Medicine and Magic: what is the world?

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Ruth

We interact with our planet in so many ways, but most importantly, we have to interact with a bit of the physical world in our own corporeal nature. We have bodies, the world acts upon them, we become injured, sick, or old; we are distressed and want a change. What do we do? What is permissible, customary, and effective, and what is outlawed, neglected, and considered unimportant? It’s one of the core belief systems of any culture.

America is a descendant of Europe in important ways, but in some areas we find Europe’s medieval period as foreign as a remote place. Their attitudes to “how the world works” can puzzle us a lot. The medieval period was a time of growth and syncretism, in which an underlayer of pagan, earth-based beliefs were replaced by rituals connected to Heaven, not earth. Replaced by, but not entirely; the blend of the two shifted according to time and place, and we don’t know a lot about what most people in most places actually believed. Still, what little we know helps illumine the evolution of the modern viewpoint. As a writer, I am far from knowing everything that “we” (scholars in our time) know, but for some of this series I’ll draw on my book A Companion to Beowulf, while for other parts, I’ll turn to All Things Medieval.

The key questions in every culture: are we fated to whatever happens? If so, by whom, and why? What are we allowed to do against Fate? Who do we blame for misfortune? Can we change our circumstances? All of these answers shape what we do about medicine and magic, the two main ways people have tried to alter Fate.

The answers were different in pagan times, Christian medieval times, and modern ones. We have to start, of course, with getting a basic grasp of European pagan beliefs. Such a vast topic; and within it, I am only qualified to give a sketch of the beliefs of the Germanic invaders who pushed out the Gauls (the pagans best known by the Romans). Most pagan beliefs have a lot in common with each other, as compared to the ideological religions that came after them.

Tacitus described the new immigrant influx, giving the tribes names that we don’t recognize now, like “Ingvaeones.” He described who they were from a Roman point of view, sometimes exaggerating qualities that he wished the Romans would work on more (the way we might praise Chinese students for studying hard, overlooking most other traits in our wish to shame American kids). He’s still the best and earliest written source for who these people were as they took over Italy, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, France, and England.

They have become the primary populations by the time the Middle Ages period begins. We define this period by the Roman Empire’s being displaced by Germanic Goths and the Arab tribes’ sudden rising under the Companions of Mohammed. Left without Roman rule and faced with Arab invasions, the forest people had to adapt and unite, giving us Europe.

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Medieval international merchants

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Ruth

International merchants were, of course, the largest sales ventures. They sent representatives to the larger regional/national fairs, but their chief trading occurred elsewhere.

To go back to Charlemagne’s time, a group of Jewish merchants based around the Rhone River traveled the Silk Road regularly. They were called the Radhanites, though it’s unclear why; it might be a Persian term for “those who know the way.” It was through their influence, most likely, that the Khazars converted to Judaism. The Khazar Kingdom was approximately east of modern Ukraine, north of the Black Sea, and it served as one of their resting and trading points between France and India. The Radhanites carried lightweight, high-value things like gems, silk and spices from the east, and often conducted Slavic slaves to those eastern markets. When Sviatoslav of Kyiv destroyed the Khazar Khanate, the road became too dangerous for the Radhanites.

During a long middle period, eastern goods could only be traded at Mediterranean ports, from Muslim merchants who worked the Silk Road. The best way for those goods to travel northward was through the international fairs held in France. Caravans and wagons came overland, up through France, so the big international trade hub was not a port, but instead it was a collection of inland towns that were situated on rivers, midway between Italy and the wool-weaving powerhouse, Flanders. (When I say “overland,” I am including travel by inland river barges.)

The Counts of Champagne, at that time independent from France, nurtured their towns’ fairs by draining swamps and digging canals to make travel from Italy easier. The fairs had regular dates of operation, nearly 7 weeks each, around the year; the towns of Provins and Troyes had two fairs each, while two other towns had one. Whereas small regional fairs (like the goose fairs in England) lasted 3 days and used temporary lodgings, the Champagne Fairs became permanent fixtures with many wooden buildings that turned into international company headquarters. Each fair usually held its cloth market for a number of days, then its leather fair, then the market for “avoir du pois” goods, things sold by weight, opened. These included wax, salt, dye and other chemicals, grain, wine and spices.

