Gorgeous Glass

I read in one of my history journals that five hand-painted stained glass masterpieces from sixteenth century Germany have been discovered in South Wales. The pieces in question were removed from Steinfeld Abbey near Cologne in 1803 during the French occupation of the district

The glass, which had previously been put into storage by the monks, was sold to a local dealer when the Abbey was secularised. From there it was sold to an expatriate German business man by the name of John Christopher Hamp, who was based in Norwich. Hamp sold them on to various wealthy clients, who either installed them in their own houses or donated them to local churches.

During the last century scholars discovered various panels in houses, chapels and churches in Hertfordshire, Cheshire, Norfolk and Bristol. In 1928 the Hertfordshire panels were bought by Ernest Cook, the grandson of the travel agent, who donated them to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they remain to the present day.

The Welsh panels are the first fresh discoveries in twenty years. Although gratifying it still represents only a tiny fraction of the collection that is still missing, possibly broken up, or possibly close to where you live, somewhere in the manor houses and churches of England and Wales. Who knows what you are looking through? :-)

Daughters of Diana

I love hunting, I have since I rode to hounds for the fist time when I was twelve years old. I’ve also enjoyed a spot of rough shooting now and then, small game. It’s just a thrill; I offer no excuse or justification beyond that; I have absolutely no guilt or regrets. I like to think of myself as one of the daughters of Artemis, Diana, if you prefer, one of strigae, the wild women who followed the goddess in the hunt. But through the ages, at least until modern times, the practice of hunting has been seen as the preserve of men. It pleased me to read a nice corrective to this assumption, an article by Richard Almond entitled The Medieval Huntress in the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine.

Although hunting in the medieval period was universally popular among men, there is little or no mention of female hunters in the texts that have survived from the period. But taking a wider view, looking at illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, paintings, carvings, engravings and prints, women, women from all social classes, can be seen taking part in all sorts of sport. There, at one level, are the great ladies of court, pursuing deer on horseback or shooting driven game, while at the other level peasant women net birds, ferreted rabbits and even poach venison.

Most often these women are depicted alongside male companions but they can also been seen hunting or hawking on their own or with other women. In a miniature from The Romance of Alexander, held in the Bodleian Library, women are depicted hunting on foot. On the left two are shown hunting hart with dogs, one with a hunting horn, the other thrusting a cross-hilted spear into a beast caught by one of her hounds. One the right another two are shown hawking, one recalls her bird with the aid of a lure, while two further hawks swoop down on a duck.

Perhaps the greatest Renaissance huntress was Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II of France, who was portrayed as Diana herself, reclining on a hart with one of her favourite hounds in marble as The Diana of Anet. There are other depictions of her as the goddess in several portraits of the period.

Certeine wicked women following sathans prouocations being seduced by the illusions of diuels, beleeve and professe, that in the night times they ride abroad with Diana, the goddesse of the Pagans, or else with Herodias, with an innumerable multitude...

Great is Diana of the Ephesians; greater still is Diana of the huntress. :-)

Blood and Wind-a Voyage into Medieval Atheism

I read a really interesting article in the BBC History Magazine (January, 2009) while sipping my morning tea! It’s called Doomed or Disinterested?, written by one John H Arnold. It concerns the degree to which some people in the Middle-Ages developed an active scepticism towards the teachings of the church.

Now, I had always known that, throughout its history, their had been dissenters and apostates within the Catholic community, though I had assumed that in the high Middle Ages such people would be more likely to embrace one heresy or another rather than outright disbelief. But many did. We cannot be sure just how many but it was a concern to those who wrote on religious questions at the time.

The question of transubstantiation, the concern that the act of faith was not enough in itself among the laity, was particularly troublesome. William of Pagula wrote that priests should not rest on the theological dogma alone, but provided more practical reasons enabling them to persuade their parishioners. The bread, he says, is not experienced as flesh and blood so that it does not provoke “horror” in those receiving it; so that “pagans” do not ridicule Christians; and because people are “not accustomed to eating bleeding flesh.” Yes, he does!

