Top 10 Strangest Deaths in the Middle Ages
BY MEDIEVALISTS.NET – MAY 14, 2014POSTED IN: BEST OF MEDIEVALISTS.NET, FEATURES
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/05/14/top-10-strangest-deaths-middle-ages/
You may have heard how medieval rulers have been killed in battle or died from an assassin’s blade. But did you know about the king who died from uncontrollable laughing or the emperor who was dragged 16 miles through a forest by a deer? Check out our list of the top ten strangest deaths from the Middle Ages!
1
Zeno, Byzantine Emperor (d.491)
Some accounts state that the emperor fell unconscious after drinking heavily. His wife Empress Ariadne declared Zeno dead, had him placed in a sarcophagus and refused to allow anyone to open it when they heard his calls for help.
2
Philip, son of Louis VI of France (d.1131)
The brash son of the French king was riding with friends through the streets of Paris when a pig jumped in front of his horse causing it to the trip. Philip was thrown off and landing "so dreadfully fractured his limbs that he died on the day following."
3
Sigurd Eysteinsson, Earl of Orkney (d.892)
Marshall Astor
Marshall Astor
After defeating and killing Mael Brigte the Tusk in battle, Earl Sigurd strapped his severed head to his saddle and rode back home. As he was riding, Mael Brigte’s teeth cut into his leg and the wound became infected, leading to Sigurd's death.
4
Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (d.1244)
Matthew Paris
Matthew Paris
The son of a Welsh prince, Gruffydd was being held as hostage in the Tower of London when he tried to escape by lowering himself down in a rope. However the rope broke, and Gruffydd fell 90 feet to his death.
5
Pope Adrian IV (d.1159)
This English Pope suffered from a form of tonsillitis that caused puss to build up in his mouth. According to one account, he took a sip of wine and began to choke on a fly, which had been floating inside his goblet. Combined with the puss in his throat, the Pontiff died within minutes.
6
Henry II, Count of Champagne (d.1197)
The Crusade leader was watching his troops gather from his palace in Acre when, in the words of one chronicle, "He was leaning on the railings of a window and looking down. The railings gave way, and he fell to the ground. His dwarf, frightened and distressed, fell out too and landed on top of him. It was said that if the dwarf had not fallen on him he would perhaps not have died so soon."
7
Henry I, King of England
After a day of hunting, the English king decided, against his doctor's advice, to dine a plate of lamprey eels. That night he fell ill and soon died.
8
Basil I, Byzantine Emperor (d.886)
The 75-year old Emperor was out hunting when his belt was caught in the antlers of a deer, and he was allegedly dragged 16 miles through the woods. He was saved by an attendant who cut him loose with a knife, but he suspected the attendant of trying to assassinate him and had the man executed shortly before he himself died.
9
George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence (d.1478)
The erratic brother of King Edward IV was found guilty of treason by and ordered to be executed. According to some reports, he asked to be drowned in a large vat of Malmsey Wine, his favourite beverage.
10
Martin the Humane, King of Aragon and Sicily (d.1410)
Martin was suffering from indigestion on account of eating an entire goose when his jester entered the king's bedroom. Martin asked him where he had been, the jester replied "Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs." The king started laughing uncontrollably until he fell over and died.
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Top 10 Strangest Deaths in the Middle Ages
Ancient Greek healthcare: as contentious as today?
http://www.historyextra.com/blog/ancient-greece/ancient-greek-healthcare-contentious-today
Thursday 13th May 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott
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America has just voted through its biggest health-care reform in decades. But what was medical treatment like in ancient Greece?
Ancient Greece was, first and foremost, a world full of gods – gods who determined much of people’s lives. So, it will come as no surprise that when ancient Greeks were ill, they often believed a god was responsible for the illness. Epilepsy, for example, was known simply in ancient Greece as the Sacred Disease.
In search for a cure, the Greeks also turned to the gods – either in an effort to appease the god who have caused their illness or to the god of healing, Asclepius, who they hoped would cure them.
The great sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros – which so many people still visit today for its magnificent theatre – was one of the sanctuaries to the god of healing built during the early part of the 4th century BC. People would come to the temple in the sanctuary and pay a fee to the priests to sleep there, hoping the god would come to them in a dream and cure them, or tell them how they could be cured.
But, over time, the god-cure route stopped being the only option. During the 4th century BC, the development of medical knowledge about the human body, and about human illness started to take off.
Hippocratus, for example, whose Hippocratic oath doctors still swear today, was making his investigations of the human body and human disease at just this time and offering alternative practical remedies to many problems that did not depend on the gods.
The sacred disease, it is argued in the Hippocratic corpus of medical writing, had nothing to do with the gods, but had human causes and human solutions. The era of scientific medicine had begun.