Both Muslims and Jews were very active at these international fairs. Leather was imported from Spain (“cordovan” became a synonym for goat leather), and two different red dyes came materials located mainly in Spain. Jews still had a big advantage in international trade, perhaps with some ties lasting from the pre-1100 Radhanite merchants. Their major advantage was that they could travel without carrying large sums of cash, since they had family and business ties with other Jews all over Europe. They gave each other letters of credit, usually in Hebrew. A merchant in Provins might pay a large sum to the bearer of such a letter, and later get paid back by sending an agent with a similar letter to Genoa. This way, sums of gold remained local, guarded from piracy.

The big international fairs had dedicated buildings for currency exchange. During the early heyday of the fairs, counting was done on boards marked with columns, using chips or markers of colored wood that tallied the income. It was a sort of rough abacus. We’ve forgotten how it’s done, but we still call a wide shelf next to the point of sale a “counter.” By the late Middle Ages, all financial professionals had learned the Indian-Arabic numeral system’s columns and were keeping books with debit and credit entries. I don’t know how they calculated rates of currency exchange, but the first specialists worked out those principles right there in Champagne.

Needless to say, every action above a sneeze was also taxed. Eventually, an heiress in Champagne married the King of France, who greedily seized the golden goose and began to squeeze. Yes, the counts had received heavy taxes from the fairs, but they had kept within traditional boundaries that permitted profit. Under the new regime, the profit margin shrank, and the fairs quickly collapsed. Merchants began just selling their wholesale goods directly in cities like London. Ships, especially from Venice and the Baltic Sea, took over the task from the inland routes and canals. Ship-building increased rapidly, and Europe was set for the age of exploration.

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Medieval merchants and regional fairs

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Ruth

Medieval traveling salesmen, 2 of 3:

The middle range of traveling salesmen were merchants who worked within one region or nation, moving things farther than ordinary people could easily travel. They were not as limited by roads, since they could count on traveling to towns with reasonable accommodations.

Towns, manor lords, and any other powers that be tried to get the main roads fixed at key times. One of those key times would be when an annual fair was approaching. The story of the regional/national merchant is mainly the story of the fair cycles.

A fair was an annual event held on the same day every year; this day was defined by its dedicated saint. A church named for the saint usually had a festival, and its town a fair, on that day. Fairs didn’t have to be connected to the church’s saint, but it was a simple means of scheduling. In order to hold a fair, the sponsor needed a charter from the king. The charter essentially delegated authority to collect taxes and fees, and to hold criminal courts for and during the fair event. Fair charters were a cheap way for kings to reward knights without actually giving them anything, so they were quite popular and fairs proliferated.

The fair grounds were fenced so that entrance was controlled at a gate, where fees were collected. The fair had an executive and under his authority, a court that heard cases in rapid rotation as problems arose. Sales were taxed; the fair had a tax booth watching sharply. If my history essays could leave you with just one thing, it would be this: when you think of the Middle Ages in Europe, forget armor or bones thrown on the floor, and think instead: taxes, fees, and tolls. That is the true spirit of the age.

A regional fair had two purposes. Merchants from outside the region brought hard-to-find goods, and local people brought livestock. The merchants’ goods ranged among copper pots, bolts of cloth, glassware, leather, spices and various ready-made items like shoes. The local people, however, knew that at each fair, one kind of livestock was in demand. You could bring other animals, but the large-scale buyers came for the advertised animal, and these were brought in from distances and in large groups.

There were famous fairs for sheep, cattle, horses and geese, usually in the fall. Each fairground set up enclosures and tents for each livestock’s needs. It made an efficient system, since farmers/sellers made only one trip, even if it was a long one, and were guaranteed sales. Big-city butchers could send agents to bring a large flock of animals to a nearby field, to be kept as supply for the coming butchering season. Some of the fairs, such as the Horncastle Horse Fair, gradually had more fair days and eventually became permanent fixtures with year-round sales. (Now I have to tell you that I had the pleasure of googling the historical horse fair’s name, and coming up with a hit for my own book! Lazy sod that I am, not even reaching for it myself.)

The merchants who traveled among the goose, sheep and horse fairs probably used wagons (certainly carts) and brought in much larger amounts of things. Just like modern regional suppliers, they specialized in certain things: dye materials, gruit for ale, types of leather, pottery, and so on. Their lives would have been a good bit more comfortable than the small tinker’s life, and they retired to decent houses in their base-of-operations town.

