Motte and Bailey

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Ruth

The first Norman castles were forts in which the invading Norman lords took up personal residence. The earliest design, made of earth and timber, set the pattern that all castles followed after: the motte and bailey.

The motte was the basic tower that stood on a natural or artificial hill. Its core design was to have two stories with living space in the top. The first floor stored supplies.

The bailey was the palisade fence enclosing an area large enough to keep space between it and the inner building, but small enough to see all at once and maintain in defense. It had to be lower than the motte, for visibility.

As the motte turned into a complex building, it was often known as the donjon or keep. The old wooden motte was pulled down in sections to be improved with more stone and stronger construction. Early keeps could be round or square. The round design is known as a “shell keep” and it was based on concentric circles with rooms built into the inner circles. But more often, these early castle keeps were square towers.

Ardres Castle was built in France, in 1117 (about two generations after the Norman Conquest of England). It had three stories and a complex inner structure. The lowest floor was for food storage, but the kitchen was on both the ground floor and the second floor. The lord’s family generally lived on the second floor, which had a Great Hall. The same level also had an infirmary and the baron’s bedroom, as well as rooms for the more important servants. On the third story, there were many rooms for the baron’s children, more servants, and watchmen. Staircases and corridors connected all of the floors so that people could live under one roof as a community.

Rochester Castle, now a ruin, was a masterpiece of its time. The square keep was 38 meters high, and it was located in one corner of a large bailey. It appears to have included a full 3 floors, like Ardres. Several wells were dug inside the keep and had shafts built so that people on top floors could dip buckets into the wells without going down. The interior is now hollow, since the floors themselves were made of wood that subsequently decayed, in the 17th century.

In 1068, William the Conqueror returned to England from a tour of Normandy, and he began building a motte and bailey castle at Cambridge. The Domesday Book (tax registry) says that 27 houses had to be demolished to make room for the new structure, which had a bailey covering 4 acres. I think it must have been highly unpopular with the townspeople.

In Canterbury, the building of a motte and bailey castle cost the king 32 houses: he traded off 21 of them for land, and 11 more were torn down to make the ditch. The motte is still there, standing as a small, steep hill in the middle of a garden. It’s now known as Dane John Hill, because an antiquary decided to introduce a name that sounded like Danes built it, instead of its real name, Donjon Hill—because it’s where the keep was.

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History of castles: 1066

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Ruth

Walled fortresses are nothing new in history. The key distinction between a town and a city in ancient times was whether it had a fortified wall around it. Many cities were walled, with protected gates and fighting posts at stations around the wall. In ancient times, there were also army outposts and forts that were walled and trenched.

What was new about European castles was that the castle was the primary home residence of a single family. Local rulers had always lived in big houses, or somewhat fortified houses, but they lived in the midst of their extended family and loyal followers. They didn’t perceive a constant need for armed protection. In 1066, this changed. The Normans, descendants of Danish Vikings, took over Anglo-Saxon England and imposed a large foreign aristocracy.

Early Norman forts were log stockades on hilltops; where there was no convenient hilltop, they built one. But within a few years, the local Norman barons began to build fortified houses of stone, and in this way the basic castle began to take shape.

King William’s chain of castles, beginning at the coast and reaching inward, is shown here.

It took several centuries for the castle way of life to spread into other parts of Europe. Castles were extremely expensive to build, and they were not easily modified once built. As regional wars and aristocratic rebellions occasionally saw castles destroyed, architects learned how to use even more care in castle construction. Each castle was built to withstand the assaults that had taken out the last castles.

Finally, with the rise of effective, permanent national governments, castles were statements of power and fashion. While they still offered minimal defensive fortification, nobody expected them to suffer any real tests. Bricks, glass windows and flower beds became the norm.

In this series, I’ll trace the development of the castle from its earliest to its later forms.

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Before castles: where did kings live?

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Ruth

What did Europe’s Dark Ages-era kings and lords live in? In the Castle series, I make the case that castles—fortified residences—were quintessentially Norman innovations for governing the rebellious newly-conquered English land. There seem to be two kinds of royal houses in the centuries before castles. The first model is the Hall, and the second is Charlemagne’s Palace at Aachen.

