Life-death of a leper

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Ruth

Having mapped out the most common modes of adult life in medieval Europe, I turn to a unique life cycle that serves as a bridge to talking about death: the life of a leper.

Lepers were legally dead while still alive. Leprosy was not diagnosed with scientific accuracy; it served as an umbrella for several disfiguring, degenerative skin diseases. But since it was considered highly infectious, the leper could not remain part of normal society after diagnosis.

Most towns and regions had a leper colony that served as its own village of the living dead. The ceremony for entering the leper colony was, legally, a funeral. The diagnosed patient wrote a will, and in some places went through a ceremonial funeral with a black shroud and a handful of dirt scattered on top.

On entering the leper village, though, each person needed to bring some of his own things like some dishes and pots. Sometimes, a husband or wife (especially wife) was permitted to enter, to live in the colony and care for the sick person. Leper villages had gardens and chickens; lepers worked as they could, given each person’s state of health. Sometimes children were born in the leper colony.

The leper colony was kept up by charitable donations, but the lepers were also expected to help support themselves by begging, in addition to gardening. There were traditional places for lepers to beg, especially outside churches (remember how giving alms was the newly married couple’s first act). But lepers were also considered infectious, so they had to wear hats and gloves (and, well, bandages). They had to ring a bell or swing a clapper in order to warn people of their presence, and they could only collect alms without skin contact, holding out a pot on a long stick.

Legally dead, lepers were still a visible part of life. As they grew sicker, presumably they stopped begging and quietly died in the rows of huts of the leper village. Funerals didn’t have to be a big deal, since they were not legally alive. In fact, lepers were connected to funerals less in being honored that way themselves, and more as people hired to pray for the souls of other dead. The prayers of a leper were meritorious even beyond the prayers of an impoverished student or starving widow. But more about that soon…

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Life of a minstrel

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Ruth

For a medieval minstrel, this season, Lent, was the most critical time of year. During Lent, all entertainment stopped. But far from having nothing to do, minstrels spent these weeks at giant conventions, learning new material. They were the only profession fully dependent on constant travel and file-sharing.

The highest order of minstrel was a musician; highest of all was the court musician who did not need to go on tour. Next was the common jongleur, clearly the root of the word “juggler.” The jongleur was a variety showman: he sang, danced, tumbled, juggled, told stories, put on puppet shows, did some sleight of hand, and maybe kept an interesting animal, like a monkey or bear. Jongleurs were always on tour, probably following a regular circuit of towns, manor houses and castles. They were often on the road, often in low company, and often cold or hungry. Their jobs were marginal; as soon as they weren’t sufficiently entertaining, they had to move on.

So when the jongleurs got together during Lent, they were all motivated to share material freely. The largest meeting was in Paris, where there was an actual school for minstrels. They met other places, too. Any foreign travel meant bringing back cool stories, new magic tricks, and the latest songs.

Medieval minstrels dressed in ways to get attention, but they didn’t wear the “jester caps” of Renaissance cliche. They were the Lady Gagas and Michael Jacksons of their time, no more. When the particolor fashion was chic, jongleurs would have been more eye-catchingly parti-colored than anyone else. Like rock stars, they wanted the biggest and best of whatever was bright and shiny.

Inevitably, minstrels had to create a guild for certification. Castles and manor homes kept tight security; entertainers were among the few who could come and go, which led to posers and downright impostors roaming the halls or unlocking the gates for thieving friends. Jongleurs came to need licenses, which of course had to be bought from towns for fees…even in the Middle Ages, the only certain things were death and taxes.

Old minstrels were not enviable. The real Michael Jacksons had cushy jobs at court, with retirement benefits, but the average jongleur had never owned a house, and now had arthritis. The wise ones found a decently-endowed widow tavern-keeper and got married before it was too late. A lesson to all musicians.

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Life as a craftsman

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Ruth

In the early Middle Ages, craftsmen served their most local village populations and were far less specialized than later. Smiths who worked iron tended to handle smelting and refining, and then made all of the basic iron implements like edges for plowshares or heads for spears. Weapon making was the first specialization, but even then, swordsmiths were uncommon and only found near royalty. The same rule generally applied to all trades, and many crafts were still based in the home, like spinning and weaving.