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Medieval traveling tinkers and small merchants

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Ruth

Medieval traveling salesmen, 1st of 3:

Medieval merchants came in sizes small, medium and large. The small ones did the thankless work of bringing small, cheap things to rural and even remote villages. They were up against two obstacles: lack of cash in the hinterlands, and terrible roads.

Roman roads were still much used in the Middle Ages, but Rome had built roads between their forts, and settlements had grown well beyond those limited places. In general, a road was a place where grass did not grow because feet and wheels trampled it. If many people passed, it was wide enough for a wagon; it might be wide enough for two wagons to pass. If so, it was rutted and generally awful.

Roads less traveled might support a two-wheeled cart pulled by one ox or horse. They were rutted and the cart might have to go around holes, along the edge of woods or fields, to get through. One axle and one draft animal was more maneuverable than the two-axle wagon we assume. Most carts were of the one-axle type, pretty much everywhere, in country and town. But they carried less freight than a real wagon, so right there, our traveling salesman’s capacity is limited.

Rural roads were no more than a path leading over any sort of terrain. Bridges could be no more than two logs in some places, and even a one-axle cart could not cross. So for reaching the remotest places, a salesman had to use a string of donkeys with baskets. When we picture a merchant arriving in deeply rural places, that is what we should see: a man on foot, leading two donkeys with wicker panniers strapped to both sides.

The second problem he had was that most rural villagers had little cash. His sales were probably trades for other goods. Little written record exists, so we have to reconstruct guesses based on models that lasted for centuries. One of the chief trade goods was anything made of tin. Tin was an easy metal to work with, and products made of tin were relatively light. This is why one type of traveling salesman has always been the Tinker.

People in the outlying places had to trade for tin. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book (1800s America), a tinker trades for wool and linen rags by the pound, which he’ll later sell to paper mills. Rags became a trade item in the very late Middle Ages, but it’s more likely that the tinker filled his panniers with skeins of wool thread. His essential service was to collect spun wool from the outlying villages, carrying it to market towns for them. At that later point of sale, he finally received cash. There may have been other portable goods, such as hard-to-find herbs; we don’t know.

Traveling merchants of this type probably tried to keep a predictable schedule so that people could have their skeins ready for him. But his travel was rough, walking on hill paths with donkeys, and he probably could not keep a strict circuit. His wares would vary, and what he received in payment might vary as well. It was a hard life, but until the plague began to winnow the numbers, there were many decades and even centuries when having any firm role in the economy was reason to thank the saints.

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Medieval traveling lives: masons

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Ruth

This fits into the Medieval Cycle of Life series, after the traveling minstrel.

Today’s “Masonic Lodge” has no direct connection to the actual Freemasons of the Middle Ages, but some of the traits and tropes we associate with them, like secret handshakes and arcane knowledge only for initiates, were in fact true of the real masonry guild. Their craft was different from all others because it depended on being practiced over a large territory, and with guild members working in relative isolation. While a town guild could keep its trade secrets within a guild hall, the masons needed a way to keep secrets while traveling far and mixing with strangers.

There were three kinds of masons (though probably those three can be subdivided into many smaller parts): rough masons, freemasons, and master masons. Rough masons were stonecutters who worked in quarries, so they could be more like a normal guild whose members worked together. Rough masons could still cut stones with precision, so that ashlar blocks could be sent far away on barges and still fit together easily on site.

Freemasons could do rough-cutting, but in addition, they did decorative carving. The best freemasons are responsible for gargoyles, statues, and stone tracery that looks like granite or marble lace. Some of these went on to train as master masons, whose profession evolved into architecture.

The master mason acted as general contractor and architect. He planned a cathedral or castle, drawing plans in a special coded way that gave precise measurements for blocks that might build a corner tower with a spiral stair, ceiling arches, or buttresses. The drawings went to the quarry, where freemasons interpreted them to draw life-size models of the blocks on wide, lightly-plastered floors that acted as huge chalkboards. Carpenters cut wooden forms from these drawings, and the forms showed both types of stone-cutting masons how to proceed.

The master mason stayed on the construction site. He was responsible for choosing when tree trunks needed to be pounded into soft ground to make a better foundation. He laid out the site with pegs and strings, trying to make the corners square and oversaw digging. When the ashlar blocks began arriving, he oversaw scaffolding and foot-powered cranes. He probably did little or none of the cutting and mortaring himself, but in his training years, he had done all of these jobs.

