Forme Over Function

With a new term and new students, I find myself answering a great deal of questions about What Life Was Like in the Middle Ages. Because the students appear to be sober, thoughtful types, these are usually questions on the practice of religion, the legal status of women, and popular views of history. Aside from the occasional treat – ‘How much of Game of Thrones is real?’, not in itself a bad question – the tone of our classes is rather serious, and thus my leisure time has to be given over to burning cultural inquiries like ‘Were medieval people drunk all the time?’

It’s a matter of great historical import, probably. As any fule kno, alcohol kills bacteria and is therefore safer to drink than pond water, whatever current NHS guidelines might say. Calorie-rich and alcohol-low small beer would have been both nourishing and tolerably hygienic. But would it really get people drunk? In the past, I’ve written about feasts and the blow-out on expensive, imported wines that these entailed. These may have caused some stinking hangovers but are by no means common. Yet medieval depictions of drunkenness abound, from manuscript images of vomiting and bar-brawls, to the chaos of Holofernes’ banquet in the Old English Judith:

                    Ða wearð Holofernus,

goldwine gumena,     on gytesalum,

hloh ond hlydde,     hlynede ond dynede,

þæt mihten fira bearn     feorran gehyran

hu se stiðmoda     styrmde ond gylede,

modig ond medugal,     manode geneahhe

bencsittende     þæt hi gebærdon wel.

Swa se inwidda     ofer ealne dæg

dryhtguman sine     drencte mid wine,

swiðmod sinces brytta,     oðþæt hie on swiman lagon,

oferdrencte his duguðe ealle,     swylce hie wæron deaðe geslegene,

agotene goda gehwylces.

[‘Then Holofernes, the gold-giving friend of his men, became joyous from the drinking. He laughed and grew vociferous, roared and clamoured, so that the children of men could hear from far away how the fierce one stormed and yelled; arrogant and excited by mead, he frequently admonished the guests that they enjoy themselves well. So, for the entire day, the wicked one, the stern dispenser of treasures, drenched his retainers with wine until they lay unconscious; the whole of his troop were as drunk as if they had been struck down in death, drained of every ability.’ Ed. and trans. by Elaine Treharne]

As you may know, Holofernes suffers no hangover because he wakes up dead.

Moral disapproval of drunkenness in the period flows at least in part from its association with the deadly sin of Gula, gluttony. William Langland does not record whether the ensuing bacon sandwich is to be counted as the same sin as the earlier pints, so my investigations have taken on a new urgency since I discovered in The Forme of Cury what can only be described as hangover food of the highest order. Owing to a Europe-wide shortage of potatoes in the Middle Ages, I can but assume that such delights as Malaches of pork filled the social and dietary function of a carton of cheesy chips. So, just in case my students begin to ask more flippant questions, I cooked it.

 

Malaches of pork (The Forme of Cury).

Hewe pork al to pecys and medle it with ayren and chese igrated. Do þerto powdour fort, safroun and pynes with salt. Make a crust in a trap; bake it wel þerinne, and serue it forth.

I bought minced pork, because I’m lazy, but made my own shortcrust pastry, with which I untidily lined a shallow round tin. With 500g of pork, I mixed in 4 medium eggs (beaten) and about 50g of grated cheddar, which in retrospect was not enough. My powdour fort recipe was somewhat vague, and consisted of:

• ½ tsp ground ginger
• ½ tsp ground mace
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg

I mixed it into the pork-egg-cheese along with about 50g of pine nuts. Saffron is expensive and it was nobody’s birthday. I then spread the pork mix evenly into the pastry-lined tin, and put it in a 190°C oven for 45 minutes. It was served forth with the old favourite spynoches yfryed (as before).

Ȝum.

Reader, it was delicious. My friend Jen, who took the photograph, heartily agreed, and neither of us was even hungover. It had the attitude of a Chicago deep pan pizza, if Chicago were in the North East of England. I wonder whether more cheese may have given it an oozy, stringing consistency whilst hot, but the leftovers were pleasant enough cold. The spice was warming, not overwhelming, the pine nuts exceeded themselves; even the saffron (which, you will recall, I did not use) was apt. We had it with a Provençal rosé of which Richard II might have approved. My blood vessels have yet to recover.

All of which rather side-tracked me. For how can I answer a serious cultural question about medieval drunkenness with an anecdote about a time I made a really nice tart? How can I teach the literature of Ricardian England when I’m thinking about the unexpected pleasure of a hypothetical royal hangover? Who is Epicurus owene sone, and how can I meet him?

Next week: The peasants threaten to revolt when the bakery moves across the channel.

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.

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.

Spice Up Your Life

Since beginning to explore the joys of medieval cooking last year, I’ve accrued a large variety of spices and as such have been adding them to almost every meal. The origins of these spices are far-flung: nutmeg and mace from India and the Banda Islands of Indonesia; cloves from the Maluku Islands and Sri Lanka; cinnamon from Sri Lanka and Madagascar; ginger from China and everywhere in-between. The excitement I derive from this makes me wonder whether I am an orientalist pig-dog (thanks, The Guardian), or in fact a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Nutritious.