The Anglo-Saxon kings in Kent, Wessex and Norfolk seem to have lived in halls similar to the one described in Beowulf. This seems also to have been the model for the royal homes in Sweden and Denmark. The king, whether a petty king or an overlord to other kings, lived surrounded by his loyal retainers. His greatest personal need for a house was to put on large feasts. His wall against danger was the human wall of loyalty, and loyalty-bonding ceremonies took place at feasts.

So the basic “hall” model was the largest single-room structure they were able to build out of timber. They were big rectangles, sometimes bowed-out like ships’ sides. Some builders may have used curved-timber ship principles to hold up the roof. Evidence of this comes in the form of postholes and trenches for halls, which are visible as soil-hardness patterns in aerial surveys. What did they look like on the outside? We have only artists’ reconstructions, with lots of contention.

We know a little about the hall from stories like Beowulf: it had fire pits in the center, with smoke drifting up through the high ceiling and out through holes. At one end, there was a partition with the ruler’s private chamber behind it. Servants would have slept in the hall itself, and cooking was done in outbuildings due to the risk of fire. The main furniture of the hall consisted of tables and benches, since its whole purpose was to put on feasts. The benches and tables could also be used as beds; in Beowulf, they seem to get pillows and blankets out of chests and convert the main hall itself into a dormitory.

The other model is Charlemagne’s Palace in Aachen. The previous kings apparently moved from house to house around their territory, but Charlemagne wanted to do less traveling and have a stable capital. The only surviving building is its chapel, called the Palatine Chapel.

The palace seems to have been a series of large houses connected by covered galleries, so that during winter the family and servants could easily go from one end to the other. There was a large Council Hall that probably functioned the way the northern halls did: big gatherings and feasts. It was built of timber and brick, and probably the other buildings were, too.

Most notable were the inclusion of Roman baths, because Aachen has hot springs. The “thermae” complex covered many acres and included a very large swimming pool. Charlemagne himself was very fond of swimming and encouraged his children and lords to come in the pool.

The palace at Aachen had a wall around it, generally, but it was not fortified as such. Charlemagne, like other Germanic kings, lived surrounded by loyal retainers who constituted his real protection.

 

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The demographic bust centuries

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Ruth

I want to make an argument that may not be provable. I’m aware of what evidence there is, and isn’t, for it; I’m aware of how much work it would entail to actually track this down and provide solid evidence in book form. I don’t have the energy. But it’s still worth putting the idea out.

My argument is that between 1400 and 1950, there was constant keen awareness of sudden death, and that this shaped the ethical values of the time. We inherited these ethical values, but since 1950, a different set of forces has been pushing us in another direction. In our time, both views of the world are still active, and they view each other as, at base, an existential threat. From this comes the very real rancor of political discourse.

Of course people were aware of death before that period. Epidemics, famines and wars were always at hand. But the climate was warmer than average; sea passages were open, settlements moved upward, and harvest seasons were long. The main evidence that Europe had become relatively overpopulated is in its ability to absorb the first visitations of the plague without disruption of services. It took a few more cuts of the Grim Reaper to put real pressure on the labor structure.

The bubonic plague continued to revisit until about 1700. The Little Ice Age was at its peak around that time; North America was settled during the coldest period, when the harvests were shorter and the shoreline lower than it had been in pre-Columbian times. (And of course N.A. was depopulated due to a smallpox pandemic.) In Europe, the plague had destabilized the religious social order, so during the 1500s and 1600s, there were many religious wars as the universal rule of the Catholic church broke down.

To grossly oversimplify matters, life in Europe before the plague was relatively easy, but food was in short supply. After the plague, there was more food but life was harder. People were more actively worried about raising the next generation, but they were worried about spontaneous death, not about supplies running out. If a child could survive into adulthood, nobody doubted that he could find a place in the world. His life would be centered around storing summer food for the winter, and around chopping firewood, but there were plenty of trees and lots of land. Keeping babies alive seemed extremely important. We have some indirect evidence in that England passed its first harsh laws against infanticide in the early 1600s.