Master masons were the most elite craftsmen of the time. In order to be well-trained, they had to work on many construction sites and in many quarries. Their art depended on exchanging information with other freemasons. A high-stakes building craft that knew only the customs of a region was limited to making the same mistakes again, so they traveled to different regions. That’s why the Freemasons Guild was dependent on secrecy and initiation. I don’t know that they literally had a secret handshake, but they had something like it, you can be sure.

Castles usually took about 5 years to build, though with money poured into the project, they could be done faster (it would mean hiring vast teams of men for every stage of the work). Some masons were hired to build a series of castles, so that most of their later career was spent in one kingdom. One famous mason, Master James, came from Savoy (foothills of Switzerland) but oversaw or otherwise contributed to many of Edward I’s castles in Wales.

The masons were specially hard-hit by the plague in 1350. Their craft never recovered; too many of the few elite masters had perished. Buildings that were completed after the plague are often notably different in their stonework of the later years.

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Medieval craftsman’s wife

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Ruth

The life of a medieval woman in town is closer to our modern ideas than the other pathways (such as the castle lady or peasant’s wife).  This isn’t coincidental, since modern life developed from the roots of those medieval towns. The towns created and steered progress.

Most women in a town were related to craftsmen, since the town existed as a craft hub. A typical town woman was born into a craftsman’s family and grew up in the rooms above his shop. She learned the rhythm of the craft from an early age and may have been helping in some parts of its work during her childhood. This would vary with the work, of course.

An only child inherited the business, so she always married within the trade. The sisters of a boy who inherited the shop often married among his friends who were probably in the same trade, since tradesmen clustered together in a town. If a girl married outside the trade, it may have been through family connections.

The wife of a craftsman had more cash running through her hands than most medieval women, and she bought far more of her things than rural women did. She was not under pressure to make her own cloth, but she still sewed the clothes her family needed, especially the children’s. She may have had a cook to help her, but she still probably stirred up porridge and brewet. She probably had at least one maid to help sew; this girl was usually someone in from the country, looking for opportunity.

A number of women in town maintained their own small businesses. Towns in northern Europe did a lot of wool and linen fabric processing; there were dyers, weavers, and fullers as separate crafts. All of the spinning, and some of the sewing, was done by women at home. Women in town were perfectly positioned to spin wool on consignment from a dyer. The spinning wheel hadn’t been invented yet, so they were spinning with distaff and drop spindle.

The other ever-present women’s small business was brewing ale. Typical ale lasted only about five days until it was sour. An ale-wife only needed to invest in copper tubs and some pitchers, assuming she knew how to brew. The brewing process took a few days, and then her fresh ale could be sold from a side door. Customers lived on the same block and brought their own pitchers to carry the drink home. Ale-wives often bought from each other on the days when their own ale was not ready, so that every home had fresh ale on hand.

Some crafts cried out for a related business on the side. Most obviously, a butcher created heaps of cast-off but edible materials. Towns had cook shops that sold ready-cooked food, and it’s likely that at least some of the meat-pie shops were run by butchers’ wives. (Meat-pies were where most of the really scrappy bits were hidden.) Tailors had scraps of cloth that could be made up into small articles like caps and wallets; a tailor’s business also lent an opportunity for a wife to make straps and belts with tablet-weaving.

There was one other intriguing business that was usually given to a town widow. Someone needed to keep the official weights and measures, charging a fee when someone needed to check their guild’s or business’s weights against the official ones. It was an easy task for a widow, but a nuisance for any man trying to run a real business.

Craftsman’s wives had much more opportunity to make friends than women in the country or manor. We can picture a craftsman’s wife knowing most of the people in her parish church, helping with parish and guild charity projects, and having friends in most houses nearby. Our word “gossip” was originally the medieval name for a woman’s female friend, and it gradually came to mean, instead, the type of chat the friends were able to have in their few spare minutes at the town pump, baker, or churchyard.

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Christine de Pizan

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Ruth

Around 1400, the most famous woman author was Christine de Pizan (or Pisan, both short for Pizzano, south of Bologna, Italy). Christine spent her life at the French court, originally moving there as an infant when her father was hired as the court physician. She spoke—and wrote—in medieval French, not Latin.

