder commanded so high a fine that the convicted, or a relative taking his place, would languish a lifetime in prison for the unpayable debt.

If the husbandman was the eldest, or youngest son in the Danelaw, what became of his brothers and sisters? Some migrated to the cities, learning crafts, becoming a new middle class of merchants and artisans. Some became servants in the manor house.

Many of the excess population of the fiefs peopled the enormous religious houses with their vast communities of low level monks and nuns, and some of these rose through education to become priests, and even bishops, as in the case of the brilliant Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, author of the standard published work on manor management of his time, translator of the Old Testament from Hebrew, mathematician, scientist, theologian, and author of “On Kingship and Tyranny” and hence instigator of the movement that resulted in the first Parliament with power over the Crown.

One of Grosseteste’s acts as bishop was to establish a system for legitimizing bastard children. By the old system, only the husbandman (husband) could marry, for only he could provide a stable living for a family. It was a system that just about guaranteed a goodly supply of bastards. Grosseteste’s solution was to perform marriages for those who weren’t husbandmen, to cover the couple’s children with a sheet until the end of the wedding ceremony, then to whisk away the sheet, revealing the couple’s children as “new-born” in legitimacy.

One wonders if Grosseteste, whose name is not a surname but means “the fat-head,” was himself illegitimate, though such a history might impair a person’s qualifications for the priesthood.

Each fief’s village would have a church, and the lord of the manor would have the right, called “advowson,” to designate whom the priest would be. With the appointment went a modest “living” charged against the local husbandmen.

Since the “living” might be given as an income to someone who didn’t live in the village, indeed never showed up to preach or otherwise, there was a need for some currency. This was solved by fairs held in the nearest town. The husbandman’s wife (which word incidentally means “carver of the loaf”) would take the fruits and vegetables from her toft and croft, or a hen or eggs, in a basket and would walk to the nearest fair. If more money was needed she might have her child come with her to drive along some geese or a pig.

If these images of the Goose Girl or Little Boy Blue the reeve, and phrases such as “going beyond the pale” ring deep in our psyches, it’s not only because we saw illustrations in books when we were very small, but because, if they dwelled in Europe, this was the life that most of our ancestors lived.

And on inspection at this remove, it seems not such a bad life, given they had no expectations of plumbing, heating, or modern means of travel and communications. There were, actually certain advantages, certain absences of stress regarding expectations of achievement—life would be what it had always been.

Further Reading

Homans, George Caspar.
English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century
. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960.

Medieval Bathing for Cleanli
ness, Health, and Sex

by Katherine Ashe

T
here is a quite erroneous notion that medieval people didn’t bathe.

Some Tudors may have been proud of bathing once a month whether they needed to or not, but their ancestors had looked upon bathing as one of the sensual pleasures of life. King Henry III even had a special room for the purpose of washing his hair.

True, the poor had little access to bathing facilities other than the local well, and hefting buckets of water home for cooking purposes was probably quite enough of a burden. What personal washing was to be done could be done with a bowl of water.

Laundry might be done in a village washhouse where once in the spring and once in the autumn stream water could be diverted to large stone tubs. Pounded lavender and soapwort made the washing compound, for soaps were not invented until the mid-thirteenth century. Soap was then imported from Spain and was only for the rich. Note, however, the shared linguistic root of “lavender” and “laundry,” shared with the French word
lavande
and the Latin, heard in the Mass as the priest says, “
Lavabo
—I will wash.” Not too bad, having your laundry smell of lavender—even if it’s only twice a year.

In cities the early mornings began with the water sellers wheeling their barrow-like barrels through the streets and selling door to door. Few houses, even of the wealthy, would have their own tubs for the immersion of a full grown person.

Personal washing would be accomplished with a bowl, filled by a servant with one pitcher with very hot water from a cauldron in the hearth and another pitcher of unheated water from a barrel or stone tank in the kitchen or cellar. The desired temperature was achieved by mixing the water from the two pitchers. This arrangement would prevail for most people until the mid-nineteenth century.