America was founded during the Little Ice Age’s demographic bust centuries. Its basic cultural values came from the expanding frontier. More people, in the form of babies or in the form of immigrants, could be accommodated. The next generation was needed to take care of those who grew sick or old. Children began working from an early age and grew up fast. De Tocqueville noted in 1830 that the average US birth rate seemed to be about six living children per woman, compared to a lower rate in Europe.

Since 1950, the climate has begun to be relatively warmer than it was during the settlement period. Growing seasons are longer, and hot-climate animals migrate northward. We’re reversing the Little Ice Age in many ways. We’ve also used political means to stop most wars; at the same time, we have eliminated many causes of infant mortality.

If you step back from the history you lived through, and look at it on a larger scale, it’s not that surprising that abortion was legalized about a generation after vaccinations became routine. There was no connection made at the time, but the people who brought about the changes were living in a demographic boom and were abolishing many other sources of death. A centuries-old ethic, which put the lives of newborn infants above all, seemed less relevant.

In today’s political culture wars, “conservatives” look to the past ethics in which all infant life is precious and there will always be enough food to go around as long as everyone learns to work hard. “Progressives” look into an unknown future and see overcrowding: the fish are dying, GMO crops may turn out to be toxic, the oceans will start flooding our cities. The last thing we need is a higher birth rate, they feel. In fact, a higher birth rate threatens the existing lives of adults. We already can’t find work for all of our young adults, now that the frontier is closed and manufacturing has moved to Asia.

And so the really hot-button emotional issue of our time is whether we should legally recognize marriages that, by definition, cannot produce babies. These marriages would provide companionship, sex and stability for existing adults, but would not add to the birth rate. They might help absorb some of the excess birth rate by adopting babies, but they would never add babies, by definition. I believe that at some level, people who are most in favor of same-sex marriage are also aware of overcrowding; if nothing else, you can see quickly that people believe and vote differently based on the relative population of their voting district. The split isn’t regional, it’s city vs. country, with the electoral battles taking place in the suburbs, who could swing either way.

The question I asked myself in 2011 was why people were reacting to fairly low-stakes political issues as though the stakes were extremely high. They were willing to dehumanize other people over disagreement, even when these other people had no more power than they did. My answer, as I finished writing about the Middle Ages, was that the Black Death gave birth to an era in which all new life was precious, while World War II gave birth to an era in which new lives threaten existing lives. That baby born in a slum or trailer might eat MY FOOD.

The health care debate underscores it again. If you haven’t read Ezekiel Emanuel’s Lancet paper on rationing scarce resources, you should. It’s a logical, fair look at how a society might assign scores to the value of life, and infant life scores lower than the life of a 30 year old who can work. This logic is wrong when you’re struggling to fill a bust with a younger generation; it’s pretty irrefutable when you have more than enough people already. We are moving into a Post-Plague world, where plague ethics don’t apply. And, of course, one that is again experiencing global climate shift and may yet see another pandemic to reset our values.

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Post-plague modern values

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Ruth

Although I’ve had difficulty keeping up the momentum of this long series on the medieval plague’s effect, I’m going to wrap it up with a short series on why I believe that we have lived in the plague’s world for 600 years, and why it’s ending. When I say “we,” I definitely mean industrialized, European-descent societies: the literal descendants of plague survivors, in most cases.

I believe that we all have an approximate sense of the ratio between “resources” and individual lives; economics may have a mathematical way to express it, I don’t know. But we can roughly “calculate” it based on our experiences. It comes from our experience of how much of everything there is to go around, and we use it to predict how likely we are to get a share. People who grow up in demographic “boom” generations learn to eat fast before the food is all gone, apply early to get the jump on other job seekers, and blend in. People in demographic “bust” generations don’t need to do those things. They can take risks and are more likely to still fall on their feet. They can walk into good-paying jobs and rent nice apartments at cut rates.

The pre-plague world was like a Boom generation. Most people never had quite enough to eat; competition for work was tight; houses couldn’t be built fast enough so they often lived in squalid overcrowded city tenements. The climate was generally warming, so for the few centuries before the plague they were consistently moving northward and upward in altitude, settling closer to tree lines. The post-plague world was more like a Bust generation. The world was growing colder and settlements were moving south and downward, but at the same time, fewer people were pressing into these new settlements. Empty buildings and low prices characterized the new economy.

