The Calendar (18 page)

Neither Leo nor Charlemagne may have realized it at the time, but this crowning was not merely an act joining a desperately weak pope with a powerful patron. It also acknowledged and reinforced two enormous changes in Europe that would profoundly affect all aspects of life over the next several centuries, including the calendar and the science of time reckoning.

First was the consolidation and victory of the Catholics in finally eradicating virtually all other sects in the West, as all Christians fell in line behind their rules for everything from dating Easter and punishing heresy to when it was acceptable to have sex. The second was formalizing the rising new political and economic order in Europe we call feudalism. Though still unformed and incomplete when Leo placed the jewel-encrusted gold diadem on the long white hair of the Frankish king, the rough outline of the fiefs, duchies, baronies, and royal domains were then taking shape in a system that would dominate Europe for centuries--with the Church as an integral component, both as a huge feudal landowner and as a legitimizer of sovereigns who as a class would henceforth claim their right to rule was sanctioned by God.

In this way the princes of Europe and the pope essentially agreed to a pact that gave the Catholic Church authority over all religious matters--including most science--backed by the power of the princes and their gendarmes and armies. At the same time the Church provided the princes with a potent religious undergirding to support their authority; and an all-pervasive code of conduct that would comfort their subjects with its message of hope and redemption, while keeping them under tight control.

Obviously this ‘pact’ was another body blow to any scientific endeavour that might challenge a dogma purporting to know the truth in all matters, including time. It also meant that anyone who presumed to suggest reforming the Latin calendar would have to go to St Peter’s rather than to kings and princes--something no one dared attempt until Roger Bacon tried it four and a half centuries later.

If the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was illiterate and treated time as a game and timepieces as toys, then what did time mean to a farmer in the Rhine River valley in the year 800? What sort of calendar did, say, a weaver use in central France? Or a fisherman on the often drizzly coast of Bede’s Northumbria?

Little is known about commoners during a period when even chronicles and official records of kings and nobles are scarce. On a continent of illiterates barely getting by, most people seem to have spent their days hoeing fields, avoiding wild beasts, worrying about crops and the weather, burying the dead, celebrating marriages and local saint’s days, and telling stories around hearth fires during the long, cold, deadly winters. They lived, ate their meagre portions, bore children, repaired leaks in their thatch roofs, tried to avoid armies if they came into the area, took an excited peek at the lord or king if he came along their road, grudgingly paid taxes, attended mass, followed the orders of the lord’s foreman, and died, all in a continuous cycle of days and years that to them had no discernible past or future.

Most Europeans lived in isolated rural communities, ignorant of the wider world. For instance, archaeology reveals that most people in Britain lived in farmsteads either by themselves or in little clusters. The latter were not even real towns; they were more like settlements of wood-plank or sod huts thatched in straw. Few towns, in fact, existed, or would exist until later in the Middle Ages, when groups of farmers banded together to form villages, and local squires and lords gathered their peasants into communal-style systems for agriculture. Some lords were beginning to organize their large estates into reasonably efficient units, some worked by slaves and others by serfs. But the transition from the chaos of the barbarian era to true feudalism was barely underway.

In 800, cathedrals, castles and local administrative manors for kings and nobles were the most highly organized communities in western Europe. This is where craftsmen, tradesmen, servants and beggars congregated, though in small numbers since there was little work--or spare change--for these classes. Even a ‘city’ such as London--described by Bede as ‘an emporium of many peoples coming by land and sea’--was really just a larger than average cluster of fading Roman stone buildings, a small port, and a community that shipped a few slaves and possibly some wool in exchange for luxury items, metals and a scattering of other products from the continent that few could afford.

To us, the world of the farmer on the Rhine and the weaver in France would have been one of dust and foul smells and mostly unhealthy-looking people wearing crude wool tunics, leggings and loose-fitting leather shoes, or no shoes at all. During the day they worked from dawn to dusk in backbreaking manual labour when crops had to be planted, tended and harvested; in the off season they had less to do. At night they slept in straw-topped huts in compounds shared with farm animals and heated with fires and stones baked hot during cold winter days.

