A Friend In Need

After some months of dicking about in Europe, reading about magnanimous Europeans from books in their grand collections, I may hold a rose-tinted view of the place. Certainly, I am under no illusion that international cooperation was much up to snuff in the Middle Ages, the high point perhaps having been reached in 1204, when the Venetians, the Genoese and the French managed to overcome their ancestral hatred for one another just long enough to sack Constantinople.

I wouldn’t wish any of this to be construed as disloyal to the people’s will, so rather than dwell on the long history of cooperation that has existed between England and Burgundy, Normandy, the Holy Roman Empire, Scotland, Denmark, Navarre, Anjou, any number of territories in Germany or our oldest ally Portugal, I have been thinking in very literal terms about Europe. Secundum John Trevisa:

Europa is þe þridde deel of þis worlde wyde, and bigynneþ fro þe ryver Tanais and þe water Meotides, and strecceþ dounward by þe norþ occean anon to þe endes of Spayne at þe ylond Gades, and is byclipped by þe est and also by þe souþ wiþ þe grete see. In Europa beeþ many prouinces and ylondes, þe whiche now schal be descryved.

What a lot we have learned! This information ultimately comes from the seventh-century Visigothic polymath Isidore of Seville, perhaps on par with openly gay Olympic fencers for general rum-ness, so we may have to look nearer afield. The reassuringly English Bartholomew Anglicus quotes Paulus Orosius, also rather foreign for this political climate, having been born in what is now Galicia:

Europae regiones et gentes incipiunt a montibus Ripheis Meteodisque paludibus que sunt ad orientem descendentes ad occasum per littus septentrionalis occeani. [The regions and races of Europe begin from the Riphaean mountains and the Maeotic swamps, which are in the east, extending in the west to the shore of the northern ocean.]

A great deal more helpful, I’m sure you’ll agree.

When medieval western writers – specifically, Latin writers – discuss Europe, it is often in relation to Africa and Asia, and always begins from the idea of its physical dimensions. Its borders are the River Don, the Mediterranean and the Encircling Ocean; its larger territories have the same names in 500 as they do in 1500; lakes, mountains and rivers may be more or less prominent, depending on the origins of the writer, but none are so prominent as those mentioned by Pliny the Elder. The physical geography recorded in these accounts makes no reference to rulers, treaties or wars. It isn’t dishonest on the part of the writers; this sort of information doesn’t generally belong in that sort of book.

Spot the unelected bureaucrat!

Bartholomew does not go so far as to write any of Aquitaine’s history when he describes its rivers and its fertile soil, but he does give some space to the vague idea of national character. The Venetians love justice, the Swabians pick fights, and the Scots are ferocious to their enemies. Bartholomew being an Englishman, the English are singled out for praise, but the descriptions of the natural bounty of the territory Anglia come from Pliny and Bede. While a quasi-nationalist sentiment guides his pen, Bartholomew’s facts are already over a thousand years old.

A thousand years ago, England was part of a wider Scandinavian empire. Seven hundred years ago, it had been decisively repelled by its quondam et futurus neighbour Scotland. Three hundred, it had unified with Scotland and was ruled by an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. One hundred, it was at war in Europe, and would shortly be again. What happens next to England in particular, and the British Isles in general, is of course up in the air. It could become a post-apocalyptic wasteland of student Macbeth proportions; there could be a new golden age of honey-flowing trees and piping dryads; neither is entirely likely.

But I cannot help but think of Portugal, with whom we have been in alliance since Chaucer was alive. As our old friend Cicero writes in De amicitia,

If you should take the bond of goodwill out of the universe, no house or city could stand. […] For what house is so strong, or what state so enduring that it cannot be utterly overthrown by animosities and division?

Bartholomew, writing in the 1240s, did not make any special allowance for Lusitania and the character of its people. He wrote nothing to allow us to conjecture how its people would respond to an animosity emanating from England for as long as I can remember, and above all in the past year.  Perhaps the Lusitanians, like the Venetians, love fairness and won’t stomach our animosity. Perhaps, like the Scots, they are ferocious to their enemies, and our government has very much treated them as if they were just that. If the upshot of this half-baked whim, of our losing a friend of forty years, is that we lose a friend of six hundred and forty, I for one shall be rather cross.

Act in Hastings, Repent at Leisure

A brief update from the wintery wastes of pre-post-Brexit Britain, and tomorrow is a very big birthday for medievalists, historically illiterate anti-Europe wonks and fans of Paul Kingsnorth alike.

