by Michael Pye
The beguines flourished all across the lands of Northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Strasbourg, for example, one woman in ten was a beguine. In Cologne, there were a hundred beguine houses. In the Northern countries as a whole, perhaps three women in every hundred were beguines. The poet and mystic Hadewijch of Brabant, who most likely fell out with her fellow beguines and then went wandering, mentions beguines in Flanders, Brabant, Paris, Zeeland, Holland, Frisia, England and ‘beyond the Rhine’, the territories of the edge of the world.5
Seventeen years before Katelijne was taken in 1345, church inspectors had visited the Bruges beguinage.6 They reported that the house had been set up by two countesses ‘by divine inspiration, as it is piously believed’, to preserve the respectability of women who couldn’t marry, couldn’t afford the ‘dowry’ needed to enter a convent and who were about ‘to go begging or shamefully support themselves’. The beguinage allowed them to ‘support and clothe themselves by suitable work, without shaming themselves or their friends’. Each woman had her own routine of washing wool and cleaning cloth, each had her own garden to grow food, working in silence on a diet of ‘coarse bread and pottage’. No beguine could spend a night in town without the permission of the mistress of the court, and nobody could leave even for an hour without beguine companions; and out in town they wore coarse, frumpish clothes to disguise any individuality; all the town would see was that they were a beguine.
This is the time when people flowed, steady as a river, out of the countryside and into the towns, pulled by the prospect of wages, independence, work in the new small factories that made cloth and needed hands. Life for those newcomers was not easy, especially not for women, and at the beguinages they knew they were among friends. Newcomers accounted for half the women in some city beguinages. In the beguine courts, a woman knew she would never need a bit of prostitution on the side, or face a time of going hungry when things were slow. She could survive a crisis in her trade, and if she was sick, when she was old, she had a home. Women rebuilt their families in the safety of the court, mothers with daughters, aunts with nieces, sisters together.
Sometimes they shared a single house, more usually they had courtyards like villages inside the cities, closed off from the outside life and big enough to have streets and their own church, hospital, school. They could come and go, they could change their minds. Usually, they did not have to buy their way into a community, unlike novice nuns, who needed sponsorship, cash or land to enter a nunnery. They might be widows under pressure to marry one more time, a woman like Katelijne who might be marketed any day as a wife; there was protection with the beguines.
Out of a pious duty, they took on the tasks other people did not want. They were the ones who handled the dead, laid them out and made them ready for the grave, and they nursed the living dead, the lepers in their colonies outside the towns. They also tended the sick in their hospitals, but since they were not meant to nurse men, they had to leave the beguinage if their fathers needed help.
They were teachers; when the priest Lievin vander Muelene wrote his last will in 1559, he acknowledged ‘a good and devout little beguine’ as his spiritual mother, ‘often punishing my misdeeds in writing or speech, correcting me and leading me towards virtue’.7 Some were housekeepers in the city; the Paris gentleman who laid down instructions for his wife in Le Ménagier de Paris around 1392 has a whole list of duties for ‘Dame Agnes the beguine’, who is there to teach the wife ‘wise and ripe behaviour and to serve and train you’. Dame Agnes hires the maids, supervises them, counts the sheep in the country, takes out stains on dresses with warm wine, keeps the keys, puts out the fires at night and goes round ‘with a lighted candle, to inspect your wines, verjuice and vinegar, to see that none has been taken away’.8
They went out from the edge of the city to herd animals, grow vegetables, raise chickens. More usually, they worked in the textile trade: they spun wool and finished cloth, were tailors and embroiderers, sometimes weavers even when that had become an officially, overwhelmingly male trade. The new and growing towns gave everyone a chance, and women most of all. Men, after all, had a habit of being distracted by war or civil strife.
Material possessions were not important; they owned nothing much, just the pots, knives and plates that each stored in her section of a special divided cupboard, known to this day as a beguine cupboard. The poorer women lived from wages, the richer women sank their money into houses they often shared with other beguines. That did not stop them being very successful in the new commercial world around them; the beguinage of Sint-Truiden was attacked and plundered in 1340 by townspeople furious at how well the women were doing, especially since they were free of some taxes.9 Some of them were traders, not just artisans. Mergriete van Ecke in 1306 complained to the commissioners of the Count of Flanders that his bailiffs had destroyed some fine white wool cloth of hers because they mistakenly thought it was not made in Ghent. She said she had sent it to a friend in Antwerp but he thought it was too expensive, and so it had come back, but she insisted she had ‘proved sufficiently by a weaver and a fuller that the cloth was made, woven and fulled in Ghent’. If she had to find witnesses then she wasn’t the one making the cloth; she was the merchant.10
Beguines were chaste, but it was not out of terror of the flesh. At Mechelen, around 1290, the rules said a beguine who fell pregnant had to leave ‘as soon as her condition becomes obvious’ and stay away for a year, after which she could come back ‘if she demonstrates good behaviour attested by good witnesses’; she had to stay inside the compound for six months afterwards, but she could raise her child there. The same applied in 1453 at Tongeren, unless the woman’s partner had been a married man or a priest. In some places the rules were stricter – a pregnant beguine was banned for life at ’s-Hertogenbosch – but it was quite usual to have children playing between the houses of the beguinage and usual for the women to tolerate other women’s mistakes. The one great sin was questioning the authority of the grand mistress of the beguinage; that always meant a lifetime ban, everywhere.11
You couldn’t be so very practical as this without annoying anyone who liked the comfort of strict rules that they were never likely to disobey. Go to the theatre and you’d hear catcalls and snickers the moment a beguine character came on stage; some of the oldest farces in Middle Dutch have beguines fucking so hard their beds come crashing through the floor. You couldn’t be a learnèd woman, teaching Latin and even theology to girls, without being mocked for it.