In Charlemagne’s time and throughout the Middle Ages, over half the children died before age five. Life expectancy was only 35 years. Farming methods were crude, with wooden hoes, sticks and little knowledge of fertilizer or systems of crop rotations. This meant famines were frequent and often deadly. Even in good times the diet was poor: barley with a few vegetables in gruel served daily with a piece of stale bread and an occasional slice of cheese or fruit. Epidemics raged across districts and kingdoms every few years. Between 540 and 600, six known plagues struck major Mediterranean cities in the East and West, wiping out many, many thousands of people. Most feared was smallpox, apparently first seen in Europe in 451 when Attila’s warriors became stricken before a coalition of Romans, Ostrogoths and Franks defeated his Huns in France at the crucial Battle of Catalaunian Fields. Russian folklore also warns about kissing the Pest Maiden, and those who knew the Bible lived in fear of the fourth horseman in the Book of Revelations, sitting on his ‘pale horse . . . and his name that sat on him was Death’.

Thieves and bandits ran amuck in 800, though there was little to steal outside the well-guarded estates, cathedrals and small walled towns. Poems and stories from that long-ago era tell of a great fear of wild animals; dark, haunting forests where no one dared venture; and imaginary beasts and devils with fiery eyes and horns. People were earthy and pragmatic, but in the absence of scientific explanations for why the sun rose and fell and countless other mysteries they were also highly credulous and susceptible to even the most ludicrous superstitions and rumours. In 810 a buzz spread across Frankland that an enemy of Charlemagne was poisoning cattle with a magic dust. Another rumour insisted that ‘cloud-borne ships’ manned by ‘aerial sailors’ were on their way to ravage the land. Even the sensible Bede off-handedly describes dozens of miracles occurring within living memory of his own time--such as the curing of the blind man by Augustine, the Archbishop of Canterbury, while meeting with the heretic Celts under the oak tree.

Few people in this world had a need for formal calendars. Like Hesiod’s Greeks and pastoral cultures around the globe, Europeans in the age of Charlemagne were primarily interested in predictable cycles and cues from nature. Chaucer, for instance, starts
The Canterbury Tales
with a calendric guide to the seasons and crops that Hesiod would have understood perfectly:

Whan that April with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engenred in the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye . . .
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

Anyone living in England during Chaucer’s age would have instantly understood the references to April as the time of ‘shoures soote’--’showers sweet’--and of ‘zephirus eek with his sweete breath’, referring to the west wind that blows sweetly after the ‘droghte’ of March. Indeed, Chaucer considers it vitally important to establish first in his reader’s mind the time of year when ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, though he evidently has little interest in the actual year or date beyond noting that this is April: the start of spring.

And why should he? He was writing for an overwhelmingly agricultural people closely connected to the soil, for whom time was more than anything a powerful constant: a progression of youth and old age, birth and death, and as always the rise and fall of the sun each day. Nothing symbolized this better than the medieval wheel of fortune that perpetually turned, with one’s lot sometimes up and sometimes down in a never-ending cycle. This great wheel of life represents the insecurity of an age when death and disaster lurked everywhere, and it explains to a large extent the mind-set of resignation about progress and change that deeply permeated this culture, caught in a constricting, repeating, seldom-altered circle of time.

Fused onto this world were the cycles and time schemes of the Church, the most obvious religious time marker being the weekly observance of Sunday, the day of rest and worship, which remains today the most constant time marker in a Christian’s religious life. Next came the regular progression of saints’ days. These saints came in two varieties: the major saints and apostles, whose days were marked by feasts and ceremonies, and the hundreds of lesser saints, whose days were marked by a reading of their lives in monasteries and perhaps a prayer by someone looking for a special favour connected to that saint’s cult.

