All Things Medieval

There’s one last important category of medieval containers. Whereas other containers were defined by being watertight, stout, flexible or portable, containers for relics didn’t need any of these ordinary attributes. Instead, they were designed to contain, share and spread holiness.

Until the modern period, old things were not valued for historical information, and they were often not valued at all. But if they were ancient bits of bone, hair or any other item that had belonged to a holy person, that was a different matter. Historical importance was still irrelevant; our concept of displaying an antique exactly as we found it, or intact behind glass, was not their notion. They believed that the item contained holiness the way ale contained water. The container needed to preserve the relic, whatever it was, from physical decay while allowing worshipers to carry holiness away like a benevolent infection.

Not only that, but the container needed to stress as strongly as possible that the relic was being honored. A leaky barrel might allow ale to dribble away until none was left. A hole in a wallet might let your dinner fall out on the road. But a reliquary that wasn’t sufficiently honoring might suggest to the item’s original owner, now a saint in heaven, that the bone, hair or scrap was better off in another church. It might be stolen, with the saint’s blessing and assistance. Such vanishings were not uncommon!

Reliquaries were ornate, above all. Everything most precious had to be packed into the small space required to contain the relic. Some relics were large, like a skull. Others were extremely small, like a scrap of cloth, hair or bone that had been cut into pieces in order to share the holiness more widely. So some reliquaries were large boxes, while others could be as small as lockets or rings.

Reliquaries were made of the most expensive materials possible to their makers: if wood, then expensive wood, highly carved and covered with gold leaf or jewels. If possible, pure silver or gold, or perhaps carved ivory. Simple local jewels like amber or coral, definitely, but even better, imported jewels like emeralds and rubies.

Reliquaries could be, literally, lockets or rings. It was common for bishops to wear relics this way. Some crowns had relics embedded in them, so as objects, they were reliquaries already. The ancient crown of the Lombards is made of gold, but centered around a thin iron band that was supposedly made from an original nail of Jesus’ cross.

Box-shaped reliquaries were larger, and they were displayed in the cathedral or chapel for pilgrims. Some reliquaries told the story of the saint’s life, even by being shaped like the saint’s head (carved from wood, covered by gold leaf, painted). Scenes from the saint’s life, or miracles worked after the saint’s death, were painted on the sides of a reliquary box.

Reliquaries were reasonably secure containers for their holy items. Some thefts happened when a visiting pilgrim could persuade the keepers to open the reliquary and let him or her see the item. There are stories of desperate measures taken to steal all or part of the relic, including biting it.

As a practical precaution against theft, they often hung reliquaries from a wire running across the ceiling. It was a bit like hanging your hiking food to be safe from bears: the reliquaries had to be high enough that a man on another man’s shoulders couldn’t reach the wire, far enough out from the wall that a climber couldn’t stand on the nearest pillar’s decorations and reach out, and so on. Reliquaries that were not hung thus out of reach were often locked into a crypt with just a small window to allow the holiness to leak through.

So far, I’ve been talking about containers for food. But we do need containers for some other things, things that aren’t wet, things we won’t eat or cook. What did they use in medieval Europe to store “stuff” in general?

Let’s look first at what they typically stored. Most homes did not have books, musical instruments, or anything that we’d consider for hobby use. Some middle-class children had a few toys, and adults owned tools for spinning, sewing, gardening, and basic repairs. Some people owned board games or dice. Most people owned no more than two sets of clothing, but some owned more. Most people owned some blankets or winter coats, whether they were thick and adequate or not so much. Shoes were worn until they could not be repaired and then replaced, so shoes were not stored. Candles made of wax or tallow needed to be stored, being made or purchased in bulk.

So the typical medieval home needed to put away some winter gear during the summer, and keep a best coat or dress clean and safe. They needed some places to keep things like candles, things that did not perish but would be used within a few months. Some homes had pillows and extra blankets to store. Wealthy places, such as castles, manors and abbeys, always kept extra bedding for guests, as well as a much greater supply of things like candles. Grand houses that put on feasts needed to keep extra table linen for those occasions. (Middle-class families that might only put on a single wedding feast in their lifetime could rent such things.)

Medieval houses never had built-in storage the way modern homes do. Instead, large chests lined the walls of their chief (or only) rooms. We sometimes use chests like this, often called Hope Chests, but we depend on cardboard boxes and closets much more. In a medieval house, pretty much everything was stored in a chest. In Beowulf, servants take extra pillows and blankets out of chests, turning benches into beds.

Some herbs were known to discourage moths, but the first defense against losing all of your stored wool (or furs, if you were that posh) to worms was weekly cleaning. It was a routine chore to take out wool blankets and clothes and brush them thoroughly. This physically dislodged worms.