By the end of the 4th century BC, the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros may have been genuinely worried about the threat this new ‘medicine’ posed to its flow of ‘customers’. The sanctuary responded by commissioning a whole series of ‘success stories’ to be written up on stone and displayed at the sanctuary.
Those ‘stories on stone’ have survived to today and make fascinating reading. The god is claimed to have helped a woman pregnant for 5 years to give birth, to have cured wounds that had seeped pus for years, to have given the dumb back their voice and even the bald their hair. It seems that, even in ancient Greece, there was disagreement about who provided better healthcare.
Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com
An Ancient Greek sense of humour
http://www.historyextra.com/blog/ancient-greek-sense-humour
Tuesday 14th December 2010
Submitted by: Michael Scott
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Were the ancient Greeks funny? It’s a question not often asked. When thought about, most people will turn to the ‘comedies’ put on at different religio-theatrical festivals across ancient Greece, most notably in Athens. The majority surviving for us today are by Aristophanes, writing across the divide of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, but some also survive by Menander writing later in the 4th century BC.
Aristophanes makes political jokes, imitates the politicians of the day (who without doubt were often sitting in the audience) and uses exaggeration and caricature to pass comment on the social and political well being of the city. The caricature of ‘Demos’ – the people – is, for example, an old man who is easily hood-winked. What we have of Menander on the other hand seems to reveal a comic writer much more concerned with representing a kitchen-sink-drama style portrayal of domestic hilarity.
But did the Ancient Greeks tell jokes? Yes they did. Sources tell of ‘joke-groups’ who met to trade and test their wit, like the group of 60 who met in the Temple of Heracles in Athens in the 4th century BC, and whom even Philip of Macedon paid to send him a collection of their best.
A much later text that has survived down to us is the ‘Philogelos’ – 'the laughter lover' – compiled by Hierocles and Philagrius (of which almost nothing is known) in perhaps the AD 4th century. Here the compilation reveals something of the nature of Greek jokes – and they are surprisingly like are own.
There are those that focus on the ‘buffon’, the idiot, who does something stupid and funny, which have a remarkable parallel, as some scholars have already pointed out, with the ‘English, Scottish and Irish’ jokes still told in Britain today in which the Irish person always does something ridiculous (and which, I’d wager, every country has a version, which simply varies the nationalities).
One ancient Greek idiot joke reads: “An idiot, wanting to go to sleep but not having a pillow, told his slave to set an earthen jar under his head. The slave said that the jug was hard. The idiot told him to fill it with feathers.”
There are also the comic insults, listed so as to be used in instant one-line put downs – “You don’t have a face, but a fireplace” reads one. But my particular favourites are the ‘doctor’ jokes: “A person went to a doctor and said “doctor, whenever I get up from sleeping, I’m groggy for a half an hour afterwards and only after that am I all right” To which the doctor replied: “Get up half an hour later.”
Reprinted from Neos Kosmos www.neoskosmos.com
What was the best wine in the Middle Ages?
BY MEDIEVALISTS.NET – MAY 4, 2014POSTED IN: FEATURES
When medieval people chose what wine to drink, they might check at its colour, smell and taste. More importantly, the choice was often an individual one based what was the healthiest drink for them.
Determining what type of wine to drink in the Middle Ages seems to have been a very complex decision, according to Allen Grieco in his article ‘Medieval and Renaissance Wines: Taste, Dietary Theory, and How the Choose the “Right” Wine (14th-16th Centuries)’ Greico, an expert in food history from Harvard University, focuses on sources from Italy and notes that while the modern wine drinker will place a great deal of importance on where a wine was produced, this did not matter very much for his medieval counterpart.
Instead, some of the ideas behind medieval scientific thought and personal health were considered to be very important in determining what type of wine to drink. It was believed that all things were made up of four qualities – hot, cold, dry and wet – and to maintain good health your meals and drinks had to balance those levels in your body. Grieco writes “In the summer, for example, a season of warm and dry weather, the right kind of food and drink was meant to be humorally ‘cold’ thus allowing the human body to become as ‘temperate’ as possible, for a median humoral constitution was the ideal. Inversely, for old people, who were considered to be naturally ‘cold’, it was suggested that they should be consuming humorally ‘hot’ foods and drinks so as to correct their ‘cold’ constitution.