That’s right! October the 14th is the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

William, you smug prick.

This cataclysmic event marked the end of five hundred years of Germanic dominance in England, and the beginning of 950 (and counting) years of a legal code, social hierarchy and system of land ownership enshrined by the French descendants of a Scandinavian mercenary. That for the first five centuries of which were run in close accord with the edicts of priests of a Levantine religion, living in central Italy, only one of whom was ever English. And that for the past four hundred years have been exported to places un-thought of by any Norman administrator – places whose existing populations did not want us, and whose languages and civilisations were many thousands of years older than ours. But certainly now we’ve had enough of ‘meddling’, and egged on by an American-born narcissist of mixed Turkish-Russian-French ancestry, and the graceless descendant of French Huguenot refugees, we’ve jolly well told those ghastly Europeans so.

One historical irony emerges from this mess.

I’ve been teaching about language and dialectal distribution in medieval Great Britain, and the maps that I have badly drawn for this purpose are covered in arrows: pushing west from Kent and East Anglia, zigzagging across the Scottish border, plunging inland from the Northumbrian coast, like armies have done since the Romans left. The medieval chroniclers liked to claim that the British (who were Trojan) were conquered by the Saxons (who worshipped horses, or something) because of their sinfulness. The Saxons then squandered Providence’s favour, and the Normans were able to conquer them.

Despite their monumental uninterest, my students knew that the linguistic remnants of the pre-Roman British are to be found in Wales and Cornwall, both of which areas voted Leave. Now the pound (sterling, steorling, OE) is tanking as those nefarious experts suggested, the Scots are calling for independence and Marmite, invented by a German and marketed by the Dutch, is at the centre of a hostage situation. I can imagine that Wales and Cornwall are watching what is threatening to become a götterdämmerung for the English, and as the destruction spreads they approach the Anglo-Saxon and say softly, ‘Cymbeline sends his regards.’

Tully-Ho!

Struggling to make sense of the past fortnight in British politics, I came across this anecdote in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (c. 1159):

Cicero, when he wanted to purchase a house on the Palatine and did not have the money at the time, accepted a secret present of two million sesterces from Sulla, who was then party to a lawsuit. Before it was purchased, the affair was uncovered and disclosed, and he was accused of having accepted money from a litigant for the sake of buying a house. Then Cicero, disturbed by the unexpected scandal, denied that he had accepted anything, saying that he was not purchasing the house; and also he said: ‘What you charge is so false that if I acquire the house, it is true that money has been accepted by me.’ But when later it was purchased and this lie was exposed by his enemies in the Senate, he laughed heartily and said, between his laughs: ‘You must be imprudent men if you do not know that to be a prudent and cautious head of a household is to deny that one wishes to buy something when competing purchasers are nearby.’ And so, that which he could not disclaim he wiped away by an urbane and humorous saying, making the matter more worthy of laughter than indictment. Indeed, it had been his custom that, whenever he could not deny a scandalous charge, he eluded it with a jocular response. [Ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman]

Cicero is a figure of awesome, and undoubtedly warped, reputation. In medieval England he was held on par with Solomon as a wise, principled philosopher-ruler. Chaucer’s mind-numbing Tale of Melibee observes that

Tullius seith that grete thynges ne been nat accompliced by strengthe, ne by delivernesse of body, but by good conseil, by auctoritee of persones, and by science; the whiche thre thynges ne been nat fieble by age, but certes they enforcen and encreescen day by day.

And,

Therefore seith Tullius, Enclyne nat thyne eres to flatereres, ne taak no conseil of the words of flatereye.

And,

And Tullius seith that no sorwe, ne no drede of deeth, ne no thyng that may falle unto a man, is so muchel agayns nature as a man to encressen his owene profit to the harm of another man.