Fifty years earlier, the most disruptive event of its era had taken place: the first emergence of the plague now known as the Black Death. King Charles V, who hired Doctor de Pizan, had been a 12 year old entering an arranged marriage during 1350, the year the plague struck so hard in northern Europe. His marriage had been private because public ceremonies were too dangerous, and the prince himself may have suffered a bout of the plague and then recovered. The plague came back ten years later, carrying off two of his three babies. A few years after that, Doctor de Pizan, also a survivor of the plagues, came to Paris.

The plague visitations began a period of rapid social change. Education broke down for a while, probably leading to more writing and publishing in the “vulgar” tongues of medieval English, French and German. Peasants, legally tied to the land, could earn much more in the depopulated economy, so they began uprisings to demand change. The church had to change; people who are keenly aware of death don’t want a perfunctory religion. As feudalism broke down, so did some traditional social roles. Christine, raised at court during this period, helped to push forward a re-examination of women’s identity.

Christine was almost certainly educated at home; we don’t know the extent of her learning, except that she was very literate. She was married at 15 to the king’s secretary, but he died (probably of the plague) when she was 25. She should have been provided for, but her husband’s money got tied up in a lawsuit and never arrived. Christine’s father was probably gone by then, so the whole de Pizan family depended on her next actions.

Christine began writing love ballads; she knew many noblemen and women, and they liked her work and commissioned her to write love ballads specifically for them. By 1399, she was fully supporting her family with prolific poetry output.

Christine had also been thinking a lot, and she did not like the beliefs about women portrayed in the literature of the previous century. Since 1275, the most popular book had been Le Roman de la Rose, the Romance (or Novel) of the Rose. The Rose stood for women’s sexuality, and the work was essentially satirical. It took “courtly love,” the anti-marriage love concept of the troubadors, as truth about human nature. It portrayed women as deeply sensuous, manipulative, and cold. Marriage was a trap.

Christine wrote a letter to the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson. Gerson, son of a peasant family, was trying to rewrite theology for the new, more challenging time. She appealed to Gerson to agree with her that the Roman de la Rose was slandering women, who could be virtuous, rational humans. Their correspondence caught the attention of others, and eventually the letters (in verse) were collected as first one book, then a second.

Christine had a powerful patroness in mind. Isabeau, Queen of France, was ruling as regent after her husband developed paranoid schizophrenia. Isabeau’s political enemies used the “courtly love” tropes to attack her character. They said her dresses were too revealing and they claimed she was sleeping around the court. Christine de Pizan’s defense of women as basically human, rather than basically wicked, pleased Isabeau.

Christine wrote some long poems about women, writing about an imaginary City of Ladies. She argued that women need to sharpen their rhetorical skills to make peace among themselves and between men. Her last published work, written when she was 65, was a formal praise of Joan of Arc: God had chosen to use a woman to deliver the nation. She probably died soon after, around 1430, just as the Italian Renaissance prepared the way for even more radical ideas.

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Heloise d’Argenteuil, an educated medieval woman

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Ruth

Following on my profile of the life of a male university graduate, I want to profile two highly educated women of the Middle Ages, whose lives turned out quite differently. First, since I mentioned her yesterday, Heloise d’Argenteuil. What we know about Heloise is fairly limited.

We know her story mainly because many years after Peter Abelard’s fall from grace, he felt drawn to tell his sad story to a fellow Abbot who also had a tragic life. His letter to Philintus got passed on to someone who still had contact with Heloise. Heloise, agitated and now having his current address, wrote to him; they exchanged five letters. (link to all of these letters)

We don’t know what her family was like; a line in her letters suggests that she was middle-class at most. She was probably an orphan; she may have been an oblate child who chose not to take orders. She grew up at a convent in Argenteuil, and from an early age proved a brilliant scholar. They taught her Latin and Greek; she also learned Hebrew. It’s not clear to me whether convents had Hebrew scholars at that time; I’d like to construct a back story in which Heloise begged her nearest relative, Canon Fulbert, to take her to Paris where she could study with Jewish Hebrew scholars for a while. We do know that she was living with Canon Fulbert when the known story begins.

We also don’t know how old she was. We assume she was very young, but on the other side, she was a famous scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which takes time. There’s one line in a letter that hints she may have been older than we assume. She was somewhere between 18 and 28.