By the thirteenth-century medical texts were often including large sections about maintaining proper diets, and the drinking of wine was a popular topic. These texts often noted that there was a great deal of difference between wines. For example, the 16th century doctor Cesare Crivallati explains:
there are different types of wines since some of them are new wines, some old ones, some white, some red, some sweet austere, some raw, some cooked, some navigated, others not navigated, some odorous, others lacking odors, some from the mountains, others from the valleys, some powerful, others weak, some fine, others gross, some tasty, others insipid…
Medieval people found there were a lot of colours in wine besides red or white – some could be black (a very dark red), gold, green or pink, and these colours could change as the wines were aged. Smelling the wine was important too – another physician Michel Savonarola commented that “the inhabitants of Padua, who know this better, always shake the wine first in the glass and put their nose to it in order to judge it. If they do not perceive an odor they make fun of the wine saying that it is a very ‘weak’ one.”
Naturally taste also mattered, and while modern-day people usually classify tastes as salty, sweet, acidic and bitter, his medieval counterpart would find anywhere between seven and thirteen types of tastes, including fat, vinegary and brusque. Wine could have a range of tastes, going from strong and sweet to bitter and weak. It was generally recommended that the sweeter wines should be drank only in small quantities and for special occasions, such as wedding feasts. If one drank too much of that kind of wine, it could lead to an overheating of the body, which could damage you physically as well as morally.
Greico adds that:
Once the nature of a given wine was determined it still remained necessary for a consumer to respect at least four other conditions. First of all, it was necessary to know the humoral constitution of he person who was going to drink the wine. Secondly, it was important to determine what food was going to be eaten with it. Thirdly, it was necessary to take into account the time of the year in which the wine was to be drunk and, finally, it was also important to consider the geographical location in which the wine was to be consumed.
This led the wine drinker to consider a dizzying variety of factors in making his choice. For example, if you were eating fish, a cold and moist food, it would be best to have a ‘hot’ wine. However, it was not recommended that young people drink ‘hot’ wine – as Baldassarre Pisanelli explains “it adds fire to fire on top of weak wood.” Meanwhile, if it was wintertime, it might be better to drink a ‘hot’ wine instead of a ‘cold’ one to compensate for the loss of body heat.
One might ask if all these factors into choosing a wine made the drinker just give up and pick the first thing available. Greico finds that in letters and other documents that medieval people seemed to care quite a lot about these rules and even tried to make wine that would better fit within the right guidelines. For example, winemakers were advised that in order to cool a hot wine you should suspend a phial of quick silver or a piece of lead in the middle of a wine barrel, so it could absorb some of the wine’s heat.
The article ‘Medieval and Renaissance Wines: Taste, Dietary Theory, and How the Choose the “Right” Wine (14th-16th Centuries)’ appeared in the journal Mediaevalia, Volume 30 in 2009. This issue was devoted to wine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – click here to see its table of contents.
To learn more about Allen J. Grieco, visit his webpage on the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies website.
See also Wine and Medicine from Hippocrates to the Renaissance
See also Medieval advice to pregnant mothers: don’t drink water, have wine instead
A brief history of how people communicated in the Middle Ages
In an age of mass communication, of 24-hour news and social media, it can seem that medieval Europe was less communicative, and parochial in outlook. Yet medieval Europeans conversed much like we do. Here, historian Laura Crombie reveals how
Friday 24th October 2014
Submitted by: Emma McFarnon
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Official speech
In 14th and 15th-century England, as the Hundred Years’ War raged in France, towns and villages heard about events through official speech – primarily through their priests. The church communicated the successes (or setbacks) of their king to the populace: they required masses or procession for thanksgiving in light of a victory, and prayers and invocations for hopes of a success at the start of campaigns. This helped to build public support for wars and the taxes to pay for them.
Official news could be delivered in both written and oral form. The towns of the late medieval Low Countries (modern Belgium and the Netherlands) were ruled by the powerful Dukes of Burgundy. Charters issued by the dukes were written communications, setting out new rights, laws or taxes, but they also carried a significant aural quality: charters would have been read out at specific places in towns, known as bretèches, or in churches or at important civic events.
Rumour and subversive communication
Communication of legislation was important for medieval rulers, but, as today, people were also able to spread rumours and gossip. It is not always clear where medieval, or indeed modern, rumours began, but there is no doubt that they could spread quickly.
In the second half of the 14th century, England saw great upheaval and challenges: the war with France was going badly, and at home the Black Death, beginning in 1348–9, had killed at least a third of the population. Survivors might have hoped for better conditions, as a smaller work force tried to demand higher wages, but this was stopped by the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers setting wages at the pre-plague level.
In 1381 this famously erupted into the violence of the Peasants’ Revolt, but in 1377 there were already signs of discontent, manifested in the ‘Great Rumour’. This social movement, spread by word of mouth across southern England, saw rural labourers refusing to work, arguing that the Domesday Book granted them exemptions form their feudal services.