People’s minds are calibrated by their sense of scarcity or plenty; this happens at a non-verbal level. It’s analogous to an individual’s “set point” of mood or weight; people as a group create “set points” of values based on their expectations of life. Boom people take fewer risks and make sure they’ve secured their share; bust people can be careless about security. Boom people feel like there may not be quite enough; bust people don’t worry. Boom people may feel, like the Mad Hatter, that there’s “no room” at the table. Bust people wave you over to the empty plates.

At a larger level, we’ve been seeing boom and bust values across the centuries. Next: what I mean by that.

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Social change after the plague: the occult

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Ruth

In the world after the plague, the occult had a much larger role. It isn’t hard to argue that pagan magic had never entirely stopped when Europe became officially Christian; but there is also no question that “black” magic, power unrelated to the holy power of the saints, was not in fashion.

After the massive death toll of the plague, people were much more aware of death and the afterlife. Art depicted death as gory. Although good-looking, clothed stone effigies still decorated aristocratic tombs, there was another trend for gory, worm-eaten, raggedy effigies. “Death” in art was often a skeleton, sometimes in a “Grim Reaper” black robe and sometimes naked. Death often had shreds of rotting flesh still attached to his bones, but he grinned merrily.

Some people sought to contact the spirits of the departed through seances. As their interest turned toward witches, those people with power to call up the dead, they also began to focus on other aspects of witchcraft. Perhaps the new loose morality played into things, too. Many more girls had babies out of wedlock now, and many of these were bitter about the men who had left them. People supposed that some of them put magic curses on the men, especially to shrink or remove their penises.

In past times, if they thought about magic, they envisioned men who had studied theology at university using their arcane knowledge to write and read books about spells. The new science of astrology, emerging like the astrolabe from Arabic texts, also played into the idea. Magicians used the power of the stars and names of demons to seek occult power.

But now, in the post-plague period, they envisioned women who used less exalted forms of magic to take personal and petty revenge. The magic had more in common with old pagan rites and herbal lore, less in common with university books and astrology.

It’s in this late medieval period that we begin to get records of church inquisitions about witches. Most of the medieval material on witches comes from the Cathar Inquisition; the southern French region had been conquered militarily and now was subject to boards of priests asking questions to find out if the heretical religion had really been stamped out. Many of the Cathar-region peasants reported that various neighbors were witches.

It was a sin, but not a crime, to be a witch. Witches were told to do penance for their sins. But it was a crime to harm someone whether by weapons or witchcraft, so if it could be “proven” that real harm had happened, a witch might be punished with the same punishment that a murderer would get: death. It wasn’t until the Renaissance time, with the Catholic church cracking down on heretical Reformers, that witchcraft trials became spectacles. The early victims of burning were not witches, after all, but preachers and Bible translators. A lot of what we think of as medieval about witches really came from the harsher Renaissance/Reformation times.

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Social change after the plague: personal religion

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Ruth

The earliest stages of the Protestant Reformation began in the years immediately after the plague. There was a widespread sense that the Church as an institution had let the people down. The Church had promised that if they were supported financially, the people could count on crucial spiritual support at the end of life. They could go about their daily lives without thinking too much about spirituality, knowing that the Church would have someone there at the end to usher their souls through death. Plague survivors felt pretty let down, having seen many people die without last rites of confession or even basic burial rites.

When someone we know very well has recently died, we tend to think about the meaning of life, death, and the possibility of an afterlife more frequently and intensely. Plague survivors were acutely aware that each day might be their last on earth, and they felt unsupported by the old deal with the Church. What if the meaning of life wasn’t to have a class that worked, a class that prayed, and a class that fought? What if everyone ought to be praying?

In the immediate years following the plague, guilds and non-guild groups founded burial and prayer societies. Members of these societies could count on a network outside of family and Church to make sure that the necessary end-of-life tasks got done. But the burial societies also began to emphasize personal prayer. They suggested the idea that each of us is responsible for our own holiness; having a nearby monastery being holy for us isn’t good enough.