Towns were first established as feudal-free zones, allowing craftsmen to devote all of their time to business without needing to go cut the lord’s hay or mend his stone walls. So from the start, they were congregations of, by and for craftsmen. Most towns were organized around craft zones according to what each one needed, such as water or wood. Town centers and roads grew up around the needs of tradesmen.

By the late Middle Ages, trades had specialized to a high degree and had formal structures. Life in one of these trades followed a mapped out pathway: apprenticeship, journeyman (in some trades), junior partner, senior partner, guild official, and maybe at the end, head of the guild or even mayor of the town (elected from among the guild chiefs). A craftsman would rarely leave his town, since specialized merchants handled distance sales. Most craftsmen had a shop window with a shutter that hinged at the bottom, opening into a counter. Town ordinances specified how far into the street a shop was allowed to move display tables or awnings. When these rules weren’t strict enough, precious little sunlight reached the ground.

Prosperous guilds built freestanding, single-purpose guild halls in imitation of manor halls. Guilds held regular meetings to regulate their trade, so they needed a large room with tables to hold everyone. A good guild hall also had quite a kitchen out back, and even a chest full of musical instruments (eventually, guilds developed those European town bands of the early modern period). Poor guilds had to rent space or borrow church halls.

The guild members divided up the work of approving new members (usually local apprentices as they graduated) and overseeing the town’s craft products. Weights and measures were hugely important in the Middle Ages. Cities had officials whose only job was making sure that the weights and measures used around town all matched the official set. Guilds had sets to match to individual shops, and they carried out frequent random checks so that their craft would not get a bad reputation. Every shop marked its products, from bread to bricks to hats, and every guild inspected and imposed fines. Essentially, so much of the town’s governance took place right at this level that elected government naturally evolved out of the guild structure.

Guilds helped their elderly and sick members. They also paid for funerals and tried to help guild widows if possible. They had other social functions, like parades and plays. Some towns had an annual fundraiser in which each guild hosted a piece of one long religious drama. The one held on Corpus Christi Day (mid-summer) in York, England, was the most famous and perhaps most highly developed. It has been recreated in modern times.

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Life of a university graduate

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Ruth

Life of a medieval university graduate meant, probably, continuing as a scholar in the same place. Doctoral degrees could be in theology, law or medicine. The degree cost a large sum to purchase, so many students never graduated. (They went on to be tutors, magicians, and stand-up comics.)

The only place for someone with a PhD in theology was right there at the University of Paris, so daily life changed little. The most famous Doctor of Theology was Peter Abelard (1079-1142). He rose to fame while the university system was still nascent, but his life as lecturer and debater works as a generic pattern. After defeating competing scholars in rhetoric and dialectic, he studied theology with a famous teacher and became a canon at Notre Dame. His fame as a lecturer came from his debate victories and at his prime, he drew large crowds of students. But as a canon (a very low order of priest, sort of), he was supposed to remain single; Abelard famously fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant teenage girl he was tutoring. Her guardian caught them having sex and all hell broke loose. It’s a complex story, worth telling in less summary, but at the end of it, their child was placed with his sister in the country, she was at a convent, and he was castrated by a gang of hired thugs. He ended his life as the Abbot of a rural monastery, exiled from all he cared about. But in his prime, his daily life was about philosophy, theology, and lecturing to enthralled crowds.

A PhD in medicine fitted someone to be a court physician. Surgeons were trained by apprenticeship, usually on battlefields. Physicians, by contrast, were expected to know the learned works of Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna. They diagnosed diseases and prescribed spices to rebalance body chemistry that had gotten too hot, cold, wet or dry. Among the known diseases they tried to treat were infectious diseases like St. Anthony’s Fire, smallpox, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, and leprosy. Leprosy was a fad diagnosis, badly distinguished from similar skin problems and even syphilis. Court physicians also diagnosed by urine tests. Every doctor had a urine sample bottle; university medical exams required him to know the smell and look of various ailments’ urine. A really well-paid, highly placed royal doctor also stood behind the king’s chair at dinner and advised him what to eat, to maintain the king’s health.