So much for washing, but what of bathing? To bathe, medieval men and women went to a bathhouse.

Picture a vast cellar, an undercroft with broad columns supporting the building, or multiple buildings, up above. The ceiling is low and groined and there are no windows. Iron chandeliers or candle stands, rusted to a mellow brown, bear numerous fat, white wax candles giving off a scent of honey. At one end of the room is a huge hearth hung with several cauldrons, each giving off a different perfume: attar of rose, mossy vetiver, musk or the haunting sweet aroma of civet (refined from the chokingly foul odor of the civet cat’s spray to make one of the loveliest of perfumes). The atmosphere in the low, dim room is dense with mists and laden with seductive aromas.

Arranged in aisles between the sturdy columns are curtained booths, their drapes hung from tall stands to provide total privacy—or, for parties of a racy nature, the curtains could be drawn back. Within each booth is a standing rack for clothing, a small table equipped with fruit, sweets, a carafe of wine and goblets, and soaps, oils, and strigils (which we will discuss below).

The central feature of the booth is, of course, the tub, made of wood like a huge bucket and equipped with seats inside so that the bathers may be immersed up to their necks when sitting. A friend of mine recently bought just such a tub from Russia, where apparently such bathing has continued in some places, sans plumbing, to this day. Such a tub will accommodate at least two people.

If this sounds a bit like the modern “hot tub” and the pleasures of the “fast set” in places like Las Vegas, you’ve got it about right. While such bathhouses were where one went to seriously wash, they were also popular with married couples with sensual tastes, were notorious trysting places for clandestine lovers, and were a favored workplace for courtesans.

Priests and street corner preaching monks inveighed against them as halls of sin and depravity, and seem to have succeeded in reducing their presence until their reincarnation (with plumbing in place of hot and cold running servants) in modern times. Most illustrations from medieval manuscripts disapprovingly depict the bathhouse of the brothel variety.

What of bathing for health? Spas developed all over the Roman empire, wherever there were hot springs and waters with minerals thought to heal or restore health and vitality. Many of these spas have never been out of business since Roman times. Probably everyone knows of Bath and its Pump Room, made the height of fashion by Beau Nash in the mid-18th century. So I’m going to describe a somewhat less grand, and more close to ancient usage, spa—that of Dax, in England’s medieval dukedom of Gascony in southwestern France.

In medieval times Dax was especially busy, as it was located on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella. Hence, it was richly supplied with jewelers’ shops to make settings for the seashells which were the proud souvenirs of anyone who had reached Compostella.

Today the elegant shops lining Dax’s main streets offer a wonderful array of toys for grannies to bring back to their grandchildren and the most beautiful candy shops perhaps in the world—row after row of footed crystal dishes heaped with chocolates wrapped in gold foil, each variety labeled with a tiny reproduction of a painting by Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, etc. Dax, as it always has been, is a place for the rich and elderly to recover, indulge themselves, and think pleasantly of those back home.

And the bathing there? The bathers, monkishly sandaled and bundled in hooded white robes as they always have been, hurry through the streets to the bath. Which could hardly be more different from the undercroft bathhouse.

Along the main street is a marble trough the rear wall of which has a row of Roman bronze lion heads with open mouths, each spewing a stream of hot water. Above the wall of these small but magnificent public spigots rise the weathered columns of the Roman bath, at the street front of a rectangular, roofless, temple-like structure.

Where the floor of this temple of health would be is the pool, steaming with water from natural hot springs. A crowd of bathers, immersed amid the wreathing steam, soak in hopes of curing everything from rheumatism to varicose veins. Pilgrims too are still there, soaking their blistered feet after their trudge across the Pyrenees and back again.

Strigils? I mentioned that soap was a Spanish invention of the mid-thirteenth century, so it was probably available at Dax very soon after its first appearance in Spain.

