Easter season

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Ruth

By the week leading up to Easter, medieval people were certainly tired of the Lenten fast. Milk could be turned into cheese, but nobody was allowed to eat it; they only had butter if their region had a papal indulgence. It’s likely that they were hard-boiling their eggs for a few weeks ahead, if the hens were still laying. Near the start of Lent, there was no use for eggs if people weren’t cheating on the fast. But near the end, perhaps the eggs would stay fresh in a cold cellar. In the late Middle Ages, there’s some evidence that the surfeit of hard-boiled eggs were dyed or used in games on Easter day.

But although the Easter feast was among the grandest, the season was not about games or fun. It was a solemn week that used a lot of drama. The church was always aware that most of its members were illiterate; the earliest medieval churches had wall murals to teach Bible stories. Many Romanesque churches were covered with story paintings to rival Kat Von D’s back. But by the 11th century, churches also tried to act out some stories during the worship service.

Palm Sunday began with a procession of palm leaves to re-enact the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem. Most parts of Northern Europe had no palms, so they used local substitutes. They didn’t take the re-enactment literally, but rather liturgically. The priest led a procession into the church and there were special songs. While miracle and mystery plays (staged outside) tried to use costumes and dialogue to tell the story, church drama did not aim at realism.

There’s no doubt that, in parallel, the country people also had traditions about spring left from pagan times. Less is known, since we have only some written records of what they did. Although the church accepted some pagan customs blended into the Christmas feast, priests were strict about keeping them out of the Resurrection story. With one striking exception: the name “Easter” itself. Eostre was a pagan goddess whose special season was co-opted by Latin missionaries during the Dark Ages. By the Middle Ages proper, nobody remembered or cared.

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Royal burials

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Ruth

Some of the normal rules, such as masses said and bells rung, applied. But there are some pretty bizarre exceptions among royal medieval burial stories.

Chiefly, any European tradition of embalming comes straight from them. Lacking Lenin-type methods, they just leaned on the super expensive spices from Indonesia. In general, the earlier in the Middle Ages that we see spices in use, the more exotic the cost.

King Charlemagne, who in 800 was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in a long time, was Europe’s first monarch on really grand scale. His burial couldn’t come close to rivaling the Chinese emperors or the pharaohs, of course. But he was buried in a room-sized tomb, dressed in his royal robes, seated in his chair. His body and tomb were packed with exceptionally costly spices; this was before the Crusader kingdom had established a decent trade route for Europe. It is said that 100 years later, his descendant King Otto reopened the tomb and found the old man still sitting there, pretty well preserved, gold teeth and all. Otto was freaked out, as anyone would be.

Embalming had two practical uses for royalty. One was legal proof of death, and the other was how to handle being buried far away from the place of death.

Legal proof of death was a serious matter. Uncertainty about who was the monarch led to uprisings that were mercilessly put down; stable government benefited everyone, even when the monarch was low quality. So kings went on public display for up to three months, to take into account travel time. (King Edward I of England stayed on display for a record four months.) It wasn’t as bad as embalming Hugo Chavez or Chairman Mao for posterity, but it was a pretty big deal.

Monarchs and people in the ruling ranks of aristocracy (dukes, earls, counts) often wanted to be buried in a place other than where they died. The problem first came up in the Crusades, when most of the rulers of England and France rode through Turkey and Syria, or sailed the Mediterranean into Egypt’s ports. Death came in many forms, not just in battle; King Louis (the saint) suffered a long, dangerous bout of illness in Egypt. He died of dysentery in Tunis. Dynastic traditions required rulers to be buried in their family tombs back at home, often in the cathedrals they had endowed.

King (formerly Count) Baldwin of Jerusalem (formerly of Edessa, formerly of Verdun, born in Boulogne) was one of the first monarchs to face this problem. He left a will with directions for his cook to remove his internal organs and preserve his body with salt and spices. He was rolled up in a thick shroud and conveyed back to Boulogne. Others in the same situation sent home their head or heart in a lead-lined jar or box. King Louis IX, dying in Tunis, was actually boiled so that his cleaned-off bones could be sent home to the cathedral in Paris. His internal organs were buried in Tunis.

Monarchs and upper aristocracy who died at home chose to be carved up, too. They had multiple homes, and they had special saints’ shrines they had endowed. Pieces of them could be buried at each of these places. Pope Boniface VIII condemned this as barbaric, but later popes sold indulgences (certificates of forgiveness) to royals who wanted to be cut up.

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Memorial images

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Ruth

While most people vanished into the silence of the countryside, historians are grateful that some took pains to be remembered. Remembrance is easiest when burials took place indoors.