Messengers and networks
In 12th-century England, kings did not stay in London – rather, they travelled around their lands. This necessitated an organised and efficient messenger service, ensuring that correspondence reached the king, and that royal letters, grants, patents and orders arrived at their intended destination. Messengers therefore became a permanent royal expenditure, paid continuously and travelling the kingdom to carry the king’s word.
The English system was efficient, allowing news to be carried quickly: in 1290 Edward I summoned a parliament to grant new taxes. The order, or writ, for the taxes was issued on 22 September at Edward’s hunting lodge in King’s Clipstone, in the Midlands. This was carried to the Privy Seal Office and then to the Barons of the Exchequer, in Westminster. The Exchequer then issued its own writs on 6 October to the sheriffs, ordering them to begin collections between the 18th and 29th of the month.
Thus, less than a month after Edward’s order, his messages had been transmitted to London and then out to the counties, and commissioners had begun their task.
Visual communication
As well as sending written messages, hearing official news from their priests, or listening to rumours spread form village to village, medieval people could also see messages. Late medieval clothing carried layers of meaning, and can be considered a potent means of communication – this is to an extent true also of the modern world, with black for funerals or badges and wrist bands to support causes.
On the battlefield, banners and coats of arms showed armies’ friend from foe, and royal standards enabled soldiers to see where their king was located. Coats of arms further marked out who was of a noble rank, and so worth taking prisoner, and who was not, meaning that being well dressed was about far more than vanity.
The wearing of badges and livery – clothes that bore a symbol, or particular colours or designs – marked out allegiance and community. Though their survival is rare, pilgrim badges were very common: they marked out those who had been on a religious journey, and acted as a souvenir, worn to show that one was devout and had visited Canterbury, or even Rome.
Guilds used badges or liveries to mark out their members, ensuring that anyone looking to buy goods or services in the medieval town would recognise a guild members from less reputable trades – visual forms of identification showed belonging and communicated identify and status.
Laura Crombie is a lecturer in late medieval history at the University of York. On Saturday 15 November she will be taking part in a colloquium on Communication in the Middle Ages at Lock keeper’s Cottage, Queen Mary, University of London, being held to mark London Medieval Society's 70th anniversary. To find out more, click here.
Medieval kebabs and pasties: 5 foods you (probably) didn’t know were being eaten in the Middle Ages
Roast boars and flagons of wine might be what most of us conjure up when we think of medieval cookery. But contemporary sources suggest that our ancestors enjoyed a wide variety of cuisine, and were adventurous in their tastes, too. Here, freelance writer George Dobbs reveals five examples of commonplace courtly dishes that wouldn't look too out of place on your dinner table today
Tuesday 26th August 2014
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Sweet and sour
Sweet and sour rabbit is one of the more curious dishes included in Maggie Black's The Medieval Cookbook. Found in a collection of 14th-century manuscripts called the Curye on Inglish, it includes sugar, red wine vinegar, currants, onions, ginger and cinnamon (along with plenty of “powdour of peper”) to produce a sticky sauce with more than a hint of the modern Chinese takeaway.
The recipe probably dates as far back as the Norman Conquest, when the most surprising ingredient for Saxons would have been rabbit, only recently introduced to England from continental Europe.
Pasta
In the same manuscript we find instructions for pasta production, with fine flour used to “make therof thynne foyles as paper with a roller, drye it hard and seeth it in broth”. This was known as 'losyns', and a typical dish involved layering the pasta with cheese sauce to make another English favourite: lasagne.
Sadly the lack of tomatoes meant there was no rich bolognese to go along with the béchamel, but it was still a much-loved dish, and was served at the end of meals to help soak up the large amount of alcohol you were expected to imbibe – much as an oily kebab might today.
In Thomas Austin's edition of Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, you can find several other pasta recipes, including ravioli and Lesenge Fries – a sugar and saffron doughnut, similar to the modern Italian feast day treats such as frappe or castagnole. The full edition, including hundreds of medieval recipes, can be found online through the University of Michigan database.
Rice dishes
Rice was grown in Europe as early as the 8th century by Spanish Moors. By the 15th century it was produced across Spain and Italy, and exported to all corners of Europe in vast quantities. The brilliant recipe resource www.medievalcookery.com shows the wide variety of ways in which rice was used, including three separate medieval references to a dish called blancmager.
Rather than the pudding you might expect, blancmager was actually a soft rice dish, combining chicken or fish with sugar and spices. Due to its bland nature, it was possibly served to invalids as a restorative.
There were also sweet rice dishes, including rice drinks and a dish called prymerose, which combined honey, almonds, primroses and rice flour to make a thick rice pudding.
Pasties
Wrapping food in pastry was commonplace in medieval times. It meant that meat could be baked in stone ovens without being burnt or tarnished by soot, while also forming a rich, thick gravy.