Heloise wanted to continue her education, but she could not enroll at the University of Paris in the 1100s. Peter Abelard, Paris’s most famous teacher of philosophy, met her. After years of scholarly celibacy, he suddenly wanted this particular woman. He asked Canon Fulbert if he could stay in his house and tutor  niece Heloise in the remaining university subjects such as philosophy and medicine.

Heloise was an unusually strong-willed, free-thinking woman. She had turned away any offers of marriage; in my fictional back-story, she also turned down taking orders in the convent. She wanted to live as an independent adult, reading and living as she wished. It’s clear that although she loved Abelard passionately, the initiative to start a sexual relationship was his. Since he was living in the same house, he had plenty of opportunities. In her first letter to him, she recalls that they were quite innovative in their lovemaking. Abelard dropped celibacy in favor of aggressive sensuality.

Abelard lost interest in his former career and began writing so many love poems that soon the entire city was talking about them. Canon Fulbert found out and kicked him out. Abelard began trying to bribe her servants to get word to Heloise to run away with him. Finally, the singing teacher took the bribe, and Heloise managed to tell Abelard she was pregnant. He took her away to his sister’s house in Brittany.

Heloise gave birth to a son, and she became the forerunner of all those Hollywood celebs who call their kids Moonbeam. She named her son Astrolabe, which was the new technology device. The name was every bit as weird as it sounds. Astrolabe lived out his life in Brittany, probably; little is known. (He never knew his mother, but it’s possible that he met his father since he was living with his paternal aunt.)

Heloise was set against marriage still. She declared that she was proud to be his whore! But Abelard married her to placate Fulbert. Then he had a problem: his career required the marriage to be kept secret. He placed Heloise temporarily at the convent where she’d grown up, though apparently he still not only visited her but had sex on the table that was in the visit room. Fulbert believed that he had only married her to cast her off, and now he was truly furious. He paid a gang of thugs to break into Abelard’s rented room and castrate him (without benefit of actual surgery). Abelard survived.

Now Abelard did a cowardly thing. Heloise promised to be his true wife, but he was jealous, thinking “she loved sex so much, surely she’ll eventually do it with someone else.” So he ordered her, as a husband, to take convent orders right there in front of him. Then he left. He himself entered monastic orders. Eventually he got someone to create a convent just for Heloise to be Abbess, so she was provided for.

When Heloise got Abelard’s address after many years, she wrote to him with a broken heart still full of love, begging him to come see her, as they were still husband and wife. He refused, and he now disavowed their former love, saying he’d only been after her body. Heloise gradually calmed down, and in her letters, she mainly asked him to explain salvation and God’s love to her. She had always been an intellectual believer, and she had no devotional love to carry her through this forced vocation. Their letters became a dialogue on faith, and then they fell silent.

When Heloise died, 20 years after Peter Abelard, she was buried next to him. Later they were given a joint tomb at Pere Lachaise.

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Early medieval ladies

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Ruth

This post is a follow-up to an earlier one about the lives of castle ladies.

Prior to 1100, medieval ladies didn’t have castles, they had halls. There was one key difference that completely shaped the lady’s life. That is, instead of stone walls and moats, they had only the defense of loyal fighters. The walls were human.

In those days, realms were much smaller so there were many kings in northern Europe. A poem like Beowulf doesn’t bother distinguishing between one kind of lord and another; they are in command of a hall, a tribe, and many men: that’s all that matters. That’s a lord. His lady was a queen (even the word has changed little with time).

One of the key reasons that medieval lords married only among the aristocracy is that the queen’s job required years of training, and that training was only to be found in a queen’s household. Of course there were other reasons, such as making alliances with another tribe, but those reasons didn’t always work out well.

Girls in a ruling household were raised to know that someday they would marry another ruling lord, and from the first day they arrived in the new household, they had to be prepared for the role. Perhaps as young as 14 or 15, they would be handed a ring of keys. Each key fitted the lock of a storage chest, and all of the chests had daily uses. The most important one held the lord’s treasure, and yes, she had the key.

The treasure was loot that came in on raids. In a pre-coin society, silver rings were the “coin” of trade, but they were also trophies to be handed out in public. The lord could do this, but it was really the queen’s job. During a feast, she would make speeches and hand out treasure, honoring men who had done some feat for the ruler. Receiving honor this way was the highest possible value for men in the tribe.