Priests were buried inside the church, in its crypt. Their bones helped to sanctify the building, and of course churches bought bones and other relics of saints to add to the crypt. Eventually, to relic containers in the main meeting room (fittingly called the sanctuary, since so many holy bones sanctified it).

But these burials didn’t memorialize the person. Memory was solely the province of royalty (whom I’ll cover separately) until late in the Middle Ages. Stone effigies that preserved the appearance of the deceased were extremely expensive. We still have most of these statues, although in France, some were destroyed in the Revolution. We think that the stone was originally painted to look life-like, but of course today the effigies are plain stone. They are usually lying down, sometimes with legs crossed, usually with hands folded; some knights have swords, and Crusaders wore crosses. After the Black Death, stone monuments sometimes portrayed the dead as actually dead, in a gross way.

Brass became relatively affordable in the later Middle Ages. The upper middle classes and lower aristocracy, who could not dream of paying for carved effigies, could afford to get etched drawings of themselves on flat brass plates. The art wasn’t especially good; the people tend to look much the same. But the artists did capture the general look, the clothing, and things like hair length. Memorial brasses often showed a married couple, perhaps made during their lifetimes, perhaps made on the occasion of one’s death while the other still lived. Many of them show symbolic children, even infant outlines for babies who died. Some show pets sitting at their masters’ feet. They always include the names of the deceased, so for the first time since, perhaps, the walls of Egyptian temples, historians can match names and faces.

The brass plaques could be placed into the floor tiles or stones of the church. They could also be placed over indoor tombs in memorial chapels at the sides of the building.

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Typical funerals in medieval England

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval funerals could be simple paupers’ burials, similar to the monastic or leper colony burial, or they could be elaborate on a scale beyond modern imagination. It all depended on who had died and what message the family wanted to send to the community. Money wasn’t poured into huge granite monuments as it is now. The cost was all in the public show. Let’s look at a rich man’s funeral. He isn’t a baron or duke; let’s say he’s the mayor of the goldsmiths’ guild. Money is no object.

First, the body has been washed and shrouded, but it will lie in state at home—or even better, at the church—for a few days. It was surrounded by candles and by the end of the Middle Ages, everything was draped in black. (Black was not the color of mourning until the 15th century.) People needed to know that the man was truly dead, as a legal matter. There was not a formal “viewing” period, as later evolved, but anyone could go to the home or church and see with their own eyes. If the viewing period needed to be longer, the body probably had costly spices (like cinnamon) in use.

During this time, at least one Mass was said for the dead man’s soul. Technically one didn’t pay for Mass, but in reality, donations to the church bought more Masses and prayers. In the monastery, the set amount of prayers and Masses came with belonging to the community, but out in the world, money made them happen. Bigger donations also paid someone to ring the church bells more, to commemorate the death, the hours of watchful prayers, the hour of burial, the one-month anniversary of death, etc.

At least in England, the family usually put out a large meal after the burial. There were two categories of guests: the actual guests, and the poor. The family, friends and dignitaries were served meat, while the poor had bread and cheese. A really fine funeral, such as our goldsmith would have, added a one-month anniversary banquet.

This brings us to the role of the poor in funerals. The official “poor” of the town, such as cripples, starving widows, orphans, the blind, and the like, became the professional mourners. Their prayers were thought to be more meritorious, even if the poor were only doing it for pay. A really fine funeral had a procession of important people and family mourners, and then a troupe of beggars, blind, and cripples following after, all wearing new robes as if in uniform. They were usually black, although for most of the period, this had no emotional significance. It was just a sober, serviceable daily color. The poor man received the new robe and his bread and cheese as wages for his attendance and prayers; he may have received a penny in addition. Essentially, this is how the very poorest citizens kept themselves clothed: by being hired for funerals periodically.

Respectable families paid for their servants’ funerals. The degree of show would be nothing like what the goldsmith just had. A few pennies saw the bell rung once, the name included in Mass, and a simple shroud burial in the churchyard. Other men and women found their level somewhere between the goldsmith’s high level of dignified show and the servant’s low level of slight commemoration.

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A monastic funeral

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Ruth

Records from the past are limited, so the few records we have take on disproportionate importance. The monastic order for Christian burial was carefully written down; we must assume that burial in general followed this pattern, though we know a few interesting differences for secular Christian burials (later entry). The monks documented mainly what prayers and rituals had to be observed, rather than the sewing technique for shrouds or other literal burial details.

