Brobin Hood and his Merry Men

With the imminent start, up and down the country, of university Freshers’ Weeks, and the multiple column inches British newspapers are devoting to advice for hapless, confused or merely teenage teenagers, UniLad is in the news once again. Specifically, the culture it engenders of encouraging young men to exhibit tasteless to offensive to illegal behaviour towards young women and each other, and then to boast about it online.

However boorish most people find these #massivelads, there is still a sense that male bonding is both a natural and a mystical process whose rules are unfathomable to women, and whose impulses are controlled by thousands of years of civilisation and millions of years of biology. From the supposed binary division of a hunter-gatherer society, we’ve apparently modernised: you drink pints and kill small animals while we watch the Food Network and depilate.

Surely this is a medieval notion? That men can – indeed, must – get together to quaff and kill, safe from the tight-lipped disapproval of their womenfolk, and that violent damage is a natural outcome to this?

I would argue, resoundingly, no.

I will not argue against the virulent antifeminism of the medieval period. There were exceptions to the general rule, but in general women were seen as the source of sin, whose task on earth was to lead men into sin. (Many women also ascribed to this view.) Rather, I want to consider a few medievally-endorsed hobbies, suitable for even the most battle-hardened Alpha, perhaps suggesting them as due a comeback, and ask: if these deeply misogynistic men in a fairly violent age could ‘bond’ without drugging, assaulting and humiliating a young woman, why can’t modern British students?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Hunting, Gambling

You don’t get much more Alpha than Sir Bertilak. When he and Gawain (#fresherLAD) enter into a wager to swap their days’ winnings with one another, Bertilak leads three adrenaline-fuelled hunts, with hounds and sharp weapons, and returns with dismembered bits of a boar, a stag, and a fox. Gawain stays in the castle, respectfully rejecting the advances of his host’s beautiful wife (#matesbeforedates). Verdict: Fewmets? FewMATES!

 

 #stagparty, #williamtwyti

Lay le Freine: Drinking

Two old, anonymous battle-chums get together to chew over the good old days with lashings of ale (#auldlangsyne). One of their wives has twins, the other is natural choice for godfather. Baby Daddy sends his man servant with the news; God Daddy is so pleased he gives the servant a HORSE. (Unfortunately their wives hate each other, and this spurs the action of the rest of the poem.) Verdict: Breton Bromance.

 

The Reeve’s Tale: Carousing, Admin

Two students take a business trip to Trumpington. A tricky situation is turned into a #massivewin through perseverance, mutual support and really poor lighting. Verdict: Will You Be My Wingman?

 

Peter Abelard’s Planctus David: Singing, Fighting, Emotional Bonding

Biblical Alpha David hears his best buddy Jonathan has bitten it in battle. He kills the messenger (#revengeLAD), then sings a lament for Jonathan and padre Saul, reliving the old days and reflecting: ‘thy love was wonderful to me, passing the love of women’ (#matesbeforedates). Also David has an epic vocal range (#darkhorse). Verdict: Dolorum Brolacium

 

The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney: Cooking, Organised Sports

Young Gareth runs away from home and comes to Camelot, but is keen that no one, especially his princely brothers, finds out who he is (#modestLAD). Everyone bullies him and he is forced to work in the kitchens. But Sir Lancelot, genuine Alpha, keeps an eye out and helps him fulfil his dream of becoming a knight (#massivewin). Verdict: Arise, Sir LADcelot.

Good bros colour-coordinate

Troilus and Criseyde: Carousing, Diplomacy

Elderly bro Pandarus helps his younger buddy Troilus score with his smoking hot niece Criseyde. When Troilus isn’t wooing, or tearing it up on the battlefield (#HomericLAD), he and Pandarus chill and discuss the finer points of love. It’s not unlad-like to express your emotions. Verdict: Brojan War.

 

Beowulf: Where to start?

Ultimate Dark Ages Alpha? Check. Band of supportive bros? Check. Hospitable mead hall? Check. Reciting of inspirational or instructional tales which clearly demarcate the expected behaviour of a hero and a good ruler? Check. Respectful attitude towards women? Check. Community spirit which leads to the vanquishing of three threats (#brosbeforefoes), even if the final victory is darkened by the death of the hero, possibly attributable to greed, which some would argue is the point of the character arc of a respectable but essentially irredeemable human protagonist? Check. Ray Winstone here to kill your monstah? More checks than Nike. Verdict: þæt wæs god LAD!

 

Coda: None of this is to suggest that young men should give up swapping and take up jousting, but that is exactly what I’m suggesting.

Tonight We’re Going To Party Like It’s 1399

‘Book of Armagh very pretty. Still evidently written by a drunkard.’

This is not, to clarify, any kind of slur against the Irish, but rather a note I took at a palaeography workshop in May. My note-taking is often rather scruffy. This workshop inspired the exact following jottings:

I didn’t need to move seats.