It’s impossible to view the life of John Wycliffe outside the context of the plague. Wycliffe was a student at Oxford in the years immediately before the plague; clearly he survived, though little else is known. Beginning in the 1370s, his teachings became a focus of dissent. Like earlier monastic reform movements, he protested the Church’s worldly wealth. He also encouraged and sponsored uneducated, sometimes illiterate, lay preachers (Lollards) to go out to villages and spread the new message of personal holiness. Wycliffe’s greatest life project was to translate the New Testament from Latin into the Chaucerian English of his time. The first installments began to appear at the close of the Peasants’ Rebellion.

The Western Schism, when the cardinals’s attempt to impeach a mentally ill pope resulted in two popes at the same time, further eroded people’s confidence in the Church. At any time between 1378 and 1418, half of Europe was excommunicated by one of the popes (and the other half condemned by the alternative pope). Salvation through the official Church grew increasingly uncertain. Wycliffe’s writings went to the continent, where Jan Hus of Prague taught them publicly and ended up burnt at the stake.

The medieval world wasn’t ready for a full-scale reformation yet; it took another 100 years for the economy to modernize further so that they could support religious change. When it came, the Reformation definitely ended the medieval world. There were battles, massacres, and many incidents of property destruction; it was a traumatic process that society avoided for as long as possible. But the underlying concerns and attitudes began in the shadow of the plague.

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Social changes after the plague: hospitals

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Ruth

Before 1350, there were about three different models for hospitals. In Byzantine regions, the chief model was the municipal hospital operated in Constantinople. It was funded by tax money, and it actually had some surgery and active medical care in addition to charitable poverty-old age care. Italian cities ran municipal hospitals on the Byzantine model, often connected with their university medical schools. If you wanted good care when you were sick, your best bet was to get sick in Milan or Bologna.

Crusaders brought home this new idea, so the Byzantine model improved French, English and German hospitals. These hospitals tended to run on another model, the private-donor religious hospice. Often located in manor or town houses donated by the dying, they mainly cared for elderly poor people and orphans. Medical care was usually limited to heat, food, and rest, three things the poor did not have. Most hospitals took in orphans left by the dying or on a doorstep, and used the orphans as orderlies while giving them basic schooling. Private hospitals tended to have a charter that restricted them to certain issues, such as blind people, lepers, pregnant women, or the elderly. But they often took care of a number of different kinds of people, and their first priority was to make sure their patients attended Mass to pray for the souls of donors.

The third model was based on the infirmary of the Roman camp, and was chiefly followed in monasteries. One of the early monastic mandates had been to establish these infirmaries and make them available to travelers, as well as to monk residents. Monasteries used a lot of herbal medicine, in addition to food and rest. Crusaders also used this model when they copied the Byzantine one; the Order of St. John was originally a monastic order for taking care of sick pilgrims in Jerusalem.

The Black Death heavily disrupted the hospital system. First, they were simply swamped with sick people and had to decide how to manage the infectious epidemic. Second, they became swamped with orphans. A city hospital with a typical load of 20 orphans found itself with 200 and unable to feed them. Third, of course, their own nursing staff died as fast as anyone else, leaving them unable to maintain care.

Many small hospitals continued to exist in name, but they closed or combined with others. Some used their limited staff and funds to keep up the top priority: saying Mass for the souls of past donors. They had been not only care institutions but, as in modern times, also fundraising machines. Their donations patterns were thrown into chaos as businesses and families collapsed, but some continued to get money through land assets. Waste and fraud abounded.

The post-plague period saw a huge loss of faith in public institutions, including hospitals. Hospitals were audited and many closed; new foundations were started on more transparent principles. Private hospitals that could no longer afford to stay open deeded their houses to towns, who then had to determine how to fund them. Care for orphans, the elderly and disabled, and infectious disease victims were more rigorously separated. Donors began to found alms-houses specifically as retirement communities for the poor, with the obligation of perpetual prayer. Nobody could yet call the hospital system outside of Italy “organized,” but the Black Death nudged it in that direction.