The dying monk had one last confession of sin and received absolution; his monastic community chanted the Psalms during this time and perhaps until his death. It could be tricky to get the timing of Last Rites, because it could only be done once. It created legal death, just as for the lepers who “died” when they entered the leper colony. Of course, if a monk or anyone else survived and recovered, they had to figure something out. There are some records of survivors having to do penance. Among the secular, the opposite problem was almost more likely: to die so fast that last confession could not be heard. But in the monastery, there was always someone nearby.

The deceased monk was placed on sackcloth (burlap) and ashes, surrounded by candles, while his community said Mass for his soul. Then the body was washed and positioned with clasped hands, in prayer, dressed in his monastic robes. The body lay in the church overnight, while monks took turns singing the psalms or chanting prayers between the usual hours of prayer. After morning Mass, they buried the monk. The burial itself was very simple in a monastery; the hard work had been done already, caring for the deceased person’s soul.

Monastic cemeteries tended to double as orchards and flower gardens. Monks and nuns were laid to rest, probably in unmarked graves, at the foot of apple trees or near beds of lilies. All monasteries grew lilies and roses for use in the church at certain seasons to honor the Virgin Mary; lilies and roses were “her” flowers.

Monks did not write wills, having already left their possessions behind in joining the monastery. (You may recall that writing a will was part of the process of becoming an ordained monk.) Their only possessions in the monastic community were their robes and shoes, and a few tools like a knife to sharpen pens and a needle to mend their robes. What wasn’t buried with them would be washed and passed on in the community. Before experiencing a death close to me, I might have wondered if this felt weird to them, but I’m sure it didn’t. Monks and nuns developed life-long close friendships and would be glad to have Brother Thomas’s penknife, or Sister Barbara’s shoes, as small keepsakes in a lifestyle that so de-emphasized things and ownership.

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Coffins, shrouds and bones

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Ruth

Early medieval Europe was thickly forested, but by the late Middle Ages, even Sherwood Forest and the Black Forest had thinned and dwindled. As iron became the primary building material, more and more wood was devoted to charcoal production for refineries. Eventually, the discovery of coal rescued Europe’s forests, but for a time, wood was hard to come by and very expensive.

This was a problem for Christian Europe because the burial tradition that grew around the Church generally involved wooden coffins. Bodies were washed and wrapped in linen shrouds, then carried to the grave in a wooden box. (More about funeral rites in next installment.) The wooden boxes may not have been single-purpose containers early on; early Europe stored most things in wooden chests that lined the walls of a hall or cottage. (Casket, the other name for a coffin, also meant a storage chest.) Especially for children, a household wooden chest was large enough. But while wood was plentiful, Europeans began making the recognizable oblong shape to fit tall men.

A few early Christian burials used such sturdy coffins that we have some samples of the cloth used as burial clothes. A Frankish princess managed to retain some scraps of her dress, while St. Cuthbert of Northumbria’s silk shroud was clearly made of imported Asian damask, quite rare in his time. The really wealthy might line their coffins with lead so that they became airtight.

But as the cost of wood skyrocketed and cemeteries filled up, the traditions had to change. Coffins could be rented just to take the shrouded body from the house or church to the grave. There, the body was placed in its resting place but the coffin went back to the rental service or church. This was just as well, since the cemeteries were quite full. Burials tended to rotate around the graveyard year by year, instead of being like modern burial plots that are purchased from a map and might be anywhere in long rows of headstones. Ordinary people didn’t use headstones. Just as well, since at regular intervals, the burials came back around to the same area of the graveyard. When diggers found bones, they stacked them up; the bones, either boxed or loose, went into the bone house, or charnel house. The ground could be reused.

When the plague hit, cemeteries were quickly overwhelmed. Lucky corpses had a priest who lived long enough to consecrate a field; unlucky ones were placed wherever the living could dig. Bodies stacked up overnight and were buried all day; excavations of plague burials show bodies stacked like lasagna noodles with layers of sand or dirt to level off. (If I recall correctly, even an observer of the time used this analogy to lasagna—-of course, he was writing in Italy!)

The wealthy and royalty had different customs, which we’ll get to. They expected to be preserved and remembered; the common people had to be content with returning to the dust from which they came.

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Early medieval burials

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Ruth

The Medieval period is generally counted from around the end of the Western Roman Empire, sort of 500-600ish, to the end of the Eastern Roman Empire with the fall of Constantinople. One of the major dividing lines within this period comes when all of the Germanic tribes had converted to Christianity. The period of Christian conversion stretches from about 300 (Goths and Visigoths) to 1100 (Swedes). The Franks converted by 500, the Anglo-Saxons between 600 and 700, and the Saxons on the continent by 800 (defeated in war by the Franks, forced to convert or die). The Norwegian king converted around 900, and by 1000, Iceland was Christian. The Swedes were the last hold-outs, being most remote and most deeply devoted to the cult of Odin.