Good governance, sober counsel, social-mindedness and faith in wisdom (or expertise, if you will). This Cicero would have made short shrift of the UK’s shower of shits, and the thrilling irony is that the classically-educated Boris Johnson has frequently invoked Cicero over the years, having even been described as a ‘Cicero super-fan’ (admittedly by Tatler, whose use for Latin extends to ‘Quis?’ and ‘Ego!’ outside the tuck shop). I have no doubt that Johnson sees himself as Cicero, standing up to the EU’s disgraced and overbearing Antony,

For he does not now desire your slavery, as he did before, but he is angry now and thirsts for your blood. No sport is more delightful to him than bloodshed, and slaughter, and the massacre of citizens before his eyes. O Romans, you do not have to deal with a wicked and profligate man, but with an unnatural and savage beast. […] Valour tends to ward off any cruelty or disgrace in death. And that is an inalienable possession of the Roman race and name. Preserve, I beseech you, O Romans, this attribute which your ancestors have left you as a sort of inheritance. Although all other things are uncertain, fleeting, transitory; virtue alone is planted firm with very deep roots; it cannot be undermined by any violence; it can never be moved from its position. By it your ancestors first subdued the whole of Italy then destroyed Carthage, overthrew Numantia, and reduced the most mighty kings and most warlike nations under the dominion of this empire. [Philippics 4, 11-13]

And so on, except we are unlikely to see Johnson’s hands nailed to the doors of the Palace of Westminster.

Droppe þe myke.

John of Salisbury’s story shows Cicero as a morally dubious figure – perhaps a lesson of how even the most admirable of men make bad judgements, but equally a warning against accepting honour at face value. Now, Cicero is lying about what could be construed as a bribe to a public official, and not about something as esoteric as haggis exports, but I was struck in particular by John’s statement that ‘whenever he could not deny a scandalous charge, he eluded it with a jocular response.’ A critic is made to appear obsessive and dull against the light-hearted tone of the liar. It is a tactic that has served Johnson, for one, well over the years – for there can surely be nothing weirder, nerdier, or duller than wanting to assert facts about pillowcases and prawn cocktail crisps.

Cicero’s undoubted economy with certain truths was often shrouded by his exceptional skill at rhetoric and his flair for the dramatic. He might even have admired Johnson’s utter lack of scruples when it comes to misleading a crowd for political gain. This is an orator who successfully defended a man from charges of public disorder by slut-shaming the prosecutor’s sister. It helps his case that his works have enjoyed an astonishing rate of survival (about 75%) and have been rigorously studied for two thousand years, with his speeches still providing models for political speechmaking today. But not only was late republican Rome not a parliamentary democracy: Cicero lived in extraordinary times, and seemingly from reasons of principle squared up to some of the most famous war-makers in history. If Johnson in particular, and the Brexit Suicide Squad in general, truly think that Jean-Claude Juncker stands on par with Julius Caesar for populist, expansionist ambition, either satire or education is dead.

So please do not imagine that I am equating Johnson to Cicero. One of them held the highest office of the Roman Republic. The other will, I hope, never come within a mile of high office ever again.

Yes We Khan

A brief update from the damps of February. This week I considered writing something about romance (not Romance), or Forty Seven Medieval Ways to Neck a Bottle of Wine, but today is a special anniversary for two very special people. That’s right: on this day in respectively 1294 and 1405, Kublai Khan and Timur the Lame both died. Two out of three favourite medieval warlords rate today as the best day to die!

It is a bit weak to talk of the ‘achievements’ of men who ruled over substantial parts of Asia, oversaw vast construction projects and whose empires could scarcely survive them. In part it is a question of scale and ambition. Both men seem to have modelled themselves on Genghis, with all the ruthlessness and brutality that entailed. In another part, they simply feel unreal as historical figures.

Bro, do you even pillage?

What I know of these men I know primarily from European sources. Specifically, from the Livre des Merveilles du Monde of Marco Polo and Kit Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. In many ways, this is like exploring medieval history using only the Arts and Crafts movement and Game of Thrones – or, precisely how most people explore medieval history.

The mythic quality of the historical figures easily spills into depictions of them. Rustichello’s Kublai is a King of Kings, with vast wealth, vast lands and a vast court, a latter-day Cyrus whose historical truth is more than a little tainted by legends of Prester John. Marlowe’s far later creation is an orgulous tyrant, crushing rivals and burning cities in scene after scene. Handel’s Tamerlano is pretty dreadful, with its three hours of da capo arias. Netflix’s Marco Polo is almost worse. Somehow, every one of them has a ring of truth.

The moral: enjoy your warlords in moderation.

Misnomers

For many, generally unedifying reasons, the term ‘medieval’ is bandied about online with increasing regularity. Of course the Middle Ages in the West saw more than its fair share of brutality, misogyny, religious absolutism and the plunder or outright destruction of ancient cities. Frequently this was inflicted by Christians on marginally different Christians.