 

 

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Social changes after the plague: education

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Ruth

The plague was so severe that it disrupted most ongoing institutions, including the ones that educated the youth. During the worst of it, schools closed as pupils died or were sent home. Masters and apprentices died. When it was over, each social circle had to find ways to get started again.

In England, one main purpose of school had been to teach French so that students could find work in the king’s service. Court still used French, and if it wasn’t used exclusively any more, it still remained as an employment requirement. After the plague, schools had to hire more teachers, and their hiring standards dropped due to the labor shortage. They had to settle for people who knew Latin-related subjects (grammar, history, literature) but could not speak French.

From this point on, the use of French at court dropped off sharply. It was already in decline; the new schools that did not teach it only accelerated the inevitable. Geoffrey Chaucer, born in 1343, was among the children who survived both the first and the second plague epidemics. He is among the first writers to use the English vernacular that was spoken in everyday London, instead of French. In the Canterbury Tales, written in the general era of the Peasants’ Rebellion, he points out that the Prioress could speak French, although not the French used at court. French always remained an important part of upper-class education, but it was increasingly detached from practical use at court, until in later times the focus shifted to Parisian French and travel.

University education changed after the plague, particularly for priests. The common people were dissatisfied with how the Church had carried out its duties, although they understood that some of the problem was that the priests had died in just as great numbers as the people had. Too many bodies had gone unburied, too many souls unforgiven. The normal way of becoming a priest in past centuries had been through an apprenticeship structure, but this was disrupted. The Church needed to crank out priests as rapidly as possible, without long training years. University education seemed the best way.

With increased awareness of impending death, many wealthy donors left property and money to endow colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. These colleges were residences for students, since the universities provided nothing but lectures. More colleges meant more financial aid and opportunities, and the number of educated priests rose rapidly. Some pre-plague priests could not read (although monks were always literate); after the plague, more of them had genuine educations. More later on other effects on religion.

The apprenticeship system was disrupted for other trades, but for the most part, enough masters and apprentices were left to keep up the basic knowledge. As we know, a lot of rural boys came to town to find apprenticeship slots, and the city populations rose rapidly. But there was one profession that never quite recovered.

Stonemasons had always been itinerant, by necessity. They had to move where the building was going on, and move again to the next project, instead of remaining based in one city like most craftsmen. There were ordinary stone carvers, but there were also highly-trained masons that we’d call architects. A very small number of architect masons planned and oversaw a large number of cathedrals and castles. A few elite masons worked internationally. Similarly, a small number of highly-trained freemasons cut most of the delicate granite tracery in Gothic cathedrals.

After the plague, only a few of these elite workmen were left. They were never able to transmit their knowledge adequately, so mason skill declined immediately after the plague. A few cathedrals that were partially finished had to be completed in simpler styles because only the second-tier workmen survived.

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Last outbreaks of the bubonic plague

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Ruth

For the record, bubonic plague was a major cause of death until the mid-17th century.

Seville had a devastating outbreak in 1647, followed by another, the last, in 1676. London’s last huge plague outbreak occurred between the two in Spain, in 1665.

We know a lot about London’s last visitation because the court official and diarist Samuel Pepys stayed in town and recorded what he saw around him. A century later, Daniel Defoe wrote a fictional account of what the plague had been like, A Journal of the Plague Year. London was never the same again, literally, since during the same time that the plague was ravaging and the wealthy were fleeing to their country homes to avoid it, fire destroyed much of the old medieval city. The oldest buildings in London generally date from the rebuilding effort begun after the fire.

The last remnants of folklore about the plague probably date from the final outbreaks. There’s the song “Ring around a rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” It seems to be talking about symptoms of bubos, the lymphatic swelling characteristic of the disease, and about the belief that smelling good air from flowers might ward off bad air of infection.

Bubonic Plague had a third major outbreak in the 19th century, when scientists could finally determine its cause: the Yersinia pestis bacterium, carried by members of the squirrel/groundhog family. The disease ravaged China and India, but did not create high mortality in Europe or the New World.

People can still die of it, but antibiotic treatment is now effective if it’s diagnosed in time. Get tested if you’re in close contact with or bitten by a squirrel, especially in the Western US.

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