The queen’s job was to keep the peace among the men. She was to watch for jealousy and try to placate it with gifts and honor. She could not allow private dislikes of her own to interfere. She was in an especially tight place if a powerful warrior made sexual advances on her, since she probably needed to keep that information very private. If her lord felt the need to punish the man, he had lost a valuable ally and perhaps made a fatal enemy. A former insider enemy was always the worst kind.

When the lord had gone away to war, or even just on a few days’ hunt, the queen was responsible for defending the hall. Some queens led desperate last stands, fending off attackers and fire. Any decisions she made during the defense were final, as though the lord had made them.

There’s a great story about an English Saxon queen in approx. the 500s, before they had converted to Christianity. She was the queen/princess of her own tribe, not yet married; she made a marriage agreement with a teenage prince of the Franks (on the continent). Gifts had been exchanged, which made it legally binding, but they had never seen each other. His political situation shifted, and he was pressured to marry a different princess on the continent. When the English princess heard of it, she was not willing to just forget the gift agreement. She had a brother who raised a war band and crossed the channel to pursue the young Frank. They captured him alive and tied him up until she could arrive in person (she may have been right there with the war band). She addressed the teenage boy, saying, “What cause did you have to dislike me? Why did you betray me? Now revoke this second alliance and come back to me.” He did. Procopius, the source of the story, says they were married and lived on in a reasonably normal way.

The young queen knew that it was extremely important to force an outside tribe to honor an agreement. If she had signaled weakness, they could have been attacked by others.

One last important task for the queen: keeping secrets. Loose lips sink ships. The queen was taught from girlhood never to complain or share confidences. A wrong word from her could sink the tribe, since she knew exactly how much treasure was in the chest, and who had shouted angry words at her lord in private.

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Medieval law school in England

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Ruth

This entry fits into the “Medieval Cycle of Life” series first posted in January and February of 2013. It belongs in the set of entries that describe the growth of the medieval university: Beginning University, Living at A College, Notes on University Life

Most landowners owned many different types of property; they chose to live on one or two of them, but their income came from all of them. Every time a man made his will, he had to make tough choices about which properties stayed with the oldest son. A family’s income was based on a collection of farms, fields and houses that might be claimed by other family members. Lawsuits among relatives and disputes over someone’s right to sell land were very common. These disputes could last for years and bridge over generations.

Landowners were wise to make sure that their sons were educated in law. Often, the point wasn’t to become a lawyer as a profession. Rather, it was to use the law to defend the family’s property. As time went on, hundreds of wealthy families’ sons went to the city to learn.

Universities taught canon law, but priests were forbidden to teach secular law after 1200. A student began at a college, studying canon law (which was very important for family law). Where was he to learn practical law?

Legal practices changed dramatically between the 1200s and 1400s. In most of the medieval period, royal courts in England traveled around the provinces. These temporary moving courts were called “eyres.” The king himself moved in a circuit, through his realm and among his residences. But the king himself didn’t hear most cases; instead, he had magistrates among his officials, and they handled most of it. This is basically the reason we have a double meaning for “court.” It’s the group of people around a king, and it’s also the place where a judge hears cases. In 1200, the two were the same.

After the Magna Carta stand-off, John’s son Henry III tried to reform the court system, but it wasn’t done in any thorough way. As the eyre system broke down with royal inconsistency and changing customs, more cases were heard in London, at the Royal Court at Westminster. I don’t know why, but King Henry III outlawed legal education within London’s city limits, in 1234.

Near Westminster, just outside the city limits, lawyers rented large houses in the town of Holborn. This provided a place for provincial lawyers to stay when “court” was in session. Their “inns” became known as the Inns of Court.

The first ones were associated with the Knights Templars, then the Knights Hospitallers after the Templars were banned. The Templars hired lawyers who lived nearby, and their complex of buildings became known as the Temple. They lived and worked there, and gradually they took students.

The two other Inns that emerged from the medieval mix of various rented houses are still the names of law schools in London: Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. Like medieval colleges, after starting just as residences, they became schools in their own right with libraries and classes.

Provincial students learned the manners of the court and city. They read case law and watched trials, learning how to argue and speak. They stayed as long as their families would support them, learning as much as the family needed. There was no graduation, and at that time, no bar exam. It’s possible that the “bar,” a wooden barrier to keep people back, was not even in use yet. Probably, there was no rule to prevent anyone from arguing before the judge; the question was only whether he’d do it badly.

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