Pie crusts were elaborately decorated to show off the status of the host, and diners would often discard it to get to the filling. However, there were also pastry dishes intended to be eaten as a whole. In The Goodman of Paris, translated into English by Eileen Power, we find a recipe for cheese and mushroom pasties, and we're even given instruction on how to pick our ingredients, with “mushrooms of one night... small, red inside and closed at the top” being the most suitable.
Candy
Subtleties are a famous medieval culinary feature. The term actually encompasses the notion of entertainment with food as well as elaborate savoury dishes, but it's most often used to refer to lavish constructions of almond and sugar that were served at the end of the meal.
These weren't the only way to indulge a sweet tooth, however. Maggie Black describes a recipe in the Curye on Inglish that combines pine nuts with sugar, honey and breadcrumbs to give a chewy candy. And long before it was a health food, almond milk was a commonplace drink at medieval tables.
So what have we learned? From just a few examples it's easy to see that, despite technological restrictions, cookery of this period wasn't necessarily unskilled or unpalatable. It's true that a cursory glance over recipe collections reveals odd dishes such as gruel and compost, which look about as appetising as their names suggest. But for every grim oddity there were many more meals that still sound mouthwatering today. In fact, many of our modern favourites may have roots in medieval kitchens.
George Dobbs is a freelance writer who specialises in literature and history.
"People in the Middle Ages coped better with death than we do"
Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death airs on BBC Four on Wednesday 9 October at 9pm
Monday 7th October 2013
Submitted by: Emma McFarnon
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We spoke to historian Helen Castor about her new television series examining how people in the Middle Ages handled the most fundamental moments of transition in life – birth, marriage and death.
Looking back at a time before antiseptics or anesthetics, when death stalked the moment of birth, Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death will reveal how labour was one of the most dangerous moments a medieval woman would ever encounter.
The series will also see the historian and author explore the rite of passage that was medieval marriage, before investigating how people in the Middle Ages had a mutual interest in helping their peers to have "a good death".
Castor, who earlier this year presented She-Wolves: England's Early Queens, told us more about the three-part Medieval Lives series, which first airs on Wednesday 9 October.
Q: How did you come to be involved in this series about medieval lives?
A: We used the Paston family as a starting point. Some years ago I wrote a biography of the Pastons – a 15th-century gentry family living in north Norfolk.
They were a family as interesting as any other, but what’s unique about them is that many of their letters still survive. Their letters are the earliest collection of private correspondence in English.
So you can write a biography of the Paston family in a way you cannot for anyone else in the 15th century. You get more of a glimpse of the private experience of life, including birth, marriage and death.
Those events are the architecture of our lives – they were then, and they are now.
We used the Paston family as a starting point, but we wanted to show the differences in experiences up and down the social hierarchy.
We’ve told stories from the perspective of the royal family, and others from people at village level, trying to work out how these rituals were played out.
We wanted to see the continuities, and understand where the differences came in.
Q: What struck you most about your findings?
A: What struck me was how birth and death were so close together. Giving birth was a situation where death could appear at any moment, so the reality of the next world would weigh heavy on people’s perceptions of this world.
When filming the birth episode, it really was a case of part detective work and part journey of exploration, because birth was such a private experience.
It was women’s work; it happened behind closed doors. Men wrote history then, so there were very few records kept.
But today, we watch it on TV – you have One Born Every Minute and The Midwives – and we give birth in public buildings. It’s a very different way of thinking about things.
Also, doctors were men, so they did not go into the birthing room. So we have a gulf between medical theory and practical experience.
And there was the overriding importance of a baptism saving the soul. You were considered born in a state of original sin, so if a baby was dying in labour the midwife could perform a baptism there and then.
Women were not allowed to perform such rituals in any other aspect of life.
And going back to the closeness between life and death – when we visited the bone crypt in Rothwell, where there are two small rooms full of the remains of 1,500 people, I was struck by how the dead were part of the community of the faithful.
The living needed to be aware of the dead.
It was very powerful being there. When you look at a room full of skulls you begin to see faces, as they are all different. It was a privilege to be there.
Q: There seem to be a number of differences between how people in the Middle Ages dealt with birth, marriage and death, compared to now. Can we draw any parallels?
A: Yes, certainly. Marriage was a huge rite of passage because it was society’s way of managing sex and establishing the building blocks of society.
It presented a fascinating challenge to society, and we are still going through this now. It’s a current issue, as we think about who should be allowed to marry.
And the medieval marriage ceremony is absolutely recognisable today. And there’s still a debate about whether, and in what circumstances, marriage should be allowed to end.
The church taught that all that was needed for a marriage was two people making vows to one another. You didn’t need a priest or witnesses. But marriage was absolutely undissolvable.
If you wanted to separate from your husband and wife, the best way was to argue you had never been married in the first place.
Or a marriage could be annulled if the husband was impotent, if partners had been married before, or if you could claim one of the partners was mad.
What you get through these technical legalities is a snapshot of the palpably human experience.
Also, like today there were age restrictions on marriage. The age of consent was 12 for a girl and 14 for a boy.
There is a resonance in how we cope with new life and with the loss of life. But I was left feeling that we, as a society, don’t know how to cope with death anymore.
In the Middle Ages you had ritual and collective understanding. Death was a supported and shared experience.
Everyone had an interest in helping people to have ‘a good death’, because they hoped they in turn would be helped also.
You didn’t have the isolation and denial we feel in relation to death today.
But I think you find more points of contact than you at first might think. People in the Middle Ages can feel so far away, and you can think they were remote and full of superstition, but when you find traces of their emotions, they are instantly recognisable.
Q: The series promises to explore how religion affected the way people dealt with birth, marriage and death. How did it, exactly?
A: Religion was a framework within which life and death were understood. But the Reformation changed that framework a great deal.
The idea of death was centred around purgatory - ie that all repentant sinners would spend time in purgatory, but people would be praying for them on Earth and they would not remain there forever.
But purgatory was effectively ‘removed’ by Protestants. The whole architecture of provision for the dead changed, and those changes reached the birthing room too.
Holy objects that were used to help women in labour were outlawed by the Reformation.
Relics were destroyed and prayers deemed superstitious – overnight, these things were not allowed anymore.
One could argue the Protestant world view was, in its plainness and rigour, bereft of comfort.
The first episode of Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death airs on Wednesday 9 October at 9pm. To find out more, click here.
Castor is the author of Blood & Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, published in paperback by Faber
A time traveller’s guide to medieval shopping
Ian Mortimer, author of Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, takes us on a shopping trip in a 14th-century marketplace
This article was first published in the October 2008 issue of BBC History Magazine.
Monday 1st September 2014
Submitted by: Emma McFarnon
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The poet WH Auden once suggested that, in order to understand your own country, you need to have lived in at least two others. But what about your own time? By the same reckoning, you need to have experienced at least two other centuries. This presents us with some difficulties. But through historical research, coming to terms with another century is not impossible.
We can approach the past as if it really is ‘a foreign country’ – somewhere we might visit. And we do not actually need to travel in time to appreciate it – just the idea of visiting the past allows us to see life differently, and more immediately. Come shopping in the late 14th century and see for yourself.
The marketplace
“Ribs of beef and many a pie!” you hear someone call over your shoulder. Turning, you see a young lad walking through the crowd bearing a tray laden with wooden bowls of cooked meats from a local shop.
All around him people are moving, gesturing, talking. So many have come in from the surrounding villages that this town of about 3,000 inhabitants is today thronged with twice as many. Here are men in knee-length brown tunics driving their cattle before them. Here are their wives in long kirtles with wimples around their heads and necks. Those men in short tunics and hoods are valets in a knight’s household. Those in long gowns with high collars and beaver-fur hats are wealthy merchants. Across the marketplace more peasants are leading in their flocks of sheep, or packhorses and carts loaded with crates of chickens.
Crowds are noisy. People are talking so much that chatter could almost be the whole purpose of the market – and in many ways it is. This is the one open public area in the town where people can meet and exchange information. When a company performs a mystery play, it is to the marketplace that they will drag the cart containing their stage, set and costumes. When the town crier rings his bell to address the people of the town, it is in the marketplace that the crowd will gather to hear him. The marketplace is the heart of any town: indeed, the very definition of a town is that it has a market.
What can you buy? Let’s start at the fishmongers’ stalls. You may have heard that many sorts of freshwater and sea fish are eaten in medieval England. Indeed, more than 150 species are consumed by the nobility and churchmen, drawn from their own fishponds as well as the rivers and seas.
But in most markets it is the popular varieties which you see glistening in the wet hay-filled crates. Mackerel, herring, lampreys, cod, eels, Aberdeen fish (cured salmon and herring), and stockfish (salt cod) are the most common varieties. Crabs and lobsters are transported live, in barrels. In season you will see fresh salmon – attracting the hefty price of four or five shillings each. A fresh turbot can cost even more, up to seven shillings.
Next we come to an area set aside for corn: sacks of wheat, barley, oats and rye are piled up, ready for sale to the townsmen. Then the space given over to livestock: goats, sheep, pigs and cows. A corner is devoted to garden produce – apples, pears, vegetables, garlic and herbs – yet the emphasis of a medieval diet is on meat, cheese and cereal crops. In a large town you will find spicerers selling such exotic commodities as pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, liquorice, and many different types of sugar.