I’m afraid I don’t know much about the life of a trained lawyer. I suspect that a real Doctor of Law was over-trained for real court use, and was left instead to teach philosophy of law at a university, leading a life much like Abelard’s original lecture routine. There just weren’t that many of them; their lives were marginal in the medieval economy. I can imagine that toward the later centuries, Italian merchants and bankers might hire one as consultant for contracts. “Law” meant “Roman law,” part of the fiction that Rome’s Empire never really ended. Designing a contract that met some obscure point of Roman law might ensure victory in a court challenge by a competitor.

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Lenten fish

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Ruth

I’ll do another entry on Lent and fasting. It’s worth just talking about fish.

Some fish came from ponds and were probably fresh.

Monasteries knew in advance that they’d be fasting for every possible fast day year round, so they put a lot of effort into growing fish. Some monasteries figured out that letting their sewage flush into the fish pond was actually good for the fish. (They tried to build over a stream that could carry water in and sewage out, and then they dammed it for the fish.) Mill ponds were great for eels, too. The miller’s landlord often asked for eels as part of the rent. Eels could be found in streams and lakes, too. Peasants could spear or trap them. But they rarely ate eels; the cash value was too great. The cash value of a five-foot carp was so great that many entrepreneurs invested in long-term fish ponds to raise these Danube River invaders. It took about five years for a carp to grow to table length, but then the Abbot or Baron would pay a lot.

By far most Lenten fish were not at all fresh. They were either dried or salted/pickled. The fish preserving industry was one of the largest enterprises of its time.

Cod came from the far north Atlantic, including Canada. Basque fishermen were shopping the cod banks near the St. Lawrence River without disclosing that they’d found a New World. You know how fishermen are. Cod also came from Iceland and all around Norway. It was most often flayed and then hung to dry in the cold wind. Prepared this way, it was called stockfish, with “stock” referring to wood. Cod stockfish were sometimes smoked, and frequently salted. When caught at sea, they were usually salted so that they would not spoil during the two weeks the ship stayed out. Stockfish had to be soaked for a long time, sometimes with many changes of water to remove salt, and pounded hard with a hammer to make it edible. It was tasteless, once reconstituted. Cooks had to find ways to season or fry it, but stockfish was never very good.

Herring came from the north Atlantic and the Baltic. The cities along the Baltic joined in a compact for dominating the herring industry; some made salt, some made barrels, some employed thousands of peasant women gutting several herring per minute. The herring were packed firmly in salt and the barrels closed tightly. Ships were specially built to accommodate as many barrels as possible. The Hanse (“the League”) made monopoly deals with various ports so that they would bar other traders. They also policed the northern seas for pirates, keeping shipping lanes open.

Herring was salty. Monks ate so much herring, it was penance just to swallow another one. More creative cooks soaked it to remove some of the salt, and made it into other dishes, but all too often, the poor saw herring simply sitting there, looking back at them in all their salty glory, next to a piece of rough bread. Still, herring was the only preserved convenience food they had. Armies bought barrels and barrels of the stuff, as did monasteries.

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Lent begins

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Ruth

The fast season of Lent was not nearly as unique in the medieval year as it is in the modern. Fast days punctuated the year, and the entire four weeks before Christmas was also a fast. Lent was merely the longest fast.

When I was young, I used to hear Catholic friends talk about choosing something to give up for Lent. In the Middle Ages, there were no such choices; they always gave up the same thing: animal products. You might think “meat,” but that only annoyed the rich. The poor never had meat anyway, and their chickpea or lentil porridges were “fast food” for every day year round. But the real problem was butter.

Butter and cheese were sheep, not cow, products, usually. In much of northern Europe, butter was the main cooking oil, not counting lard, which of course was out for Lent. Zones of Europe that depended on walnut or olive oil were less deprived, but butter regions had no solutions. Over time, their rulers bought indulgences from Popes that gave automatic forgiveness for using butter during Lent. Some cathedrals were funded by butter indulgences.