The Northern tribes had a strong tradition of funeral pyres that lasted right up to their conversion dates. They believed that the dead person’s spirit was freed to fly upward in the flames. We don’t know how they determined when to use pyres and when to bury, but there was another tradition of burying bodies in the ground or under a cairn (pile of large stones).

The Southern tribes seemed to bury bodies in the ground from earlier times, so archeologists have thousands of examples of grave goods from all over Europe. Typically, women wore a string of amber or bone beads and had their spindle and a comb tucked in nearby. Men were buried with a spear or, if they were aristocrats, a sword.

Best of all were the ship burials. In these royal burials, the king’s ship was lowered into a pit and then filled with provisions and treasures. The king’s body was laid out in the center, and sometimes servants or concubines were executed and laid out with him. Then they made a tent roof out of timbers and began to cover the whole thing with dirt and stones. When they were finished, the mound grew grass and became part of the landscape.

Ship burials were certainly the most exciting sort for the people of the time, and they remain the most exciting archeological finds. Sutton Hoo, in Kent, England, was the biggest ship burial ever found, but smaller ship burials continue to turn up.

The epic of Beowulf begins with a very unusual burial that combined a ship with a pyre. In this incident, the king is placed on a ship with grave goods, and then after the ship is set on fire, they push it off into the sea. We can’t know if this was ever actually done, but it appears to be a fabulous tale even for its time. The story may have been included simply because it was so different from typical burials.

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Last will and testament

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Ruth

Like monks, people in the world began by dying legally: writing a will and making last confession. The availability of paper in the 14th century made actual written wills much more common and, at last, mandatory.

Outside the monastery, dying people were usually worried about the afterlife. The church could not assure them that they’d go to heaven, though it could reassure them that purgatory wasn’t forever. People with violence on their consciences, or those who had been wealthy and not very charitable, often became very afraid. What if last confession was not enough?

The average man owned some furniture, a shop, a house, and some animals, with perhaps some silver stored in a hidden sack. A married woman owned some of the furniture, her clothes, some of the pots and pans, and maybe some money from ale selling or from inheritance. Wealthier people owned larger or more houses, much more furniture, extra farms and fields, larger sums of money, jewelry, books, and perhaps even investments in other businesses (by the late Middle Ages, shareholding was a new trend in Italy). So with this, the dying man or woman began to bargain with Heaven. Perhaps those with young children or clean consciences just left it all to the family, but that’s certainly not what some did.

Monasteries, churches and other forms of religious ministry received most of the willed goods. The Knights of the Temple, the fighting monks sworn to defend the Holy Land, received so many gifts of property that their order had to take in many lay brothers just to farm their vast holdings. Although individual monks (even Knights Templars) could own nothing, the order could own a great deal. Many peasants found themselves deeded over to monasteries; the Abbot was now the landlord. Each order, beginning in pious poverty, eventually found itself weighed down with worldly goods.

Gifts of money also went to local churches and monasteries. A man might will a sum of money to the local church to buy its candles for a year, with the request that they pray for his soul in purgatory. Gifts could buy annual Masses said just for the donor, or they could pay to build a small chapel added onto the main building. Especially by the late medieval years, this chapel would have some kind of statue or plaque proclaiming the donor and asking the visitor to pray for his or her soul.

Gifts of land, houses and money also went to charitable projects like orphanages, hospitals, leper colonies and schools. Again, the residents were requested (required) to pray for the donor’s soul in perpetuity. The prayers of the sick and poor were considered more meritorious than the prayers of one’s friends and family. (You may recall that this is how colleges began: as dormitories funded by a donor in exchange for perpetual prayer.) Pretty much anything could be willed to an orphanage or hospital; if you had a chair or bed, or even a copper pot, you could will it.

Wills also gave to family and friends. They were usually very detailed. Every pot, spoon, hat, book and gown was willed to someone. It seems creepy to us when clothing appears in an old will, but clothing at the time meant a relatively big investment. Dying people would have listened to visiting family and friends saying good-bye but also asking if anyone else had already requested the new hat or the green gown? We live in a culture that can’t figure out what to do with its left-over, broken, wasted material goods; in their time, the ends of candles, pried from candle-sticks, were paid to servants as part of wages and benefits. Things were relatively more valuable and were treated with great respect. You didn’t sneeze at the chance to own anything additional; a set of two spoons or a bone-bead necklace was worth putting into a will and was received gratefully.