The forces who, led by Doge Enrico Dandolo and the Marquess of Monferrato, sacked Constantinople in 1204 did so seemingly out of avarice and a vague desire for revenge against the scarcely blameless Eastern Orthodox population of the city. Thousands were killed, thousands were raped, and thousands of precious artworks were looted or destroyed. The public spaces of Venice are still decorated with the spoils of that campaign. During the Albigensian Crusade, the infamous sack of Béziers ended with the city’s entire population, an estimated 20,000 people, dead, attributed in part to the chilling order of Arnaud Amalric, the Papal Legate: ‘Cedite omnes; novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius’ [kill them all, for God will know who are his].

Recorded history is filled with such events, from the sack of Persepolis by Alexander, to the burning of Heidelberg by Louis XIV, to the Sook Ching massacre during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, to the wholesale looting of the National Museum of Iraq. I scarcely need to argue that these events were not medieval; as the novelist and medievalist T.H. White often reflected, we are a brutal species.

Something something something Lannisters.

One artefact sums up for me this history of looting and slaughter. The Piraeus Lion stood in the Athenian port of Piraeus for perhaps 1,500 years before Francesco Morosini, later Doge, attacked Athens and bombarded the Parthenon. It was taken to Venice in 1687, and now stands outside the Arsenale, Venice’s military dockyard. Over a century after it was brought to Venice a Scandinavian antiquarian made the first modern translation of a series of runes that run down its right shoulder, and discovered that they related to the exploits of the Varangian Guard, Scandinavian and Kievan mercenaries loyal to the Byzantine Emperor, including someone who may perhaps have been Harald Hardrada. Amongst them,

Asmund cut these runes, along with Asgeir and Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, at Harald the Tall’s behest.

And,

Egil is gone on expedition with Ragnar into Romania and Armenia. (Trans. Carl Christian Rafn.)

The statue itself was the spoils of a war, perhaps a sore point to the Ottoman rulers of Athens but hardly an unexpected loss. The Varangians, insofar as they can be classified at all, seem to have been an elite force of foreign fighters, like the Swiss Guard if the Swiss Guard wore fur coats and went on raiding trips to Sicily. Their presence in the Byzantine Empire and their vandalism of an ancient marble statue show how deeply ingrained war was as a way of life even in metropolitan centres. But the Varangians, as rough as they may have been, still had a code of honour. The eleventh-century historian Georgios Kedrenos gives the sole account of an interesting case in the 1030s:

A man of the Varangians, who were scattered in winter quarters in the Thracesian theme, met a woman of the region in a private place and tempted her virtue; and when he could not get her to agree willingly he tried to rape her, but she got hold of the foreigner’s sword and struck him with it through the heart, so that he died at once. When this deed become known through the neighbourhood the Varangians gathered together and honoured the woman by giving her all the possessions of the man who had attempted to rape her, and they threw away his body without burial, according to the law about suicides. (Trans. Benedict Benedikz.)

It is unclear to me whether Kedrenos had any particular interest in painting the Varangians in a good light. Such events are not recounted elsewhere and, if true, this may have been a one-off, yet the actions of the Varangian guardsmen, denouncing their dead companion and supporting his victim, may come as a surprise to those for whom ‘medieval’ is synonymous with violent misogyny. I cannot try to persuade people that the Middle Ages were a time of peace, tolerance and free love, because for the most part they were not. But please remember that not all ‘medieval’ actions are terrible, and not all terrible actions are ‘medieval’.

Rue the Day

I was faffing around on the BnF Gallica website this week (this is how all good stories start, naturally) and came across the Chronica Karoli Sexti by the ‘Religieux’ of Saint-Denis. For reasons which should be clear this passage, from volume 5, particularly stood out:

Dolorosa relacione audita, rex, duces quoque Guienne atque Biturie, gravi dolore perculsi et merore consternati debito, in lamenta se dederunt; gemitu et lacrimis, quas pre spiritus angustia cohibere nequeunt, dolorem protestantur. Non modo nobiles tunc presentes, sed et ceteri utriusque sexus longe lateque per regnum, excecrabile fatum attendentes, spculum suum infame et pudendum omnique posteritati perpetuo criminandum reputabant, et addebant: “O quam malignis diebus nati sumus, qui videre cogimur tantam confusionem et ruborem!” Ubique sane vidisses insignes dominas et domicellas pro olosericis auro textis vestes lugubres sumere, quarum nec siccis oculis querimonias attendisses, dum quedam venerabile fedus conjugii dissolutum, alie natos et consanguineos interfectos inconsolabiliter deflebant, cordialius tamen illos qui insignium proavorum preclaros titulos, in bellis solitos proclamari, sic obruendo in perpetuum extinctos reddiderunt.