Some of the ‘miracles’ of the day were, in point of fact, conceived to overcome practical doubts about the Eucharist. In one popular tale a woman receiving the sacrament from Pope Gregory the Great burst out laughing when he declared that it was the body of Christ. When asked why she is said to have replied, “Because I heard you say that the bread I made with my own hands is God’s body.” Immediately the bread changed into the shape of a finger and the woman recovered her faith! Precious, is it not?

I suppose these cases could be taken as an example of proto-Protestantism, a belief that communion is only a symbolic act. But there are also cases of outright and simple atheism or scepticism, right across Europe. Giordano of Pisa said of this, “There are many people today who do not believe that there is another life, or that things could be better than in this one." Another wrote of those ‘unbelievers’ who are unhappy when their loved ones died because they do not believe that they will ever see them again.

My favourite example of this common-sense scepticism is that of Guillemette Benet of Oracle in southern France, who lived in the late fourteenth century. She is reported to have told her neighbours on several occasions that the soul is nothing but blood or wind. She reached this conclusion for two reasons; first when she banged her nose and noted the subsequent bleeding; and second, when she observed the death of a friend’s child, noting only the exhalation of air at the end. From this she deduced there was no heaven and no hell; no afterlife at all.

Blood and Wind. I shall write a book with such a title one day; truly I shall.

Medieval Childhood

People are always people, and there is no reason to suppose that Medieval parents did not treat their little ones with as much love and affection as those today. Of course, there are always exceptions, and people were more subject to the vagaries of circumstances, particularly economic circumstances, in the past than they are in modern societies; at least in the developed world. However, Medieval sources provide plenty of evidence that attitudes towards childhood have varied remarkably little over time, although, of course, there was a much greater emphasis on corporal punishment in the past. Allowing for all due differences in lifestyle and culture, Medieval children grew up in much the same way as children today.

Let's begin by looking at the very first stages of life. Writing in the thirteenth century, Bartholomew of England observed "The mother loves her own child most tenderly, embraces and kisses it, nurses and cares for it most solicitously." About the same time, Philip of Navara said;

God gave children three gifts: to love and recognise the person who nurses him at her breast; to show 'joy and love' to those who play with him; and to inspire love and tenderness in those who rear him, of which the last is the most important, for 'without this, they will be so dirty and annoying in infancy and so naughty and capricious that it is hardly worth nurturing them through childhood

In Montaillou, his seminal study of life in a French village, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie documents the affectionate interplay between parents and babies, including adults enjoying the sensation of a baby’s skin against there own. In the circumstances of the day, given the low level of medical knowledge, and the general problems caused by hygiene and the transmission of disease, a great many babies and young children died, but again there is ample evidence that these losses were felt severely.

Medieval adults, moreover, had a clear concept of childhood as a distinct phase of life. They believed, in other words, that children progressed through a series of stages, the so-called 'ages of man', each with its own specific features. This was recognised also by both the church and the state: children below the 'age of majority', generally reckoned in the high Middle Ages as between 12 and 14, were not expected to undertake the same religious and legal obligations as adults. When they committed sins, or breached the code of law, they were generally treated with greater leniency than adults.

When children took ill there is again ample evidence that parents did everything in their power to deal with the problem. In some cases this involved, often at considerable expense, trips to sacred shrines, to pray for divine intervention. At Canterbury in the late twelfth century we hear, for example, of one Guibert of Thanet bringing his crippled daughter to the shrine of Thomas Becket, the two walking the whole way, the little girl supporting herself on a staff. Another man came from Folkestone on horseback with his seven-year-old daughter, who could not feed herself because of crippled fingers. Many other parents made the same journey, inspired by stories of St. Thomas' miraculous cures.

Children were also expected to have their own society, with codes of conduct developed in interaction with their fellows. In 1398, the English writer John Trevisa observed that the young "love talkings and counsels of such children as they are, and foresake and avoid the company of the old." The important point here is that children were given the liberty to develop their own unique customs and culture, and there is a lot of recorded detail, concerning the games, rhymes and songs of the time. Play is also well-recorded. In the fifteenth century, the poet John Lydgate mentions running, leaping, singing, dancing, wrestling, climbing trees to steal fruit, football, chess and many other such games. The paintings of Brueghel the Elder give depictions of some of these activities. Similar depictions are to be found in marginal illustrations of the fourteenth century Romance of Alexander, which also show children on hobby horses and playing blind man's buff.