But how did people wash before that? They rubbed themselves with scented oils and then scraped off the oils, dirt, and shedding skin with a strigil, which looks rather like a marriage of an old-fashioned straight razor with a butter knife—with the sharpness of the latter. The heat of the bath caused pores to open, helping to expel dirt, and the strigil scraped it away, leaving the skin smooth, clean, oiled and scented.

This was how people bathed in ancient Rome, this was how they bathed in Europe—until the invention of soap, in Spain, which may or may not be an improvement when dry skin is taken into consideration. However, the new Spanish luxury took over and made the strigil obsolete.

Other means of hygiene associated with Spain were not so universally embraced. Gaius Valerius Catullus, in about 50 BC, pokes a jibe at a Spanish customs of cleanliness in a poem addressed to Egnatius, a young Iberian gentleman overly given to flashing his brilliant smile. Catullus claims he would not be offended by such smiles from people of any of a number of other nationalities, but Egnatius is a Spaniard, and in Spain, according to Catullus, bright, clean teeth were achieved through the use of one’s urine. If this seems shocking, we might take note that synthetic urine (urea) is an ingredient in many modern compounds. No doubt the synthetic variety is to be preferred.

Cleanliness has meant different things to different peoples at different times. It has always been considered a virtue, in whatever form was current, except of course when it was pursued with excessive sensual gusto. Then it could be a sin. The spa has two-thousand years of history as a treat for the rich and a hope for the sick. And lavender still scents some of our laundry detergents.

Boundaries: Medieval Women in Medieval Garde
ns

by Judith Arnopp

M
ost of my novels feature at least one scene with a woman in a medieval garden. It may not be a key moment in the book but I like to illustrate how intricately linked high status women were to their gardens.

While I was at university I wrote a paper tracing the evolution of the medieval garden motif from its biblical roots through medieval art and on to Chaucer’s development of the garden as a literary device.

The ideal of the garden was initially evoked in King Solomon’s
Song of Songs,
and it is there that we see the first links between the enclosed garden and womanhood. The tradition slowly expanded to incorporate the story of the Fall from Paradise and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, until the motif expanded into secular love poetry.

Medieval literature depicts noblemen striding about the world, galloping into battle in the service of the king, embarking upon arduous pilgrimage and living and breathing upon a vastly dangerous, stimulating stage. These men are shown to be invincible, self-assured, and in control, and there were few limits placed upon them.

The women in this literature are portrayed very differently; they rarely travel, they never fight and are usually to be found within the vicinity of the castle walls. Their role is to marry, provide heirs, and be an asset to their husband. Life for most medieval woman was closeted; we see them safe within the walls of the castle, sewing, strumming musical instruments, listening to minstrels’ songs or to tales of courtly-love.

The favoured place for these activities was the garden, and many manuscripts illustrate this. We see women sitting among the flowerbeds, sometimes planting and maintaining the gardens or, more often, we find them in a lovers’ tryst. Other times they are shown sitting in the shade of a tree listening to a minstrel’s tales and, paradoxically, the stories they are listening to are of other women also dwelling within the safety of their own gardens.

But these fictional women were not always as ordinary as they seemed, and many of them faced complex difficulties. They were invariably highborn, young and fair, and most of them expressed a personal desire that, because they were subject to male authority, could not be fulfilled.

Chaucer managed to depict the plight of these women so empathetically that there can be little doubt that he was conscious of their predicament. Even when projecting patriarchal prejudices through the mouths of his male narrator, he managed not to indoctrinate but to reveal how flawed male expectations were.

In
The Merchant’s Tale,
May is married to a decrepit, selfish old man of higher status than herself. Her needs and wishes are not considered by anyone, and only the narrator takes the time to reflect upon what her reaction may have been to the consummation of her marriage. Her husband, Januarie, builds an idyllic garden in which to make love to her, and the following scenes are a horrific inversion of the story of Eden. The walls that enclose May in the pleasure garden lead her to make dramatic and hair-raising choices, but, instead of condemning her infidelity, Chaucer chooses to ultimately reward her with the “maisterie” that, according to the tale told by the Wife of Bath, all women desire.