As anyone who has ever played Anno 1404 will be able to confirm, the acquisition of spices is a serious business. The impact of European colonisers throughout the tropics tells its own grisly story, from the Dutch in Indonesia and the Portuguese in Goa to the English, Spanish and French in the Greater Antilles. In the High Middle Ages the market desire for these substances was naturally smaller than in later periods, but was sometimes matched by a curiosity towards their origins. The Frenchman Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre in the early thirteenth century, writes several breathless chapters into his Historia orientalis, a chronicle of the Crusades, where he describes the plentiful fruits and spices of his new surroundings:

Sunt in eadem terra arbores mirabiles, quas propter earum praecellentiam nominant arbores paradisi, poma oblonga suauissima, et quasi unctuosa, dulcissimum saporem habentia ferentes: in uno autem globo plusquam centum sese contingentia et compressa inuoluuntur. [There are in that land wondrous trees, who because of their excellence are called trees of paradise, bearing very sweet and almost oily oblong apples which have a very sweet taste; and in one sphere are encased more than a hundred of them, touching and packed in tight.]

It sounds like Jacques is describing a pomegranate. We are also reminded that oranges and lemons, now abundant in Mediterranean Europe, were once exclusive to Asia and novel to the European:

Sunt praeterea alie arbores fructus acidos, pontici videlicet saporis, ex se procreantes, quos appellant Limones. Quorum succo in aestate cum carnibus et piscibus libentissime utuntur. […] In parvis autem arboribus quaedam crescunt alia poma citrina minoris quantitatis frigida, et acidi seu pontici saporis, quae poma Orenges ab indigenis nuncupantur. [Furthermore there are other trees bringing forth from themselves sour fruits, which is to say of tart flavour, which they call lemons, whose juice is very freely used in summer with meat and fish. And on certain small trees there grow other citrus apples, cooling and smaller of size, and with an acid or tart flavour, which are called orange-apples by the locals.]

Delicious.

Jacques’s notions of the harvesting of pepper, for example, are amusingly foolhardy and doubtless derive from a European literary tradition that emphasises the weird over the strictly accurate. As he muses upon cardamom, galangal, zedoary, myrrh and terebinth, he doesn’t exhort his reader to set up trade colonies, but to marvel at the richness of the earth as given them by God. There is, of course, a possessive aspect to his treatment of the Holy Land, since he is in a contested kingdom as an early sort of colonial bishop. But the botanical cornucopia he describes is not for the taking, but for dreaming about. He’d have been a sucker for Bombay Sapphire.

Physics Is Fun!

A brief update from the midst of the lurgy-ridden wastes of November, and it’s good news this week for the public perception of the Middle Ages. Researchers from the University of Durham were nominated for a Times Higher Education Award in the Research Project of the Year category, and although they were beaten to it by a team from Nottingham, the collaboration between historians and physicists was notable for its reference to the scientific writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253.

A lecturer in theology at Oxford, Grosseteste was part of a network comprising the key English academic figures of the period – Adam Marsh, Thomas Wallensis and Alfred of Sareshel inter alia – and was teacher and possibly mentor to Roger Bacon, who praises the bishop’s multilingualism in his Opus Tertium. While his intellectual energies went in all directions, perhaps his most interesting writings are his commentaries on Aristotle and his treatises on astronomy and light.

Þu canst nat þe Maþþeletes iunen, yt is socciale selfe-slauȝte.

The popular notion of medieval ‘scientists’ as urine-drinking, augury-taking weirdos, deriving in no small measure from the efforts of Mark Twain and Monty Python, is given the lie by figures like Bacon and Grosseteste; and while men like my homeboy Alexander Neckam may ultimately have been answering to ideas of a divinely-ordered schema, their academic curiosity was none the worse for it. Mindful of Bernard of Chartres’s phrase, I sometimes have to remind my students that, simply by merit of living in a world where the concept of gravity is known, they are not automatically more intelligent than the intellectual giants who lived before. A paper published by the Durham research team goes to the heart of the matter:

[S]cience is never ‘complete’ — and perceiving modern scientific endeavour as part of a continuum keeps us honest. Admitting that we may be almost as far from a full understanding of colour as our thirteenth-century collaborators reminds us to doubt — and that, after all, is the only way to progress. [Hannah E. Smithson, Giles E.M. Gasper, Tom C.B. McLeish, ‘All the colours of the rainbow’, Nature Physics 10 (2014).]

While it’s always fun to explain to people why A Game of Thrones isn’t historically accurate (true story), it is my hope that an increased exposure, however small, to Grosseteste’s early work will show casual modern onlookers that rumours of the Dark Ages have been greatly exaggerated.