Carnival parades at Huy in 1298 included men who ‘had shaved their beards and dressed as ladies or beguines, marching through the streets two by two as if in a procession, some singing, others holding an open book in their hands as if they were reading’.
There was a quarrel even over the word ‘beguine’: whether it came from benignitas, which is ‘goodness’, or as one Benedictine said from begun, meaning ‘dung’.12 Its most likely origin is a word for a mumbler, someone whose speech you can’t quite hear and can’t check or control. That was especially worrying when the speech was prayer, which was meant to be spoken loud and clear in a church; the beguine’s prayers were between her and God, not laid down or certified by authority. She could be telling God anything.
There was also the beguines’ licence to moralize, even over the trading they did so well and the profits they made. Some were most unhappy that their parents made money by lending money, although richer beguines loaned out money themselves; quite aside from helping other women in the court, two beguines of Arras lent two hundred pounds to the town of Calais in 1300, a solid deal at 10 per cent, which was at least a lower rate than usual. Still, Ida of Louvain thought her merchant father’s wealth was ill-gotten, was only mildly relieved to be told that usury was not involved and made her opinion so obvious to her father that ‘losing all restraint, day after day he would beat with the harsh blows of his curses this girl so innocent, so commendable, so unused to answering back’. He bought casks of w
ine to sell at a profit, and she disapproved, offering to buy only what she could use, which made her father furious. When the wine went off, miraculously or not, lost colour and flavour and started to froth, her father was growling with fury. Ida saw her father grieving and said her prayers, and the wine was made good. ‘She completely forgot about the wrongs her father had done her,’ her biographer says.13
The beguines were in need of a history, any man could see that: something less spontaneous, more miraculous, involving the suffering that women were meant to endure as part of their spirituality. The beguines talked of the ecstasy of their love for God, but obviously they meant pain.
Various sympathetic priests began to tell their stories, to make them fit the Church.
In place of the scatter of communities, women choosing their own rules and their own way of life, there had to be a founder saint: St Begga, a seventh-century abbess who married the son of a saint, whose father had been a great local power under the Merovingian kings and who had nothing much to do with beguinages except living in roughly the same part of Flanders.14 The spontaneity of the beguines’ story was weighted down with royal connections, saintliness and the rigid governance of religious orders.
The written stories of early beguines, in texts that went back and forth across the North Sea in Middle English as well as Latin, allow nothing at all ordinary; they seem to doubt that work, calm, prayer and kindness could be enough. They take the women out of the world. One, Elizabeth of Spalbeek, becomes a phenomenon, a woman with the stigmata of Christ; ‘in wounds and in pain she affirms the faith of the Passion’, as her story says.15 If women put their whole bodies and souls into their faith, if they were as vivid as the poet Hadewijch when she writes of ‘a whirlpool turning so fearfully that heaven and earth might wonder at it and be afraid … the deep whirlpool that is so fearfully dark that is divine union in its hidden storms’,16 then obviously faith must hurt. Elizabeth became famous for knowing women who were suffering even more than she was.
Another, Christina Mirabilis, starts her life by dying; her terrified sister sees the body fly to the rafters of the church, where Christina is given a choice between Heaven and Earth and chooses Earth. She is raised from the dead, and goes about as a creature on the edge of madness. She has to be chained because she keeps going to high places, towers or trees, and she lives for nine weeks on nothing but her own breast milk. She goes into red fire and iced water and comes out unscathed, which must mean God’s approval as it does in ordeals. She begs alms, so she has to live as a man because women were almost never given a papal licence to go out and beg; but she tactfully does not preach because that is a man’s work. Her wildness is personal; she never joins any kind of community, although she does at one point go to Germany, as did some other holy women, to be with a famous anchorite called Jutta. There is nothing to say she was a beguine, but she is written into stories about beguines, and she brings with her all the sulphurous reputation of mystics, madwomen, women who won’t be happy being women.17
Marie d’Oignies is a very different story. For a start, she was married at the age of fourteen to a man called John, which meant she no longer owned her own body, and as a kind of penance she ‘wore discreetly under her smock a rough, sharp cord tied tight around her’; her biographer, the beguines’ advocate Jacques de Vitry, insists he isn’t ‘praising the excess but telling her fervour’. She’d been a serious child, unhappy with bright clothes and the company of vain girls, and although now she knew the ‘hard heat of burning youth’ she decided that what she wanted in marriage was chastity.18 Her husband agreed to treat her as though she were his ward, not his wife.