[After hearing this sad news, the king and the Dukes of Guyenne and Berry were struck with grave sorrow, and fell into a deep melancholy. They showed their grief with groans and tears, which they were unable to control because of anguish. Not just the lords of the court, but all people of both sexes far and wide throughout the kingdom, thinking of this dreadful event, thought their century to forever besmirched and dishonoured to all posterity, and said, ‘Alas, in what an evil day were we born, we who are forced to behold such chaos and shame!’ Everywhere it was observed that noble women and girls changed their silk and cloth-of-gold for mourning garments, women whose laments could not be heard with dry eyes, as some wept bitterly for the loss of their husbands, others for their slaughtered sons and relatives, but above all for those who in their burial should consign the famous names of their noble ancestors, so often honoured in wars, to perpetual extinction.]

‘This story shall the good man teach his son.’

1066 and Little Else

I have always thought it the height of twattery to quote 17th-century Frenchmen, even more so than to quote Bernard of Clairvaux, or Cicero, or Abraham Lincoln. This is because 17th century Frenchmen can be accepted as so urbane, witty and glamorous – even Racine – that anyone who quotes them clearly thinks of themselves as such, and can therefore bugger off.

We do not need to know that La Rochefoucauld drew the distinction between thinkers and doers. It is for anyone to reason that it would be nice if, for example, government ministers took the advice of experts who actually know the field into which said minister has been parachuted, or if know-it-all theorists would practice what they preach. We are all heroes in our own imaginations. Marcus Aurelius observed as much. But aside from heralding the creeping grumpiness of a new term, what do these thoughts have to do with anything?

Today is the traditional Feast of Edward the Confessor, that’s what.

Edward occupies a strange place in the English historic imagination. He is an interim figure, someone poised between more interesting periods and dynamic characters. He is a patient, abstemious, possibly celibate man in a world of bastards and Vikings. We generally have no idea what a Confessor is, and it’s a saint who, rather than having a cinematic martyrdom, dies rather quietly. If he had lived today, he would probably collect stamps.

He was emphatically not a doer. Indeed, the most interesting thing he did, many would agree, was to die, because the most seismic shift in English social history closely followed his death. Certainly, Edward functioned as a patron saint for several centuries, but even in this he didn’t do anything, being already dead. (To give credit where it’s due, he also founded quite a nice abbey.)

#squadgoals

Part of the development in history teaching in the past half century or so has been to move away from the idea of history being strung together by a few heroes (usual military) who forced the rest of us into progress, and more towards history within a narrative of flux, deriving from wider social forces as much as the actions of an elite. The heroes are retained only to be picked apart. The problem with the reign of Edward the Confessor from this perspective is that it is dominated by a military and ecclesiastical elite. The problem with Edward the Confessor is that he appears to have taken a back seat on pretty much everything.

So in the absence of much action to judge, what impression might we have of Edward’s character? Clearly he was religious; the Pope is a Catholic. He seems not to have been particularly keen on patronising literary efforts, unlike his mother Emma. He married a member of the most powerful family in the country, and was effectively ruled by them thereafter. Does this make him weak, apathetic, or just quite zen?

My inclination would be to see Edward as a sort of vegan pacifist geography teacher, like Merlin in the third Shrek movie. Non-confrontational and not terribly interested in status. Keen on growing his own vegetables, like a latter-day Noggin the Nog. He probably had a repertoire of jokes that he never told but which amused him greatly in long meetings. He may have had a favourite song that he requested of every scop he met, and it was never as good as the first time he heard it but he still made admiring faces and gave several coins. He was perhaps embarrassed by his coin portrait, thinking it showy-off. He almost certainly apologised to every rock he stubbed his toe on. He was undoubtedly fond of his too-glamorous wife, and mildly saddened that she hated his favourite tunic. He definitely had a beard.

Edward the Confessor was Jeremy Corbyn. You heard it here first.