The wealthy didn’t have to give up anything except products from mammals and birds. Wine and sweets were still just fine. In theory, they ate less. In reality, their cooks just substituted almond milk for dairy and spiced the fish to match venison dishes. Fresh fish sold for a premium during Lent. By the middle of the 14th century, inland parts of Europe were so covered with fish farms (mostly for carp, a big meaty roaster of a fish) that they were getting malaria.

Monks, in richer and softer monasteries, had an out from the everlasting fast diets. Monasteries served normal food in their hospital wings, including meat. An amazing number of monks got sick during Lent.

But the prevailing attitude to the fast was deeply pious and observant, in all walks of life. No weddings were held during Lent, since weddings required feasts. Eggs were hard-boiled and saved in cold sheds, awaiting the day when they could once again be eaten. (I’ll cover Easter week when it comes around.)

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By request: what was the world like, the last time a Pope resigned?

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Ruth

1415: the Battle of Agincourt, the burning of Jan Hus, and the only other resignation of a pope.

The Medieval Warm Period was over; Arctic ice was growing, making Greenland harder to reach and cutting back cod and herring fishing. The new plague had come and gone a number of times, cutting back population. Common people began enjoying meat and eggs in their diet; hopped beer was taking over the market. In so many words, Europe began to taste like Europe.

Peasants’ revolts had begun; they were no longer willing to do feudal labor. Large towns had mechanical clocks. By and large, England, northern France, Germany and Switzerland had no Jews; southern France and Spain still did, and the survivors of Germany’s first holocaust had gone to the Kingdom of Poland. The Hanseatic League’s mercantile monopoly of the North Sea had ended, with Venetian ships taking over international trade. The Crusades were long over; Arabs had taken back the Holy Land.

At the Battle of Agincourt, the English King Henry V soundly beat the French, as memorialized by Shakespeare. It was the last major English victory in the long territorial contest with France.

The plagues had touched off religious reform; John Wycliffe’s movement to translate the Bible into common speech was very popular in Bohemia, where Jan Hus was a popular preacher. In this year, he was invited to the church council on promise of safety and just being listened to, and was then burnt at the stake. How’d that decision work out for you, guys?

The church council, though, was a huge step forward in Europe’s chief genius of political theory. There had been two Popes for several generations, and since each kept the other under excommunication ban, common folks became unsure if their babies were going to hell or not. Church law couldn’t resolve the problem because each pope appointed more cardinals, and the colleges of cardinals could not negate each other. So a council of bishops, theologians, and nobles declared that power really came from the people. The council dictated that all popes must resign (due to a previous attempt, there were 3) and they appointed a new one. One of the popes, who convened the council, followed through. That’s the only known time a pope had not died in office, until now.

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The beginning of Lent

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Ruth

Shrove Tuesday, ca. 1200 meant three things: food, cockfighting, and mummers.

Food, obviously. A forty-day fast was about to begin. Chiefly, they would eat no animal products, so any and all animal products, especially meat, had to be eaten. The pre-fast feast came to last three days. By the end of the medieval period, it had developed its French name, Mardi Gras; it was the Carnival because they ate meat (cf chili con carne).

Schoolboys made it the season to hold cockfights. Medieval people didn’t think cockfights were cruel; roosters were the knights of the bird world, and they were merely letting the knights hold a feathered tournament.

In Germany and England, but especially in England, they put on mumming plays. We talked about mumming at Christmas; this was the other season, when the death and rebirth of the Turk (or Wild Man, or other) probably had pagan seasonal symbolism for spring. German/English mumming and Mardi Gras perhaps blended during the Renaissance to create the masked revel traditions of the Latin world today. (that last bit is a guess.)

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The peasant’s wife

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Ruth

The peasant’s wife had a pretty hard life. In addition to helping with a lot of field work as needed, she did a lot of everything else.

Her most likely cause of death by accident was to fall into the local well, which was usually a poorly-marked hole in the ground. Lining wells with stone came later. She had to stand on the edge and haul a bucket up, and it was very easy to slip. If not a well, then a riverbank.

Half-wild pigs wandered in and out of her yard and even her hut. She probably shared living space with their ox and dairy sheep. Her heating came from a central fire pit; chimneys were invented in castles in the medieval period, but it was a long time till they came to peasants. She did her sewing and spinning outside to have adequate light; rainy days were dim and smoky. Her only light, after dark, was a long splinter of wood dipped in lard; it burned for 20 minutes at most.