Chests must have ranged from very primitive ones made of rough boards to the painted, perhaps gilded, storage boxes of the rich. Not many medieval storage chests have survived, since wood could be repurposed in another generation—and never survived a house fire. Here are two storage chests; the second one is from an English church. (For more images, most of them from late or post-medieval, see this woodworker historical website.)

Most chests were locked. While one chest might hold supplies that the household would need to access frequently, most of them were for long-term holding. Everything had value, even woolen rags, so nothing could be left out to tempt visitors, poor relations or servants. It was even more important to have locks on smaller chests made for holding valuables. Caskets for valuables had to be made of very thick wood and were often reinforced with metal. They had to be too large and heavy to be hustled out under a coat, and too stoutly made to be easily split with a light ax. Getting into a casket without using the key was possible but it was not convenient; it would leave a telltale mess and make noise.

What might be stored in a locked casket? Right away, we’re not talking about working-class homes. Guild officers, merchants and aristocrats needed caskets to keep jewels, money and ceremonial items like silver cups or candlesticks. Aristocratic households whose ladies kept busy with silk embroidery probably kept their silk thread supplies in a locked casket, since it had pretty good street value to tempt thieving servants.

Caskets weren’t owned by the poor, so their construction was often ornate. The most ornate caskets were reliquaries, which I’ll consider separately. But even wooden caskets could be ornately carved. This one, pictured, may have held chess pieces, but it might have been for jewels, money, and any other valuables. Medieval decoration often depicted scenes from daily life: people playing, dancing, sewing, and working. Here is another ornately-carved casket.

next: medieval locks and keys

Baskets, of course, were the cheapest universal carrying container. We still use the standard English basket size that emerged from medieval measuring: the bushel.

Bushels started as the typical size that a merchant could load onto a pack mule. During most of the Middle Ages, Europe’s roads were barely good enough for wheeled vehicles to travel on. Two-wheeled carts could negotiate bad roads more easily than four-wheeled wagons. Horses and mules with packs could navigate any kind of road, including a track going through the hills. So while two-wheeled carts carried most goods in town, pack animals carried most goods out into the countryside and sometimes from town to town.

So the bushel didn’t start out as defined by so many pints, pecks, or pounds. It started out as a bushel: the right size to properly load on a mule’s pannier harness. Of course, merchants who purchased by the bushel wanted to standardize the size. During the medieval period, it was divided into gallons and pints. Each town had its standard bushel, probably made from copper or brass instead of basketweaving. As with other measures, by the end of the period, the king’s office of weights and measures had owned a royal bushel by which the legal volume was determined. When bushels of grain were measured out in the Port of London, the measuring team had leveling rods to make sure each bushel was exactly right, no more. (Merchants carried away the measured goods in their own basket-bushels.)

Four pecks were in a bushel, and so were eight gallons. These, too, had official volume measures in town. Eight bushels, together, made a “quarter,” though I’m not sure what the volume was a quarter of. It probably referred to the size of the two-wheeled cart used to move it around in town. One of the items sold by the quarter was charcoal.

Carts and wagons had standard sizes too, since they could be containers. It’s possible that “quarter” referred to the cart being one-quarter the size of a standard wagon. Wagons always required teams of oxen or horses to pull them. They were used to move the king’s furniture from manor to manor (some kings traveled almost constantly), and they were used for very large loads, like hay. Two-wheeled carts, on the other hand, could be pulled by a laborer or a single animal. Towns were filled with constant cart traffic as nearly every raw material was delivered this way.

I want to touch on measurement by length, although it’s off the subject of containers. The two important length measurements were for land and for cloth. Land was traditionally measured by how much a man with an ox could plow in one day. This measure, the acre, was divided into furlongs, which were envisioned as the strip that the plow made before it had to turn around and go back. It was something less than 1/8 of a modern mile, and the acre was defined as one furlong long, by 4 rods wide—the rod being 1/40th of a furlong. Square acres made no sense to medieval plowmen, since it was much more convenient to turn the ox and plow as seldom as possible.

Cloth measurement was highly local and regional, but since the highest volume of cloth was sold in the international fairs of Champagne, the Champagne measurements gradually became dominant. Even so, the measurements were very different from place to place. In Troyes, a bolt of cloth was 28 ells (the ell was roughly our yard, but it varied a lot). In Ypres, the bolt was only legal if it measured 29 ells. At Provins, they didn’t sell it by bolts at all, but by cords and lengths. A cord was 12 ells, and a length was 12 cords (144 ells).

The Champagne fairs also standardized the foot, since some materials were sold in much shorter lengths. Each fair had an official iron ruler with feet and inches–and the inches were also split into 12, each one called a line. Merchants at the fair were required to have wooden rulers that precisely matched the fair’s standard. (Every fair had its own justice system, too.) When sovereignty over Champagne came to the French crown, the king over-taxed the fairs and killed them entirely. They never got to work out a truly standard measurement of length.