Love Among the Ruins

In the twenty four hours since the announcement of the probable destruction of the temple of Baalshamin, which has stood in Palmyra since the reign of Tiberius, and near where the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad was tortured and murdered this last month, thoughts of destruction have been much on my mind. It just so happens that today is the traditional date of the sack of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric I. Palaces, mausoleums and basilicas were destroyed, although not for ideological reasons.

Today is also the traditional anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Now, I am a Pliny the Elder fangirl, and it is a distressing quirk of history that the author of one of the defining artefacts of the early Roman Empire, a naval commander, military historian and orator, should be remembered for the manner of his death. Pliny the Younger, as we know, avoided his uncle’s fate because of a propensity for Greek homework. The eruption, which lasted for two days, buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. Though the site of Pompeii wasn’t discovered until the late 16th century, the eruption (‘grades Campaniae’, disaster at Campania) was known to medieval readers of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, because the vast majority of its manuscripts were prefaced by a mini-biography of the author, much as the standard text of Troilus and Criseyde begins ‘Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London’.

Destruction by nature and destruction by man cannot really be considered in the same register. Dresden in 1945 may in certain ways have resembled the shores of Aceh in late December 2004, loss of life is loss of life, but there can be no rationalisation, however unsatisfactory, for the freak natural disaster. It happens and everyone is equally powerless to prevent it. As Tewkesbury Abbey confirms, all we can do is not build on flood plains.

Where circumstances allow, i.e. not in Plymouth, Montserrat, humans will also rebuild. There was much admiration in 2011 for how quickly roads in Tōhoku were repaired after the extraordinary earthquake and tsunami, while the Franconian city of Würzburg, almost entirely destroyed in bombing raids in 1945, has been rebuilt in identical style, such that it is still recognisable from its depiction in Schedel’s 1493 Weltchronik. In cases where conquering forces have remained, there are even examples of the preservation of existing buildings, such as the requisitioning of pagan temples as Churches from the fourth to seventh centuries in Rome.

‘For thousands of years the Romans were the best in the world at… almost everything.’

Yet we as humans clearly have a desire to salt the fields, to ensure the complete destruction of an enemy’s way of life. The Harrowing of the North in 1069-70, England’s answer to the Fall of Carthage, is one method of delivering such destruction. The systematic obliteration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Sufi shrines in Mali, the remains of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, to name but a few, is another. Gilgamesh and Enkidu destroy the Cedar Forest, Alexander razed Persepolis, the Christians of Alexandria burned the Serapeum and its library, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine responds to his wife’s death as any dictator would:

This cursed town will I consume with fire
Because this place bereft me of my love.
The houses, burnt, will look as if they mourned,
And here will I set up her stature.

Such wanton destruction is inspired by a desire to cripple the enemy with the fear of one’s unwavering resolve. But, as has been much discussed in recent months, to destroy an enemy’s history is to remove every trace of their identity. In 2012, William Dalrymple wrote of the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo,

While the human pain inflicted by torture and killing is immeasurable, the destruction of a people’s heritage is irretrievable: once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. With modern weaponry it only takes a few months of concerted shelling for the history of an entire people to be reduced to rubble. (The Guardian, 18.10.2012)

There is nothing that I can add that will sound any other than glib and half-hearted.

Perhaps, then, a message of hope: Saint Cuthbert was born in the early seventh century, and probably spent his entire life in Northumbria. Before the Conquest, he was arguably the most beloved of native English saints, even serving as a sort of Patron Saint of England, long before the concept existed, by merit of the devotion of the House of Wessex. He was buried at Lindisfarne, where he remained until it was sacked by Vikings in 875. Over the next two centuries, his body found rest at Chester-le-Street, Ripon and Durham, where in the early 12th century the Romanesque cathedral was constructed around his shrine. A very late Old English poem describes Cuthbert’s central role in the structure of the Cathedral:

Eardiæð æt ðem eadige      is in ðem minstre
unarimeda      reliquia,
ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,      ðes ðe writ seggeð,
midd ðene Drihnes wer      domes bideð.

[Inside the minster, by the blessed saint, are numberless relics; there many miracles occur, as books make known, while God’s servant lies there and waits for Judgement.]

The shrine was destroyed during the Reformation, and Cuthbert’s body buried elsewhere. Yet miraculously a copy of St John’s Gospel, which had been kept in his coffin perhaps since the early 8th century, survived. This book was recently purchased ‘for the nation’ for £9 million, and though officially attached to the British Library in London, has since been displayed in Durham, no more than a hundred yards from where it spent the better part of five hundred years.

