A Knight and the Bath

The thing that surprises me the most about the genuine trufax that Vikings bathed a lot – apparently way oftener than your average ninth-century marauder (though how do they know this stuff?) – is not that they felt the need to bathe; as Maximus tells us, dirt cleans off a lot easier than blood, Quintus, and a decorative spatter is perhaps the most obvious side-effect of slaughtering a monastery. Rather, I’m surprised they managed to get their kit off at all.

The moral of today’s story: Scandinavia is cold.

Now, I have no idea what the Little Ice Age actually is. It comes up in conversation sometimes, in relation to the Greenland settlements, or as a way of proving that Sir John Clanvowe’s The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was not written on Valentine’s Day, and all I can do is nod sorrowfully, much as one might when someone describes how their chateau was infested by woodworm. It sounds rotten, but I can’t very easily relate. But the Little Ice Age seems to have been a Bad Thing in the fourteenth century. It got colder.

To suppose that the North Atlantic was already pretty cold is not exactly controversial. In the first century, Pliny the Elder described a mare congelatum to the north of the island of Ultimate Thule (variously considered to be Iceland, Shetland, Orkney, the coast of Norway…), while seafarers in Old English poetry are often to be found scraping hrim- or horfrost off their noses. The Vikings even had a raiding season: the bulk of their pillaging and marauding had to take place in the summer, so that the seas and winds were still conducive to a home journey. Otherwise they would overwinter, which sounds both terrifying for the locals and extremely chilly for all involved.

Even if we concede that Vikings were made of sterner stuff, please consider this: it’s midwinter, on an island in the Seine, it’s getting nippy but there’s a very picturesque ground frost. Is Ragnar really about to shed his best raiding cloak to get into some water? [I must admit I’ve no idea whether the water is cold or not. My guess would be yes, because a) to my knowledge, few if any archaeological digs have found Viking bath tubs and b) well, Vikings.]

Let’s transport Ragnar home to Trondheim, where today it’s on average ten to fifteen degrees colder than Paris in December. I’m not Ragnar, but if I were Ragnar that cloak would be staying on. And I’d add a slanket.

I deal with extremes of temperature extremely badly. Once, on a summer evening, I forgot my cardigan, and still think of those few hours as ‘the coldest I have ever been in my life’. I would be a rubbish Viking. Of all the images of visceral cold that I can think of, Sir Gawain’s struggle with the elements while searching for the Green Chapel makes me tingle the most.

Nade he ben duȝty and dryȝe, and Dryȝten had serued,

Douteles he hade ben ded and dreped ful ofte,

For werre wrathed hym not so much þat wynter was wors,

When þe colde cler water fro þe cloudes shadde,

And fres er hit falle myȝt to þe fale erþe.

This isn’t even in Scandinavia, but Wales. He’s literally been fighting dragons, wolves and crazed woodmen, bulls, bears and boars, and giants. Giants. But the weather is the real killer. Doubtless Gawain was forced to have cold showers at school.

When it’s as warm as it is at the moment, cold showers and dips in lakes are extremely attractive prospects, as is the fan in the library, which I can have mostly to myself because the library’s basically empty. In the grand scheme of British weather, this is also something of an extreme.

As illuminated Books of Hours show us, summer dressing sort-of existed for medieval peasants. The month of July image in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows a reaper in a straw hat, tunic and loin cloth, while the Misses and Misters June have all taken their shoes off and covered their heads against the smug charioteer in the sky. In an image redolent of the digging scene at the beginning of The Muppets’ Treasure Island,  T.H. White considered how medieval haymakers ‘did not wear many clothes, and the shadows between their sliding muscles were blue on the nut-brown skins.’ Toned, tanned and sweaty.

    

Quite clearly, the current weather makes me glad that I was born in an era of electric fans and cold running water. The gulf in the experience of cold or heat between me and the Middle Ages is not something I terribly regret. A slight sweatiness convinces me, quite wrongly, that I can imagine spending three months in a field with a woollen dress on, just as those few hours without a cardigan allow me to pretend that I understand Gawain’s predicament in that hailstorm. But I don’t, and I’m very lucky for that.