Köln, Cathedral Lib. 213 – beautiful capitals.

Is this basically primitive graphology?

Actually, Irish script looks like it’s written by drunk people. That would be an amusing reason for the proliferation of scribal errors. Or maybe how Tolkien conceived of Bilbo’s ‘spidery hand’? Book of Armagh very pretty. Still evidently written by a drunkard. If we know that beer was consumed, can we infer that local alcohol was also consumed? i.e. whiskey. St Toirdhealbhach drank whisky but he was a heretic. Also fictional.

An hour of unadulterated intellectual stimulation from one of Britain’s foremost palaeographers, and what I took away from it was that booze makes your handwriting go funny.

Many people are aware of the (potentially true but still pretty dodgy) fact that it is because East Asians boiled and Caucasians brewed that when I shared roughly half a bottle of wine with my friend Wing Sum in 2008, she quickly nodded off at the table and I got an extra glass and a half of wine. [I suspect relative size also played some part.]

This is perhaps unfair. There was, of course, alcohol consumed in the Far East in the medieval period, and long before. In The Travels of Marco Polo, we read that the Mongols drank fermented horse milk – still consumed today, and actually rather nice. But I know very little about the Yuan Dynasty and rather more about booze. And the medieval Europeans knew how, and when, to drink – and when was always.

Under Edward III, Geoffrey Chaucer had a pension of a gallon of wine per day. Not the value of (and we know this because, when Edward’s grandson Richard acceded in 1377, he swapped the wine for an annual cash pension to the value of), but the wine itself. Of course, this does not suggest that Chaucer drank a gallon of wine to himself every day – but he had a family and a household, and this is a useful reduction of costs on necessary expenditure. History does not record what the wine tasted like.

Brother William: ‘Nobody likes my sshooen.’

But individual consumption of a Friar Tuck standard was not unknown. Legend has it that the series of banquets to celebrate George Neville’s enthronement as Archbishop of York in 1465 provided approximately 2500 guests with 300 tuns of ale and 100 tuns of wine. A tun holds roughly 950 litres. 95000 litres of wine is over 126000 bottles of standard modern size. I would naturally assume that budgeting for over 50 bottles of wine per person (and three times that of beer, though that everyone drank both is unlikely; many of these 2500 would have been servants of some variety), even over a few days, is optimistic at best, downright irresponsible at worst. So unless my maths is far worse than I thought, or the records are inaccurate, or each guest was given a brilliant party bag with two months’ supply of booze, or Neville had an excellent bulk deal at Ye Olde Berry Bros, it seems safe to suggest that lavish parties such as these would have been as heavily-watered as they were over-catered. (They ate peacocks. Peacocks.) A lot must have gone to waste.

There was a large, if weak, vein of humour mined from stories of drunken monks and tipsy troubadours, squiffy cellarers and pissed pilgrims. The Miller’s insistence on telling his tale, and plea that ‘if that I mysspeke or seye, Wite it the ale of Southwerk’, is as recognisable to most students today as is his companions’ failure to shut him up; and just as Chaucer disingenuously apologises for crude things the Miller says/ he writes, so do most of us quite enjoy hearing what people say in their cups.

Saye that vnto min visage!

My homegirl Hildegard von Bingen writes about hops that were used to flavour beer, and as any fule kno, everyone in medieval Northern Europe drank beer. But the defining ingredient of most high-status medieval drinks is spice: cinnamon, ginger, mace, cardamom. And while spices a) are yummy and b) may have masked the taste of sour wine, they were also c) phenomenally expensive, and thus a status symbol extraordinaire. When the Venerable Bede died in 735, he possessed only pepper, handkerchiefs and incense. Big deal, you may think. But incense would have come from the Middle East and pepper from India. To a monk north of the Humber in the 8^th century, this is not unlike possessing chunks of the Moon.

High-status cooking in the later medieval period was spiced to the point of farce. The sauce galantine, which Chaucer so gallantly namechecks in his chubby-chasing lyric To Rosamounde, contained cinnamon and two sorts of ginger. A fifteenth-century French recipe for cameline (good with meat or fish) contained cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and saffron. It’s clear from these ingredients alone that eating and drinking beyond the call of duty was a seriously pricey pastime in the Middle Ages.

All of which leads me to conclude this: the George Nevilles are the hip-hop artists of the late Middle Ages. With expensive booze, everyone from a medieval Archbishop to Jay-Z signifies that they can afford to party, and that partying is something well worth the money. ‘I dyd ydrynke nat that yppocras’ sounds a lot like ‘I got the Roly on my arm and I’m pouring Chandon and I roll the best weed cause I got it going on’.  ‘Make we alle divisioun of thys aquavit’ roughly translates as ‘We ballin, it’s Platinum Patron that be ours’. ‘Heere ys some rhenish on thyn seyntes-dai’ literally means ‘We’re gonna sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday.’

Happy birthday, Battle of Poitiers. I shall now proceed to drink in honour of the Black Prince.