There should be more stories like this.

First Wives Club

Due to various complicating factors (the weather, my research, hangovers) this is my first despatch in over a month, but what a day to choose! For today is the anniversary of the death of wild child, imperialist pig-dog and all-around LAD Henry II. While between 85 and 92% of my enthusiasm for this king was initially inspired by the peerless Peter O’Toole, who portrayed Henry in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), the historical figure was himself pretty exciting in an era filled with dramatically large characters. In January I spoke on the radio to propose a Tudors-style telly treatment for the early generations of the Plantagenet dynasty, and while the supporting cast ought to include his despotic mother the Empress Matilda, fearsome wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, quarrelling sons, and the ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas Becket, Henry would of course be at the centre, the Tony Soprano of the 12th century.

The case I made was as follows:

Henry II pacified England and Normandy after the twenty-year civil war known as ‘the Anarchy’, fought between his mother Matilda and his uncle King Stephen. He married the phenomenally wealthy, well-connected and beautiful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was ten years his senior and very recently divorced from the King of France. His repeated clashes with the Chancellor-Archbishop Thomas Becket would lead to Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170; Becket had been the beloved tutor of his eldest son, also called Henry, and would become the most popular saint in medieval England. The ‘family firm’ nature of the Plantagenets and their influence across their Empire would cause fractures: three of Henry and Eleanor’s sons – his Heir Apparent Henry, Geoffrey, and Richard, later known as the Lion-Heart – mounted a rebellion against him, with the support of King Louis of France. As Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar-winning Eleanor says, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

I also made a glib remark about Henry, like England’s other famous Henry, having red hair. (Perhaps Damian Lewis could play him? was the subtext. The discussion arose from publicity about Wolf Hall.) Sex, power and plate armour – surely all anyone desires from Sunday night television? Perhaps with John Hurt in the cameo role of Pope Alexander III, narrating Bulls in voiceover. I can picture it now.

But one has to ask oneself about the environment that allowed Henry’s achievements, theatrical as they were, to warrant such attention. It is a matter of fact that his mother Matilda made an absolute hash of the whole Queen-ing business. She served as regent in Italy for her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but had little other practical experience of rule. That is, of course, to be expected, as despite being the sole surviving legitimate child of Henry I, as a woman she cannot reasonably have expected to inherit either England or Normandy. Hence the accession of her cousin Stephen, and hence the civil war.

Henry’s wife Eleanor represents the other side of the same coin. As the elder of two sisters, she became Duchess of the quasi-independent Aquitaine in her teens following the death of her father. Aquitaine effectively comprised all of western France south of the Loire, and an easterly channel between Bourges and Limousin, as far as Lyon. In short, most of modern France. So when she married Prince Louis of France, later Louis VII, and her property theoretically transferred to her husband, France doubled in size. One of the stipulations of their marriage, however, was that Aquitaine would remain independent until their son came of age. Eleanor and Louis had two daughters, then for a combination of political and personal reasons they were divorced, and she married Henry, then Duke of Normandy, taking Aquitaine with her.

All the women who independent.

Landowning aristocratic women were not nearly as rare in the Middle Ages as one might suppose. One famous example within the English monarchy is Blanche, co-heiress to the Duchy of Lancaster, whose marriage to John of Gaunt made him the richest man in England. Another is Margaret Beaufort, only child of the Duke of Somerset and eventually mother of Henry VII. Blanche’s marriage was arranged by King Edward III himself, eager to wed his spare sons to wealthy heiresses. Margaret was also married by a king, Henry VI, to his half-brother, when she was 12 and he 24. Within a year she was pregnant and he was dead.

The grim reality for heiresses – and it is only honest to frame these women in terms of their fathers’ land – was to be fought over by noblemen, their guardians or prospective fathers-in-law, sometimes abducted (a feudal version of ‘finders keepers’, and quite legal), promptly remarried if widowed, and generally treated as an extension of their desirable property – which would, of course, be absorbed by their husbands’ families. Now, it may seem disingenuous to suggest that aristocratic women were the hardest-done-by of medieval European society, and I would claim no such thing. But I would argue that the disparity between the sexes was greater at this stratum of society than amongst the peasantry or burgeoning urban bourgeoisie.