These are only for the wealthy. When your average skilled workman earns only two shillings (2s) in a week, he can hardly afford to spend four shillings (4s) on a pound of cloves or 20 pence (20d) on a pound of ginger.
The rest of the marketplace performs two functions. Producers come to sell fleeces, sacks of wool, tanned hides, furs, iron, steel and tin for resale further afield. The other function is to sell manufactured commodities to local people: brass and bronze cooking vessels, candlesticks and spurs, pewterware, woollen cloth, silk, linen, canvas, carts, rushes (for hall floors), glass, faggots, coal, nails, horse shoes and planks of wood.
Planks, you ask? Consider the difficulties of transporting a tree trunk to a saw pit, and then getting two men to saw it into planks with only a handsaw between them.
Everyone in medieval society is heavily dependent on each other for such supplies, and the marketplace is where all these interdependencies meet.
Haggling
Essential items such as ale and bread have their prices fixed by law. Yet for almost everything that’s been manufactured you will have to negotiate. Caxton’s 15th-century dialogue book is based on a 14th-century language guide, and gives the following lesson in
how to haggle with a cloth vendor:
“Dame, what hold ye the ell (45 inches) of this
cloth? Or what is worth the cloth whole?
In short, so to speak, how much the ell?”
“Sire, reason; ye shall have it good and cheap.”
“Yea, truly, for cattle. Dame, ye must me win.
Take heed what I shall pay.”
“Four shillings for the ell, if it please you.”
“For so much would I have good scarlet.”
“But I have some which is not of the best
which I would not give for seven shillings.”
“But this is no such cloth, of so much money,
that know ye well!”
“Sire, what is it worth?”
“Dame, it were worth to me well three shillings.”
“That is evil-boden.”
“But say certainly how shall I have it without
a part to leave?”
“I shall give it ye at one word: ye shall pay five
shillings, certainly if ye have them for so many
ells, for I will abate nothing.”
And so you open your purse, which hangs from the cords attached to your belt and find five shillings. Except that there is no shilling coin in the late 14th century. The smallest gold coins are the half-noble (3s 4d) and the quarter-noble (1s 8d), so if you have one each of these, you can make up the sum. Alternatively you will have to make it up from the silver coins: groats (4d), half-groats, pennies, halfpence and farthings (¼d).
Regulations
A well-run market is crucial to the standing of a town. Thus it is heavily regulated. The actual policing tends to be undertaken by the town’s bedels or bailiffs, who enforce regulations like “no horses may be left standing in the marketplace on market days” and “every man is to keep the street in front of his tenement clean”. Most towns have between 40 and 70 regulations, and those breaking them are taken to the borough court and fined.
There are reasons to be grateful for the supervision of trade. Short measures are a notorious problem, and turners normally have to swear to make wooden measures of the appropriate size. Clerks in borough courts will tell you of cooking pots being made out of soft metal and coated with brass, and loaves of bread baked with stones in them to make them up to the legally required weight.
Wool is stretched before it is woven, to make it go further (but then it shrinks). Pepper is sold damp, making it swell, weigh more, and rot sooner. Meat is sometimes sold even though it is putrid, wine even though it has turned sour, and bread when it has gone green.
If you are the victim of malpractice, go straight to the authorities. The perpetrator will be pilloried – literally. The pillory is the wooden board which clasps the guilty man’s head and hands, and shamefully exposes him to the insults of the crowd.
A butcher selling bad meat can expect to be dragged through the streets of the town on a hurdle and then placed in the pillory with the rotten meat burnt under him. A vintner caught selling foul wine is dragged to the pillory on a hurdle, forced to drink a draught of the offending liquor, and then set in the pillory where the remainder is poured over his head.
The sweetness of the revenge makes up for the sourness of the wine.
Shopping in the 14th century will often remind you of how much we have in common with our medieval forebears. It will likewise alert you to the huge differences between us. We are not the same as our ancestors. Look at how young they are – the median age is just 21 – and look at the meagre diet of the poor, their rotten teeth as they smile, their resilience in the face of death.
Consider how rough and smelly the streets are, and how small the sheep and cattle are in the marketplace. When a fight breaks out over some stolen goods, and the bedels rush to intervene, you may see how the spirit of the people is so similar to our own and yet how much the process of managing that spirit has changed. For if the stolen goods are of sufficient value, the thieves will be summarily tried and hanged the same day. This is what makes history so interesting – the differences between us across the centuries, as well as the similarities.