But we can imagine a part of the relief of moving from the extremes outside to man-made comfort inside. In Hong Kong there is a culture of aggressive air-conditioning. In Sweden, domestic buildings have woodstoves while churches and cathedrals are insulated for the months of inevitable snows and sub-zero temperatures. When Gawain arrives at a mysterious castle, he discovers that

Ther fayre fyre upon flet fersly brenned.

He is whisked off to a bedroom insulated with carpets and curtains and seriously snazzy duvets, and given a dressing gown. It’s probably a bit drafty to have a bath.

Anachronise This

The phrase ‘it’s positively medieval!’, bandied about on the online comment threads of popular dailies, is used to denote casual violence, tyranny, oppression (often of women), ignorance and superstition. By applying this term to a particularly unsavoury regime or a particularly brutal practice such as female genital mutilation, enlightened commenters both denounce their subject and distance themselves from it morally as easily as they distance themselves temporally from the Middle Ages.

I would hazard a guess that none of these commenters is a medievalist.

The reputation of the medieval period as a mud-spattered, scrofula-infested Dark Age, where bearded men only pause from bashing one another to toss a bone over a shoulder, sing some plainchant and rape some wenches, is on par with Tintin au Congo for its offensively simplistic stereotyping. Yet it is an undeniably cinematic image, and one that we have come to expect in novels, films and television programmes set during the Middle Ages.

In the popular conception, the medieval period is defined by three characteristics in particular. The first is difficult to quantify but easy to throw at film sets: mud. The second is the pervasive and frequently wicked influence of the Catholic Church. This has found success outside strictly ‘medieval’ settings, as the novels of Dan Brown and many other Templar-themed mysteries have proved. The third is the ritualised and socially sanctioned mistreatment of women. Of these three, this third is probably the most factually accurate, and least skewed in modern depictions.

It is undeniable that, in Western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries (the commonest conception of ‘medieval’), women generally enjoyed significantly less freedom than they do today. Moreover, periods of campaign and siege warfare were brutal, especially if one found oneself in the way of an army or on the wrong side of a wall; medicine, though not uninquisitive, was not as advanced and nowhere near as hygienic as in this century; access to education was restricted, and fear of the Last Judgement dramatically shaped the outlooks of whole societies.

But if we so readily distance ourselves culturally and spiritually from our medieval forebears, why are so many ‘serious’ depictions of the Middle Ages so intent on making these forebears in our own image?

It is almost (almost) inevitable that novels, films or series set in the Middle Ages will feature at least one character who shows themselves to be frightfully enlightened by espousing atheism or wanting to marry for love or saying something like ‘There must be something more to life than this’. Women who have, to our knowledge, received little in the way of education can read complex medical texts (many of which, production values aside, would have been in Latin) and know so much about trends in Arabic medicine that one expects the expo-bomb ‘Last time I was in Salamanca…’ Men show their pacifism not by entering the church and rendering themselves unable to fight, but by borrowing modern anti-war expressions and turning the medieval up to eleven. Make mead, not war, my liege.

These characters are the heroes, the lovers, the underdogs. We as readers and viewers associate most closely with them, so their feelings and outlooks have to mirror ours. If the glowering villain exhibits period-accurate levels of misogyny and anti-Semitism, he represents villainy and not the period in which the narrative is set. If the same attitude is held by the plucky young hero with model looks and the secret dream of being an architect, this undermines our ability to see him as a hero. As a character, he is only sympathetic as far as we recognise ourselves in him.