I am often struck by how frequently working women appear in records of the medieval period, and there are hundreds of books and articles on the lives of working women before the modern period, in contrast to how little popular culture assumes about historical women-at-work. From spinners and laundresses to agricultural labourers, it is patently absurd to judge that women did not work in the past – and smacks of elitism in the same way that some western, middle-class feminists seem to believe that the success of the movement begins and ends in the boardroom (although, doing doctoral research in medieval Latin, I am barely qualified to highlight anyone else’s elitism). Women weren’t ‘professionals’, and only professionals count, is how that argument develops. Of course mainstream history is elitist – probably because, until very recently in the west and still in parts of the developing world, literacy is a matter for elites. But even the high-status and highly romanticised Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows women mowing, shearing sheep, harvesting grapes, and generally behaving like humans in an agrarian society. The images of aristocratic life in the same manuscript only hint at an imbalance: there may be no women at the Christmas feast, but they get to flirt in the same garden and join the same May Day hunt as their men.

©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. OjŽda

Working 9 to 5.

Quid enim iste cum Henrico? He, after all, was neither the cause nor the worst case of the difficult treatment of property-owning women in the Middle Ages. Henry was not responsible for his mother’s disinheritance or mismanagement, nor indeed for Margaret Beaufort’s horrific childbirth. It is all the more important to remember that Eleanor was substantially older than him at their marriage, and apparently suggested the match herself, possibly in part to avoid less desirable suitors who had attempted to kidnap her ‘fair and square’. This level of autonomy is remarkable because it is so rare.

Henry is a curious example of a man whose power was, if not provided, certainly solidified by his mother and wife, who in certain lights both overshadow him. Eleanor backed her sons’ rebellion against their father and allegedly had one of Henry’s mistresses murdered. (To clarify, this is almost certainly untrue.) Although Henry was tutored by the philosopher William of Conches and was on good terms with several other learned clerics, it is Eleanor who is remembered, perhaps without foundation, as the patron of poets and musicians. Eleanor is quite rightly described with superlatives; Henry is popularly less famous than both of his sons and his best frenemy Thomas Becket. And the icing on the cake? Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for her portrayal of Eleanor; Peter O’Toole lost out to Cliff Robertson for Charly.

Roman Holiday

Like those proverbial buses, birthdays always seem to come in groups. This current eight-day period sees the birthdays of sixteen Facebook friends, five actual friends, my housemate, my sister, my mother, my godmother, my late grandfather and great-grandmother, and Iggy Pop. But it’s not all about me, and today is the grandest birthday of all: Rome.

Of course, it isn’t possible to know precisely when Rome was founded, settled, called Rome, or countless other matters that mark the beginning of its status as the most historically important city in Western Europe. So today’s commemoration becomes a bit like the Queen’s Official Birthday – her actual birthday, as if by magic, also being today. Nor is it possible to describe Rome’s colossal influence on the formation of medieval Europe, linguistic, cultural, religious, or poetic. The medievals themselves were well aware of this. Writings and artworks of the high and late Middle Ages explore Rome’s foundation myths, emulate the style of her histories and celebrate the spread of Christianity as it consumed Rome’s pagan practices and appropriated her artefacts.

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 753 B.C.

It may be a surprise to read that Rome often overshadowed even Jerusalem, for whom centuries of wars were fought and where the holiest places of Europe’s dominant religion were recalled in countless itineraries. But overshadow it did. Alexander Neckam, the late-12th-century Augustinian academic and administrator, wrote of Rome,

Primitus Europae mea pagina serviet, in qua
Roma stat, orbis apex, gloria, gemma, decus.
[My page will first treat of Europe, where stands Rome, the pinnacle, glory, jewel and honour of the world.]

He creates a picture of a city filled with churches and inhabited by the ghosts of great men – from Caesar and Cicero to Peter and Paul – and beautiful, lost artworks. Earlier books on the marvels of Rome write of the changing ground of the city, where cathedrals grow from the rubble of demolished temples. The impressive and impressing power of the Roman church pervades these books, and others that depict the lives (or, more properly, deaths) of Christians in Rome before it was Christian. It’s all too much and too varied to cover in a career, let alone in something like this.

There is an interesting side-channel to this narrative of conquest and appropriation. The books of the Church and churchmen can be, surprisingly, tinged with regret at the beauty the Church destroyed. Now, regret is not an emotion for birthdays, and birthdays aren’t a concern of the medieval Church. If you intend, like I do, to celebrate Rome’s birthday, Titus Pullo is nearer the mark.