What passeþ on pilgrymage, remaineþ on pilgrymage

As the summer holidays galumph to a close, I suspect the British have much for which to apologise. With a Europe-wide reputation for bad behaviour – from public drunkenness to an inability to learn one’s host country’s language – the British ranked 3^rd in the world, after only the French and the Russians, in a 2012 poll of poorly-mannered tourists.

In this, as in everything, we could learn much from the Middle Ages.

If you’re worried about how to choose a spot for next summer, think you run the risk of offending your hosts, or simply believe you may be lacking in travel etiquette, try following this advice, distilled from the memoirs of never-quite-a-Saint Margery Kempe.

 

Respecting local customs

This is especially tricky if you’re travelling somewhere with a strict religious code. If you should find yourself confused by local customs, or find them to be unwholesome – tell them! They’ll be grateful to know that Jesus disapproves.

 

Communicating with the local population

You can hardly be expected to learn basic phrases for everywhere you go. If you struggle to communicate, either look for someone who can translate for you, or pray for divine intervention. If you pray hard enough, anyone can be made to learn English.

 

Getting into fights

Before going abroad, you should check to see whether you’ll be straying into a conflict zone. Planning to go somewhere where the English aren’t welcome? Go anyway!  If you can’t control the urge to start a fight, make sure you pick on a heretic.

 

Behaviour in public places

Observe local customs and do whatever feels right and holy. Churches, mosques and temples can make interesting daytrips for tourists. Although conventional wisdom suggests that you should be as quiet and respectful as possible – particularly if a service is taking place – it’s actually perfectly acceptable to scream and cry. Everyone should realise how holy you are. If they don’t, they’re probably a heretic.

 

Appropriate dressing

Be mindful of the weather. Make sure you pay proper attention to local customs of dress, so you can tell them exactly how they’re going to be damned. If you’re taking black clothes, also pack white ones in case the Virgin Mary changes her mind.

 

Currency

It’s foolish to carry money – Jesus will take care of it.

 

And if anything should happen – cry.

 

A Leap of Faith

The Medievals were pretty keen on God. Alongside revolutionising the rules of engineering to build their cathedrals, inventing a system of daily prayers that allowed little time for anything else, and engaging in a long series of religious wars, the Western Europeans of the Middle Ages devoted literally billions of words, and killed millions of cows and sheep, in writing about their religion.

After the necessary copies of Bible texts, and manuals for the performance of divine offices, there were Biblical commentaries, Saints’ Lives, theological summae, histories of the world from the Creation onwards, conversion histories, preaching manuals, religious poems, visions of the Afterlife, plays for holy days, and numberless sermons. And this is barely to scratch the surface. Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale illustrates the function – and sometimes mind-numbing length – of sermons in popular usage. But significant numbers of works of a strictly non-religious nature also contain religious figures, religious settings (from monasteries to hostile pagan cities) and references to religious feasts.

75,361 words in, still no punchline.

One of my favourite late medieval texts, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, narrates the ‘journey’ of an English knight through the Holy Land and to the countries beyond, where he ‘encounters’ not only all sorts of monsters (from 60-feet-high giants to single-footed sciopods to women with snakes in their whatsits) but also Jews, Muslims, and multiple strands of Christian. The author, probably a Frenchman of the early 14th century, is surprised to ‘discover’ that

[the] Saracens do great honour to the Temple of Our Lord, saying it is a very holy place. When they enter, they take off their shoes and kneel often with great reverence. When my companions and I saw them do so, we too took off our shoes and thought it was the more reasonable that we Christians should do as much worship and honour to God as unbelievers did. (trans. Moseley, 1983)

Many of the reported encounters with Muslims focus on the common ground found between the faiths. In the author’s view, they can’t be all that bad if they adhere to Catholic dogma concerning the Virgin Mary.

Religion is both the central ground and the point of departure. And rightly or wrongly, it is the single most important factor in life and literature in the Middle Ages.

So I found myself this week considering what might have happened in a few well-known medieval narratives if one were to remove Christianity entirely. The following suggestions were the result of much thought, and even more wine.

 Lay le Freine

A baby girl dies of exposure.

Ratramnus of Corbey’s Epistola de Cynocephalis

Whatever you do, don’t talk to the men with dogheads. It just isn’t worth it.

The Canterbury Tales

Some strangers spend the afternoon in a South London pub.

The Man of Law’s Tale

A noblewoman lives quite happily with her Middle Eastern husband, and never has to visit Northumberland.

The Vision of Piers Plowman

A man from the Midlands has a nap in a field.

Le Roman d’Alexandre

Ancient King has some fruity adventures, then dies.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Wintertime. The descendants of the exiles from the Trojan War are celebrating Saturnalia. They are all tripping balls, and consequently no one notices when a completely green man enters the hall on his completely green horse. He soon grows bored of watching people vomiting and telling bad jokes, so leaves. The End.