She had no real child care help, and it was difficult to keep children even slightly clean. They did have soap; they didn’t have time and leisure to use it. Gardening, animal care, direct child care, spinning, weaving, sewing, brewing and getting wood and water took up all of her hours.

Sanitation was, at best, a wattle hut around a latrine hole with a wooden or wattle seat. Wattle, something like wicker, was the poor man’s building material. Slabs of wood were just too expensive; poor men could keep some tree stumps sprouting shoots so that they could replace worn wattle when needed. The hut was wattle and daub (clay); their two-wheeled cart, if they had one, had wattle sides.

Cheap leather for shoes was affordable for some peasants, but if they had them, they kept their one pair of moccasins out of the muck and went barefoot where possible. Socks were strips of torn linen, wound around the leg and tied. The wife’s wool gown tended to be short in the skirt. Her only coat was a cloak or shawl.

Her only annual fun came at peasant festivals like May Day and the harvest feast that every feudal lord had to provide. These traditions loomed large in her life and remained unchanged for years after the cities had forgotten.

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Peasant life

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Ruth

One medieval life pathway that I’ve ignored so far is that of the peasant farmer. He hasn’t entered into our stories yet because his life had so few transitions from infancy to adulthood. He didn’t go to school or get formal training, nor did he join an organization. He just started going to work and kept on working.

The peasant typically had two types of field; his own, and the lord’s. The rent for his field strip was a work requirement to plow and sow the lord’s. Peasants did some of their work individually and some together, in particular when they yoked six or eight oxen to get all of the plowing done. They were usually organized to work certain days on the lord’s land, with their time free on other days. In addition to farm work, peasants owed the lord a certain number of days to help with roads, bridges, or walls.

Peasants spent their lives on the land, literally. As horses became more common in the 12th century, some could travel to the nearest town and back for market. They were free to sell whatever they produced on their own time and land, so some peasants got ahead. As towns grew, peasants began saving to buy a son’s freedom from service. With a fee paid to the lord, the son could go to town and find lodgings while he attended school and then apprenticed for a craft.

It’s a myth that the lord slept with a bride on her wedding night; if that famous custom was ever practiced, it certainly was not widespread. (In fact the custom’s earliest mention is in the Epic of Gilgamesh.) But the peasant did have to pay a tax when he got married. Getting married was a sign of prosperity, and it also robbed the lord of a field or house servant when a girl became a wife. So to compensate the lord, the peasant paid some customary or negotiated fee of animals or grain.

Then there’s the death tax; the dead man’s family had to give the lord his best horse or some such fee. This makes no sense at all. Why ask a bereaved family to become poorer? But the idea came from much higher up in society. In the Magna Carta, we find that the king’s death tax on his lords had to be limited. “If any of our earls or barons, or anyone else holding from us in chief by military service should die, and should his heir be of full age and owe relief, the heir is to have his inheritance for the ancient relief, namely the heir or heirs of an earl for a whole county £100, the heir or heirs of a baron for a whole barony 100 marks, the heir or heirs of a knight for a whole knight’s fee 100 shillings at most, and he who owes less will give less, according to the ancient custom of (knights’) fees.”

With the king and his barons, the idea was that the heir had to swear loyalty to the king, and in doing so, he paid a “relief” tax that established his gratitude to the king for continuing his rank and property after his father. It makes a little sense if you think of him bringing a gift to the king when he swears fealty for the county or barony. Perhaps that’s how the barons and knights thought of it when a peasant died: that his heir had to swear fealty and bring a gift. And after all, without money flowing upward from the farmers to the landowner, how was the knight or baron to pay his own “relief” to the king? Or perhaps that year there was a special tax for the king’s son being knighted, or for the king to go on Crusade. Money didn’t grow on trees but at the bottom level it did come from crops and animals.

Peasants lived right on the edge of survival, mostly living on bean porridge. They suffered from bad weather; the end of the Medieval Warm Period was a curse to their lives as the Little Ice Age dropped the average winter temperatures while peasants still could not afford fur coats.

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