Writing about the 18^th century shortly before he was sent to die in a forced labour camp, the Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb admitted:

I was as wary of tackling historical fiction as I would have been of setting a novel in a country I had never visited. A kind of respectful diffidence held me back from putting words they had never spoken into the mouths of once-living people, assigning feelings to them which I could not be sure were not my own, and taking them down paths they had never trod. [Preface to The Queen’s Necklace, trans. Len Rix]

Szerb’s concern for imposing his own opinions on not only historical figures but also characters who lived in a time not his own, seems not to be shared by many authors and screenwriters of today. To me, the anachronistically modern views of these characters are a shorthand. They say to the reader or viewer ‘We’re just like you, only muddier. Please like us.’

I also sometimes view the characters, depending on the extent of their enlightenedness, as an avatar for the audience on a time-travelling holiday around medieval Europe. Their actions are what we would like to think our actions would be if we too visited 14^th-century Gloucestershire. They stand for Reason and Compassion in the face of ignorance and intolerance; but how many residents of 14^th-century Gloucestershire would recognise this as ignorance and intolerance?

There are of course books and films whose medieval setting is incidental and whose modern characters with modern views are humorous rather than anachronistic: Prince Philip the Californian teenager telling his father, ‘You’re living in the past. This is the fourteenth century!’ The muddy peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail denying Arthur’s right to rule because the Lady of the Lake doesn’t represent a ‘mandate from the masses’. But while we understand that Disney or Monty Python use their medieval settings to allow for legends, jokes and set pieces that would be out of place in a modern one, this is not the contract we make with the authors and screenwriters of ‘serious’ books and films.

I feel that these writers insult my sense of history by allowing these patently unmedieval characters to pass as medieval. But I feel even more strongly that they insult my emotional intelligence with the assumption that one cannot possibly read, watch or enjoy something if one doesn’t empathise perfectly with the protagonist. Two recent examples of where this assumption has been challenged are Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby and Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery. In the former, the narrator-protagonist is a manipulative, emotionally stunted serial killer. In the latter, the narrator-protagonist, who suffers from a multiple personality disorder, is a treacherous and vicious anti-Semite. Although critical reception of Engleby was mixed, The Prague Cemetery was a bestseller.

The success of so many television series with dangerous or unlikeable (anti)heroes would also suggest that we need not necessarily approve of someone to want to watch them. So what is it about the Middle Ages that makes authors and screenwriters so keen to populate them with recognisably, perfectly modern characters?

Or is it in fact a problem with the genre of romance?

Can we not support the romantic endeavours of someone who conducts themselves differently from ourselves? For example, is the apparently great love found in the arranged marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia significantly less interesting than the romantic tribulations of a fictional heroine who insists, contrary to the well-documented norms of her status, on marrying ‘for love’? It is such a cliché of historical fiction in general, and yet authors use undeniably modern criteria for what constitutes Real Love.

I realise that many people, women in particular, enjoy what has been derogatorily termed ‘chick-lit’, but the use of a medieval setting for what is in essence a Jane Green novel is more than just incidental. The supposedly medieval characteristics of uncleanliness, brutality and close-mindedness are frequently invoked in these works, and the protagonist’s role is to rise above it, to engage the reader or viewer with their sympathetic modernity, to show the Middle Ages for the Dark Age they must have been. The writers want to have their cake and eat it. While one violent band rapes an entire nunnery, God forbid that the hero mightn’t like Jews or the heroine mightn’t dream of being the first ever female scrivener, or whatever the backdrop prescribes.

You do not have to be a medievalist to find the often cartoonish depiction of the Middle Ages patronising. But it is the anachronism of ‘sympathetic’ characters that especially winds me up. We are presented with a deeply unpleasant period in which the only good is wrought by people who simply don’t belong there. In contrast to their progressive reason, the period becomes more ignorant, more casually violent, so that we are presented with an Us-and-Them scenario in which we cannot choose how to sympathise, or even whether we’d quite like to live in 14^th-century Gloucestershire. We wouldn’t, we are told. Look at the mud. Look at how poorly our modern heroes are treated.

In the foreign country of the past, characters we are meant to like are not allowed to be foreign at all.