At dusk – just before the great gates of the city are closed for the night, and you see everyone leaving the adjacent taverns – you may begin to think that Auden was on to something. To understand ourselves, we must first see society differently – and to remember that history is the study of the living, not the dead.
Facts
Prices in the 1390s*
Ale, ordinary: ¾d–1d per gallon
Wine from Bordeaux: 3d–4d per gallon
Bacon: 15d per side
Chicken: 2d each
Cod, fresh: 20d each
Sugar, loaf of: 18d per lb
Apples: 7d per hundred
Eggs: 33d for 425
A furred gown: 5s 4d
* Prices from the account books of Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Derby.
Wages/salaries in the 1390s
The king’s physician: £40 per year
Officers in the royal household: £20 per year
Mason: £8 per year (6d per day)
Carpenter: 4¼d per day
Thatcher: 4¼d per day
Labourer: 3¼d per day
Valets in a lord’s household: £1 10s per year
Manservant in a yeoman’s household: £1 per year
Maidservant in a yeoman’s household: 10s per year
In old money, there were 12 pence (d) to the shilling (s) and 20 shillings to the pound (£).
Clerical Conceptions of Magic and the Stereotype of the Female Witch
BY MEDIEVALISTS.NET – APRIL 24, 2012POSTED IN: ARTICLES
Hans Baldung – The Witches Sabbath (1510 AD)
Clerical Conceptions of Magic and the Stereotype of the Female Witch
By Matthew Alexander Moebius
Oshkosh Scholar, Vol.6 (2011)
Abstract: Working from the foundation laid by leading historians of medieval witchcraft — most notably Richard Kieckhefer, Norman Cohn, Michael Bailey, and Hans Peter Broedel — this study examines the conceptual development of a predominantly feminine witchcraft stereotype as understood within the perceptions of the educated clerical elite. The theories of these historians, each approaching the study of witchcraft in different ways and addressing mostly separate aspects of the phenomenon, are reconciled with one another and tied together in hitherto unarticulated ways to form a single, cohesive narrative of the emergence of the idea of the exclusively female witch. The gradual evolution of clerical conceptions of magic shifted in the later Middle Ages from a masculine conception to a more gender-neutral one, opening the door to feminization. The construction of the witches’ sabbat, influenced by largely feminine pagan mythological motifs, pushed the idea in the direction of a female conception. Finally, influential writings dominated by aggressively misogynistic ideology finalized the association between women and witchcraft.
In the last four decades, the historical work done on late medieval witchcraft has been extensive. This scholarship has found the general topic of witchcraft to be one of immeasurable complexity, and therefore, the general approach of historians of medieval witchcraft has been to narrow their individual studies. Historians Richard Kieckhefer and Norman Cohn have done foundational work on the conceptual development of witchcraft. Kieckhefer’s early work produced detailed analyses of trial records, including inquisitorial interrogations and witness testimonies, with the ultimate goal of uncovering how witchcraft was perceived by the common populace. Cohn’s study of the relationship between witchcraft mythology and ideas associated with earlier heretical groups is still heavily relied upon by current witchcraft historians. Much excellent work has also been done by recent historians, notably Michael D. Bailey and Hans Peter Broedel. Bailey’s work has emphasized the role of the evolution of general conceptions of magic throughout the Middle Ages in contributing to the creation of a defined system of witchcraft mythology in the fifteenth century. Broedel’s primary focus has been on the influential 1487 anti-witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum, and on the various elements that make up the construction of witchcraft represented therein.
One of the specific aspects of witchcraft that has seen considerable attention in recent years is its relationship to gender. Both Bailey and Broedel have made admirable contributions to uncovering the historical development of a feminine witch concept. Bailey’s theories of the feminization of the witchcraft concept tie in with his larger ideas on the evolution of clerical conceptions of magic. Broedel has discussed at length the influence of feminine mythological motifs taken from pagan traditions. Each present compelling ideas, but in each case the specificity of the scope of their arguments has limited the overall effectiveness of their conclusions. This study builds on the foundations laid by these historians’ theories. It will draw not only on these recent studies of witchcraft and gender, but also on the general scholarship of witchcraft mythology. Combined with clues from the primary sources, the threads of these historical arguments will be woven together into a more cumulative view of the gender associations of medieval witchcraft.
Click here to read this article from Oshkosh Scholar
在這些偶爾由拉丁文引起的厭惡和憎恨感中，我們最好注意到學生對過去領受的教育還有一個更全面的評價。別忘了這些「反抗者」中，有些人（以蘭波為首）在中學曾是非常優秀的拉丁語學生，而其他人（如：福樓拜、義大利政治家喬大尼、英國小說家特羅洛普）在重拾求學時代所憎惡的拉丁文時，都在其中發現極大的樂趣。