By 800 the number of saints with their own day of remembrance and worship numbered in the many hundreds in some areas. Because Rome would not formalize the process of achieving sainthood until centuries later, the Northumbrians in Britain were essentially free to declare their own saints; so were the Lombards, Burgundians, Bavarians and Irish. They often became a matter of fierce local pride and identity, such as St Patrick in Ireland and St Andrew in Scotland. Some became potent national symbols as people began to think of themselves as Irish, French, Scottish and Basque.

During Charlemagne’s reign saints’ days were called ‘birthdays’
--genethlios
or
natalis
in Latin--which then meant simply ‘commemoration’, and which comes from the custom in pagan Rome of celebrating deified rulers on a particular day.* Typically a saint’s day fell on the date of his or her martyrdom. Complete lists of saints began appearing in the fourth century, describing in often gory detail their burnings, hackings, crucifixions, mutilations and drownings; the particulars of place and time; and the locations of a saint’s relics-- a fragment of bone, a tooth, or a swatch of hair. Many of these holy men and women became identified with some important attribute. St Nicholas became the patron saint of children and virgins; he was also revered by sailors before becoming the model for our St Nick, or Santa Claus. His day is 6 December. St Agnes’s day is on 21 January; she is still venerated by many Catholic women ‘for her chastity and purity’. And St Giles, a seventh-century bishop whose lameness has made him revered as the patron saint for anyone who is ill or disabled, has his day on I September.

* The actual word ‘birthday’ comes from an Old Norse word,
burdardagr
, and the German
geburtstag
.

People prayed to these and other saints for good crops, rain and healthy children almost as pagans once prayed to specific gods assigned to oversee agriculture or fertility. For many these cults offered an intimate faith tied to a real person whose holy life had given them special powers in heaven to intervene either directly in a person’s affairs or as a supplicant to God on that person’s behalf. In this way the calendar of the saints became both a progression of religious dates and festivals and a highly personal cycle of time in which cultists eagerly anticipated certain days, which they marked with gifts and prayers.

The major saints’ days became so well known and widely observed that many people used them in place of Caesar’s scheme of months and days. A farmer would tell his friends that he last roofed his hut not on 21 March, but on St Benedict’s day,* and he would remember that his second child was born on St Augustine’s day, not on 28 August. Likewise, travellers in the Middle Ages talked about arriving in Rome or Paris on the Feast of the Assumption or during the feast of St Stephen rather than on a numbered date. ‘He passed over the bar of Sanlucar on Sunday, the morning of Saint Lazarus, with great festivity,’ writes a chronicler of a sixteenth-century conquistador leaving Spain on a ship bound for the Americas. The Christian calendar of saints’ days and festivals was also used to name places. Florida ‘flowers’ in Spanish--was named after the day Juan Ponce de Leon arrived there in 1513, on the day of the Pascua Florida, the ‘feast of flowers’ to celebrate Easter.

* St Benedict’s day was changed to 11 July in 1969 to avoid Lent.

To remember all of these saints, monks and priests wrote poem-songs listing each one and why he or she was revered, which they memorized and frequently repeated. One of the earliest of these is a verse calendar of saints from Britain, the ‘Metrical Calendar of York’. Penned in the late eighth century, the same century Bede wrote his
History,
it contained the names of some 81 saints, many of them now so obscure that a line or two in this calendar poem is the only information about them that survives. Who, for example, is St Cletus? Or St Linus? One wonders whether over the centuries, as memories and details of these forgotten saints grew dim, the monks chanting their names even knew who they were:

At its beginning November shines with a multi-faceted jewel:
It gleams with the praise of All Saints.
Martin of Tours ascends the stars on the ides.
Thecla finished her life on the fifteenth kalends.
But Cecilia worthily died with glory on the tenth kalends.

A better and certainly more entertaining method for preserving dates and details about the saints evolved into a new literary form in Middle Ages: the martyrology, books that dated saints’ days and described details of their lives. Bede, for instance, wrote a classic martyrology with 114 entries, researched with his usual thoroughness. He also uses our modern system of assigning a number to each day of the month, rather than the kalends and ides used in the contemporaneous ‘Metrical Calendar of York’, yet another indication of the many different dating schemes then in use. A typical entry in Bede: