Sorrow Without End
Page 22
Henry was a most uxorious man. Unlike his father, a lusty fellow by any definition, Henry produced no known illegitimate issue, although having them was not always considered a bad thing for kings. Part of the reason for this marital fidelity was Henry’s strong religious bent. Another equally important reason was his wife. Eleanor of Provence, one of four remarkably intelligent and beautiful sisters of an equally well-endowed mother, married him when she was twelve and he was twenty-eight. Despite the standard ups and downs of the union, they both seemed to have considered it a very happy marriage.
At sixteen, she bore their first child. They had at least five known children and probably other unrecorded stillbirths and miscarriages. Despite the assumption that upper class parents didn’t have much to do with their offspring, there is strong evidence that Henry and Eleanor adored theirs. When their son, Edward, fell ill at a Cistercian abbey, Eleanor refused to leave him, despite the Order’s prohibition against women staying within their precincts. Henry made sure she was allowed to stay. When their deaf and mute little Katherine died at age four, both parents fell seriously ill from the strain of deep grieving.
Henry, despite his hot temper (a very Angevin trait), was also a rather merciful man. Unlike at least one of his ancestors, he seemed to have reconsidered his words and acts when he stopped chewing the rushes and cooled down. He was outraged, for example, when his sister, Eleanor, secretly married Simon de Montfort, but Henry soon welcomed them back to court when other kings might have imprisoned or even executed the offending pair. Some might say that Henry’s more compassionate act was not the wisest decision since his brother-in-law later paid him back with rebellion, but I’ll leave that interesting discussion to others for resolution.
The king also had a reputation for some leniency toward criminals. He was known to commute the sentences of those who illegally hunted the king’s deer. He did not seem awfully fond of putting people to death for relatively minor offences, and he gave substantial alms to prisoners as well as the poor in general. Matthew Paris wrote scathingly about his legal “laxity”, but not all would have agreed that it was worthy of so much contempt. As is true today, people have always had various opinions on what constitutes justice.
Henry was also known for his love of the arts, although his methods for getting the money to pay for his projects were often less than admirable. His dedication to the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey ranks as his most splendid achievement. An example of one of his more minor ones includes the remnant of a tiled pavement from Eleanor’s apartments, now in the British Museum.
Whatever his flaws as a king, he seems to have been a kind man who tried to practice some of the basic tenets of his faith. When he died, there was a brief flurry of miracle allegations at his tomb. His widow encouraged the stories. His son, Edward I, quickly put a stop to any such claims.
The Middle Ages had a plethora of alleged miracles, yet the medievals had a healthy skepticism about cures and relics. This did not mean they lacked faith, but they were as cognizant as we that clever scam artists are often just waiting to take in the innocent and gullible. They also shared our outrage when this happened.
Pilgrimage sites were staffed with people required to log in all alleged cures and determine their validity at the time claimed. Those who traveled from place to place to gain attention by dramatic cures were a known problem, and the more notorious were chased away whenever recognized.
The medievals were also aware that the newness of something had a special power to it, although they did not use our psychological language to explain why. Each site had records showing that the efficacy of cures diminished with some predictable regularity after the relic first arrived. To correct this trend, the religious knew that doing something dramatic helped to recover that power. A ceremonial moving of the relic was one such method. Over time, however, there was no question that cures declined, and recorded ones involved increasingly local populations. Thus income from the site dropped as well.
The other problem with having a relic was the need to guard it. Relic thieves were quite inventive in their ways of stealing bits of the enshrined saint. Yes, they did take bites of the holy object, filched molars, and even sucked dust into their mouths, all of which could later be sold as legitimate parts thereof. When whole saints were stolen, the thieves, usually from a place that wanted to become a shrine, often argued that the saint had wanted to move and thus their act was justified. (Ellis Peters dealt with a similar issue in A Morbid Taste for Bones.)
In addition to acceptably documented relics, there was an impressive number of body parts (including many of the same type from the same body), uncountable slivers of the True Cross, and gallons of blood from just about anyone of sacred note. The honest faithful passionately hated the fraudulence, but it was prevalent and many did find humor in this fakery. For the latter, I refer readers to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Illness in the Middle Ages was frightening. Some of the cures were even more so, and presumed causes of sickness may seem quite ignorant today. Swallowing crushed gemstones or chowing down on sheep lice no longer has wide appeal. The belief that a leper caught the disease because he had committed some especially horrible sin, like having sex with his wife during her menstruation, would seem bizarre to most today. The assumption that a child born with red hair was conceived during a woman’s monthly bleeding does, however, show an interesting logic.
On the other hand, what we accept as good medical practice in 2006 may turn out to be quite primitive by standards seven hundred years from now. Nor may we ignore that the medical breakthroughs we enjoy today evolved from discoveries made by those in the distant past. Despite resistance to new methods and ideas from the medical professions, religious leaders, and the general public, there have always been observant, thoughtful, and curious people who persisted until their insights became conventional wisdom.
Not all medieval theories about good health or the cause of illness were completely outlandish. Physicians regularly prescribed exercise and moderation in both eating and drinking to stay healthy, understanding that good health once lost was very difficult to recover. As a cause of illness, the effect of “bad air” was a major concern. Although most blithely tossed their nightly slops into the public street, they also wanted good drainage or at least an adequate number of pigs to clean it all up. The medievals might not have known about germs, but they knew there was some relationship between the smell of sewage and getting sick.
Hospitals were also rather advanced even though they were primarily intended for the poor. Although whole families (plus valuable animals) of the least affluent often lived in one room and shared sleeping accommodations, the sick in the larger hospitals were not only given a single bed but also regularly washed sheets. (The Savoy Hospital, during the reign of Henry VII, not only offered sheets and blankets but also a tapestry coverlet monogrammed with the Tudor rose.) A light but nourishing diet was provided for free, as well as night-lights and staff to help patients should they need to visit the latrines.
Much like today, medical care funding depended upon the priorities of the powerful. While Henry VII founded and supported some of the first hospitals for the temporarily ill poor, his son, Henry VIII, confiscated any hospital land if he fancied the location for personal use. Saint James’ Palace, for example, sits on land once dedicated to the cure of the sick.
Since dissection was discouraged by the Church (although autopsies were allowed in cases of violent death), Christian physicians and surgeons learned most about anatomy, technique, and viable treatments during wars. At the time covered by the first mysteries in this series, a crusade was being fought in the Holy Land; thus these doctors not only got their practical experience but were also exposed to the superior medical knowledge of the Muslim world.
Despite gaining much scientific, culinary, and philosophical enlightenment from people they called “infidels”, the Western world considered these wars less than successful because Jerusale
m remained in Muslim hands. When Prince Edward arrived in Tunis full of fervor for the fray, he was horrified to discover that a treaty between the two archenemies had actually been signed. Despite his determination to fight on and ignore an act he considered almost blasphemous, he himself eventually offered a truce and left the Holy Land, unsuccessful, much impoverished, and barely alive. His Western contemporaries considered him a hero.
Although we obviously lack the vivid photos of a Matthew Brady for the crusades, the handwritten accounts are quite graphic. The memoirs of Anna Comnena (First Crusade), Villehardouin (Fourth Crusade), and Joinville (the life of Saint Louis up to his death in 1270) are some of the most famous from the Western perspective. Books from the Muslim point of view are harder to find for the general Western reader, although a few compilations and Ibn Al-Qalanisi’s account of the First Crusade are reasonably available. Of course, all these books contain descriptions, often idealized, of heroics. Nonetheless, the medievals did not sugarcoat the grimness or the atrocities, acts that we ourselves have utterly failed to eliminate despite four Geneva Conventions from 1864 through the current 1949 codification.
As for the mental and physical effects of any war on men, women and children, combatants or noncombatants, it is probably best to let those who went through the experience speak for themselves. There are a large number of firsthand accounts available, beginning at least with the ancient Greeks and most likely others of whom I am sadly ignorant. One very succinct summary, however, was given in 1880 during a speech at Columbus, Ohio, by William Tecumseh Sherman: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”
Bibliography
I would like to give special thanks to Dr. Juricek of Pinole Pet Hospital, who kindly explained some very crucial details about sheep anatomy to me.
For those interested in reading more about some of the subjects touched on in this book, the following are sources I consulted while writing this mystery. None of these authors should be blamed for any of my errors of interpretation or for any of the twists of imagination I took. Where I have exercised just a bit too much imagination, I take full blame.
David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284, Oxford University Press, 2003
Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, Penguin, 1969
Jean Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe 1000-1300, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E. J. Costello, University of California Press, 1969
Joinville & Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw, Penguin, 1963
Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England, St. Martin’s Press, 1995
Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton University Press, 1990
Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster, The English Hospital: 1070-1570, Yale University Press, 1995
Ralph B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, Cambridge University Press, 1968
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