There were also toy manufacturers who catered specifically for children. In the London of 1300 boys could buy model knights and other such toys. These, I think it worth stressing, were not hand made, but cast in moulds, and therefore mass produced. Miniature domestic items were also produced for girls; plates, bowls, jugs and the like. Children's literature, moreover, can be traced as far back as the reign of Richard II.

Education was also important for Medieval parents, and there were a great many schools, though these benefited boys more than girls, who trended to receive what education they had at home from their mothers. The curriculum may have been more limited than today, but masters were no less keen for their charges to develop their imaginations, and pupils were encouraged to write about the things that they liked in their notebooks. A number of these survive after 1400, with scraps of songs and riddles.

Yes, life may have been different. Yes, there were risks. But children were still children; subjects, not objects.

Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages

I begin with Johan Huizinga's classic study, The Waning of the Middle Ages, where he says that crime was "...a menace to order and society, as well as an insult to divine majesty. Thus it was natural that the late Middle Ages should become the special period of judicial cruelty."

One has to consider punishment in this context, not so much as retribution but as spectacle more than anything else. It should not be assumed, moreover, that this was simply a top-down process, a way of 'educating' the community in the severity of the law. There was also a considerable amount of popular pressure for criminals to receive forms of punishment that were both harsh and terrifying. In 1389 in England popular pressure persuaded Parliament to petition the king for the limiting of pardons granted for violent crimes.

The Middle Ages were violent for one reason or another. Legitimate and public violence was considered to be the only way of dealing with illegitimate and private violence. There was no prison, so all punishment had to carry some deterrent purpose; either the absolute deterrence of execution, or relative forms of deterrence implied in mutilation of one kind or other, which required the wrongdoer to live forever in the community carrying the stigma of his or her error. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes;

The torture and punishments of civil justice customarily cut of hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls.

Yes, it was terror; but it was also about forms of reassurance: that justice was being served and society protected: the more extreme the crime, the more extreme the punishment. Even 'clemency', when it was exercised, was, if anything, even more barbarous. In England in 1221 one Thomas of Eldersfield was reprieved from hanging at the last moment. In a show of ‘mercy’ he was blinded and castrated instead! Robert Bartlett described the scene that followed, "...the eyes were thrown to the ground and the testicles used as footballs, the local lads kicking them playfully at the girls." It was all part of the salutary spectacle.

It would be wrong to assume, though, that the didactic purpose of punishment ended with the Middle Ages. In Discipline and Punish, Michael Foucault describes the Gothic intensity with which Robert-François Damiens was done to death in 1757 for the attempted assassination of Louis XV. It was the apotheosis, it might be said, of execution as public display; of natural and divinely-ordained retribution.

The Danse Macabre-a Legacy of Christian Terror

Death, death; O amiable lovely death!
Thou odouriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows
And ring these fingers with thy household worms
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust
And be a carrion monster like thyself:
Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smilest
And buss thee as thy wife. Misery's love,
O, come to me!
King John, Act III, Scene 4

I had breakfast this morning pouring over a fascinating journal piece on Death and the Danse Macabre. There is a development in the perceptions of death, in the manner in which death related to life. In the Pagan World death is a presence, yes, but one quite different from that of Christian Middle Ages. The Romans, for example, accepted Homer’s identification of Death as the elder brother of Sleep, and the two are often depicted together as winged genii on funeral monuments. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, were in the habit of introducing a sarcophagus to the festive table as a reminder of the fragility of life;

Behold this image of what you yourself will be; eat and drink therefore and be happy.

Plutarch later took up this notion, though in his account a skeleton was displayed. This was another custom adopted by the Romans, as can be seen in Petronius’ Dinner of Trimalchio, though here a jointed puppet takes the place of the skeleton.

The point to all this was not that death was to be feared: it was no more than the implacable will of the gods. In essence it was a spur aimed at redoubling carnal pleasures in the midst of a transitory existence. It was an invitation, if you like, to even greater sin.

Then, like the ghost of Banqo, Christianity arrived at the feast, with a dead and deadening hand. Now an eternity of suffering was the promised ‘reward’ of carnal sin. Death was thus reborn as a figure of terror, the gatekeeper to a world of even greater terrors. Thus was born the Danse Macabre.