This was dangerous thinking, close to the heresy of the Cathars and their dislike of the flesh and their insistence that sex was fine for anything except making babies, which was the exact opposite of the Church’s teaching that procreation was the only excuse. Marie was suspected of sharing their error. The problem was not so much that she chose chastity, because virginity at best and chastity if you couldn’t manage virginity were virtues. Marriage was an expedient for weak persons, and the best kind of childbirth was virgin birth, bringing nothing but virtues into the world.19 The problem with Marie’s version was the fulminous atmosphere of her times, when an age was supposed to be coming to an end, and maybe the world with it.20 In his first letter to Timothy, St Paul writes that ‘in the latter times some shall depart from the faith’ and one sign will be ‘forbidding to marry’.21 Preaching chastity within marriage came to much the same thing; it could bring on the end of everything.
Marie persisted. She and her husband went to serve in a leper colony. Their relatives ‘respected them rich, but afterward despised and scorned them’. She moved on to Oignies, a place she didn’t know and hadn’t seen, and she again worked with lepers; it was there that she set up what must have been the first beguine house.22
She worked with her hands: sewing, weaving, nursing the sick, but sometimes healing sickness just by her touch. She went through the whole psalter on her knees, beating herself between psalms, so she could certainly read, and her deathbed words are written in Latin even in the Middle English version of the text, although earlier in her life she could not make sense of Latin words. She had a bed in her cell made of straw, but she went without sleep, ‘she served our Lord in the night watches’. She dealt with demons by long fasts and direct confrontation; she saved one nun simply by running a demon through by the sheer force of her prayer so ‘it seemed that he had cast out all his bowels and he was wretchedly carrying on his neck all that was within him’. Then she asked a ‘familiar friend and master’ what to do with the demon, and then she checked with a man who was an intimate friend; she deferred to men.
A man wrote her story, and it shows. We’re told she had two men in her life, her husband and her brother-in-law Guy, who served as her spiritual adviser, but she does not belong to either of them; independence is the essence of being a beguine. She was also known as ‘the mother of the brothers [meaning monks] of Oignies’, which makes her someone of authority in the monastic system; but beguines were suspect precisely because they stayed outside that system. She works, and she fills every minute of the day and she is thoroughly devout; she labours and she also acts out of charity. That you might expect, but beguines were discreet persons, dressed like ordinary middle-class women and keeping mostly to their own walled courts; and Marie was dramatic, vomiting blood, running away into the woods from visitors, dressed rather meanly and not entirely clean for ‘studiously sought cleanness pleased her never’. She even preached.23
She served her purpose admirably: a man’s explanation of why any woman would choose to be a beguine.
There are reasons why women were able to make these choices in the north-west of Europe and nowhere else, and able to make them work. The first is the merchant business that crossed the seas, and the way it made families and marriages more flexible. It’s not that women were liberated, or that men no longer ruled; but women who were not noble or royal were finding they had unexpected chances.
Consider Jewish women in the North, no longer required to keep to the rules of modesty that Judaism laid down and Islam imposed in Spain. If they had money to lend, they offered it to gentile women for their work and their homes, but they also lent to gentile men. When their husbands went travelling, the wives had to manage the business. They went out to bargain with men, some Jewish, some gentiles, and held talks with feudal lords; they could strike deals with merchant rivals of their husbands if they reckoned the merchants had better contacts. Where the great rabbi Maimonides thought no Jewish woman should ever be alone with a gentile, even if his wife was present, because ‘they are shameless’, the Tosafot commentaries on the Talmud simply say ‘it is impossible that a woman not be left alone with a non-Jew at some time’. A woman went on business with a stranger, stopped to rest in a forest and was molested by two men. She was told she was committing adultery just to sit down with other men, that she should never be alon
e with a stranger; but the rabbis ruled otherwise. They said they turned a blind eye to women going about on business because it happened all the time.24
There was more: a subtle shift in how men were required to understand their marriages. Rabbis began to tell them to marry only one woman, not to stay away from home more than eight months at a time, and not to go at all if they were not getting on with their wives, because the journey was just an excuse to leave them.25 Marriage was chosen, a companionship, not just a contract.
This edging towards a kind of equality, even among people who had no doubt that men should rule, had a very terrible side. Just as lives were opening up, crusaders were on their way to the Holy Land, and inspiring murderous pogroms against the Jews along the Rhine. Faced with forced conversion to Christianity, it was the women who had to decide whether and when to end their lives and their children’s lives to save them from betraying their faith; and then they had to kill. They performed sacrifices as they never were allowed to do in the Jerusalem Temple; phrases used for high priests, even Abraham himself, now applied to women.