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Care for the dying

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Ruth

When medieval people lived to old age, most of them had families who cared for them. Some lived in monastic communities, which were well-equipped to care for the aging. A wing of the monastery was always devoted to nursing care; it usually had a sheltered flower garden just outside its door. Some wealthy people who didn’t have family donated to the monastery in exchange for end-of-life care. The poor tended to die wherever they were, however it happened, but some lucky few came to hospitals.

Hospitals had been a Roman tradition, so in Constantinople, the Eastern Rome, they remained well-developed and even included simple surgeries. Benedictine monasteries had started a new tradition of setting aside a wing for sick care for the poor, but Crusades-related travel to Byzantine lands took hospital care out of the Dark Ages. Medieval hospitals were, in fact, the only buildings that tried to keep a light on overnight.

Weirdly, the medieval hospital considered its first duty to be the spiritual care for the sick, so the sick were forced to attend Mass and prayers if they were at all able. Physical care was generally limited to food, water, and heated rooms, with some simple wound care. This was enough help for many people to recover, but it made death a little less miserable for others. Hospitals often took in a cluster of orphans, employing them as errand-boys and keeping a little school. The duties of caring for the poor, the sick, the wounded, the crippled, the aged, and the orphans were all blurred in those days.

Most hospitals were made from repurposed manor halls, donated by owners who were afraid of Hell in their last weeks. Wards were open, without private rooms, simply for that reason. Large barn-like halls could only be partitioned and organized to a certain point. It was a long time before hospitals were built on purpose. Beds were a motley collection of whatever dying people had left in their wills; most had rope foundations and straw mattresses, but they were a lot better than the poor were used to.

The best hospitals were in Italy; they were funded by city governments and had medical schools attached. The rest of Europe lagged behind; St. Leonard’s in York was the largest and best outside Italy. It used herbal medicine and was staffed by monks with medical training; its 200 beds were dimly lit at night by lanterns in the hallways. As in most hospitals, many nuns and lay sisters were the majority of the staff; gradually they developed uniforms, usually a cross badge.

The medieval hospital system began to break down at the end, first by frank mismanagement of the ordinary modern kind, mostly scams to keep donations rolling in while few patients were in care. But then came the plague. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and their staff died as rapidly as their patients. The whole thing had to be overhauled. In the early modern period, duties became separated: orphanages, almshouses as nursing care for the dying poor, and hospitals for the sick and wounded.

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Medieval death

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Ruth

So many ways to die, so many choices! Life expectancy was not generally over 40 years, with so many options.

Childbirth could take out two lives at once, and it often did.

Infectious disease removed perhaps the largest number, including infants under one year. Of course, epidemics shot these numbers up. The most famous epidemic is the Black Death, but there were many more: St. Anthony’s Fire, measles, smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. Other infectious diseases just hung around chronically, like malaria and tuberculosis.

Work-related accidents ranged from falling off scaffolding to slipping at a river bank while washing clothes. English records typically noted the manner of death; a modern scholar calculated that most people died very near to, or at, home. Women and children drowned in unwalled wells, while men often died by trees falling on them. Of course, war and tournaments took out professional warriors, though a surprising number of them survived their wounds with simple surgical care.

For those who lived to old age, cancer was always waiting. At least for a time, long enough to name the disease, cancer was viewed as the work of microscopic crabs eating away the flesh.

Let’s not forget famine and floods, either. In the early 1300s, a series of disastrous weather patterns (probably global cooling plus a North Atlantic regional disruption) dumped far too much rain on Northern Europe. Holland flooded badly several times, killing thousands. And across the region, crops failed as many as seven years in a row, a famine of (literally) Biblical proportions.

Death was part of life. Everyone had been exposed to death so much that it wasn’t feared quite the way it is now. Only after the Black Death did society’s collective PTSD create a dark mythology of death. In post-plague art, we see rotting corpses, skeletons and Death literally choking and strangling the unwary, as well as drawing the unwilling into his merry dance.

Post-plague Europe’s PTSD ran very deep. From the shock of losing nearly half the population (in some places more, some less) in just a year and a half, people became both more devout and less devout, more pious and more occultic, more immoral and more moralistic. PTSD led to greater pomp for funerals and then, eventually, to the Protestant Reformation. People were no longer willing to let the monks and priests live out salvation on their behalf. They wanted to know where their souls would go after death.

Many modern funeral customs developed during this period. In this next mini series, we’ll cover pagan and early Christian burials and then later medieval funeral pomp, through the royal shows that gave us some of our current customs.

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