Now the skeleton reappears in paintings and frescos across Europe, leading the living in a gruesome dance. The pageant begins in earnest in the fourteenth century, the age of the Black Death, and continues beyond. The skeleton takes the hand of all, from Emperor to Peasant, leading them onwards in an irresistible caper, often in procession, with the partners walking hand-in hand. Death is not at the end of life; he is there forcing his presence on every scene of pleasure, or of love, or of simple family intimacy. He takes at will; he takes the child from the mother, the wife from the husband; he separates lovers, forcing his own intimate embraces on the one or the other.

Fear of death, even in an age when the Danse Macabre has been consigned to the edges of consciousness, is arguably the most lasting Christian legacy

Prostitution in the Middle Ages

London's licensed brothels, located in a street known as Bankside, upstream from London Bridge, were all closed in 1546. Some of these establishments dated at least as far back as the fourteenth century, perhaps even all the way back to the twelfth century, to the reign of Henry II. Indeed, up to the Reformation, the whole practice of prostitution was tolerated and regulated, though brothels tended to be consigned to the fringes of town, along with the leper houses. The women were usually supervised by some public functionary. In Paris he was known as le roi des ribauds-the king of the ribalds. In Geneva, in contrast, the women were allowed to regulate themselves, appointing their own la reine du bordel-queen of the brothel.

The Medieval Church certainly viewed fornication as a mortal sin-and people may remember Chaucer's Summoner, always on the quest for 'bawdy women'-though, in practice, the clerical authorities took a fairly liberal approach when it came to the whole question of enforcement. This involved acceptance of licensed brothels as a 'necessary evil'. Thomas of Chobham was prepared to allow that the closure of such establishments might lead to even greater offenses. Even St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest of the Church Fathers, took the same pragmatic view, saying that "If you do away with harlots, the world will be consumed with lust." For Thomas Aquinas prostitution was likened to a sewer in a palace; take it away and the building would fill with pollution. As Thomas viewed it, a world without prostitutes was a world full of sodomites, by far the greatest offense!

So, for both Church and State, the message was disapproval but acceptance. The Reformers brought disapproval and suppression, part of a more general attack of the lax moral standards of the old Catholic world. Prostitution survived, of course, but under increasingly adverse conditions. But the old world had ended; the world of Falstaff, of the Merry Wives of Windsor, of Nell Quickly, swept away by a new Puritanism, depicted by Shakespeare at the end of Henry IV Part II, when Henry V decides to clear the whores from Cheapside.

Inside the Medieval mind; sex, misogyny and passion

I was going over my old notes and came across some from last year, drawn from an article in one of my history periodicals. There’s some really interesting stuff on sex, guilt and sublimation, the sort of thing that Freud would have loved!

Sex, of course is a fairly constant part of the human experience, and people at the time could be just as direct and earthy in the way in which the experience was described as they are today. One only has to read Chaucer and Boccaccio to appreciate that. And who shall plough my little field? :))

Even so Medieval pleasures were tempered by the heavy burden of guilt, placed on the simple act of pleasure by the church. In the eleventh century priests were recommended to ask their parishioners if they had ever committed “….fornication with your step-mother, your sister-in-law, your son’s fiancée, your mother? Have you ever made a device in the shape of a penis and tied it…” And on and on and on.

This combined, of course, with a deep-seated misogyny, with Eve perceived as the author of original sin. In an early church story a heavy doom is placed upon women; “The curse of God pronounced on your sex weighs still upon the world. You are guilty-you must bear its hardships. You are the Devil’s gateway.”

It’s not just that Eve is guilty; all women are guilty. The same process of transference and perpetuation is to be found elsewhere, most specifically in the perception of the Jews as ‘Christ Killers.’ Anti-Semitism thus makes its way through this conduit into the modern age.

Naturally enough this disapproval of sex and sexuality resulted inevitably in forms of erotic sublimation. Purity was praised and magnified through the cult of the Virgin. But the young women who entered nunneries could find themselves emotionally in a place where devotion and sexual passion were not that far removed, one from the other. Consider the words of Angela of Foligno, a Medieval mystic: "As I stood by the Cross I was filled with such fire I took off my clothes and offered him all of myself.” Yes, she did. :))