Modern psychology has taught society a great deal about the dangers resulting from lack of positive bonding between mother and infant that was either unrealized or disregarded earlier. Whether or not it was recognized, the results were still serious because it would be from the ranks of the nobility that those unnurtured and unbonded male infants came, who would grow up to be the ruthless warmongers and inquisitors raining havoc on future generations of their own people, with a lethal combination of fear, hatred, longing and disrespect for women.
All women, if they chose to limit the number of children, would do so based in part on perceived ability to care for them into adulthood. It stands to reason that the poorer would choose to have fewer and the more affluent would choose to have more. When the average births per peasant family ranged from 4.5 for the more affluent to 1.5 percent for the poorest, this is exactly what happened.
In the fifteenth century, the Church of Rome condemned the use of contraception for economic motives whereas before now the Church had simply “denounced” the practice when used in connection with adultery and “fornication.”142 However conscientious the peasant woman was, the span of childhood for her offspring was brief indeed. After the age of four, children accompanied their parents to work. All able-bodied children of the peasant class worked with older siblings and same sex adults who taught the skills they would need to survive and prosper. By the age of twelve, these children were paid if they were hired out to others. Children guided plow animals, though grown men did the actual plowing, and children tended sheep, cattle and geese. In their free time, scarce though it may have been, children were free to sing, dance and play. Even though some peasant children were sent away to become apprentices to townsfolk and learn trades, most peasant children lived with and were raised by their own parents. This is in absolute contrast to the offspring of both the nobility and town merchants who were sent away from home at the earliest possible age–about 5 years old.
Peasant husbands also working the land and raising animals were rarely away from home for long periods, also in contrast to merchants or warlords of the nobility. Therefore, the peasant family, for all its intermittent misery created by failed crops, greedy landlords, sickly offspring or bad weather, had the ability to be a family, a bonded and sometimes fierce unit able to withstand almost anything life brought its way. It is odd that this majority population, often ridiculed by the learned and denigrated for their boorishness, even feared for their unyielding strength and stubbornness, should have been the sanest, healthiest and certainly most stable of all social sectors. They may have been discounted by most scribes, accorded a minor part in the medieval drama and disregarded in terms of the customs, their belief systems and their superior maternity, but they were stalwart.
Most accounts of women during this period, and there are not many, center on the woman born into the nobility who owned large tracts of estate lands, either through inheritance, marriage, or war. On the other hand, peasant women were not educated to literacy, had no time to keep diaries or correspond with friends in writing. In their own words, we know very little about their thoughts and feelings at this time. What comes down to us is an image of them created by their behavior, as seen through the eyes of those who looked down upon them, usually a deceptively unflattering picture which hides the talents and the strengths of these women, who, after all, formed the majority population of their day.
It may be surprising to some that there was no Roman Christian sacrament of marriage until the sixteenth century. Scholars inside the Church acknowledge that the public wedding ceremony was “imposed” on a very reluctant Church of Rome, not evolving from within, but borrowed from the indigenous peasant people’s common law. This common law concerned itself with rights and transfer of property between the two parties who were choosing to be joined together. Trial marriages were also recognized between teenagers, approved by their parents, to see if the two young people were compatible. If not, they separated and went on with their lives, to find more suitable mates, quite a civilized social behavior. The early Christian church writers, all men, were dead set against marriage. Augustine said marriage is sin. Paul regarded marriage as failure to remain in a state of sexual virginity. Jerome said every man who loved his wife with passion was guilty of sin. Early Syrian churches had a rule that no one could become Christian except celibate men. St. Bernard proclaimed that it was easier to bring back the dead than for a man to live with a woman without endangering his soul.143
Why?
Once again, it is necessary to journey back in time to customs as they existed prior to this new religion of Christianity and see with what these early churchmen were attempting to contrast themselves and by doing so, hoping to effect radical changes. Walker in Women’s Encyclopedia writes, “The Christian priesthood was fighting ancient traditions in which it was remembered that male spiritual authority was dependent on marriage: either a hieros gamos (sacred union) between the ruler of a land and his Goddess, or the mandatory husbandship of priests who were not allowed to contact the deities unless they had wives.”144 But in matriarchal societies, women were absolutely free to change partners, choose to take or leave, and to create group marriage. Group co-habitation was actually a means of ensuring a peaceful community, because all people shared kinship, which prevented violence between them. These societies as a consequence were not subject to sexual jealousy, and women always retained their own property and status, neither of which was impacted at all by sexual companionship nor their relationship to men.
The Greeks were patriarchs who established a subordinate role for their women with the knowledge that their system was completely at odds with those of their neighbors. Bulloch writes that
the Greek males’ contempt for women was … an intense fear of them, and bound to an underlying suspicion of male inferiority. Why else would such extreme measures be necessary? Customs such as the rule that a woman should not be older than her husband, or of higher social status, or more educated or paid the same as a male for the same work or be in a position of authority – betray an assumption that males are incapable of competing with females on an equal basis: the cards must first be stacked, the female given a handicap.145
This contempt for women as wives among classical Greek men of higher status, education and power, eventually resulted in their widespread custom of homosexual romance as their primary sexual preference. They turned to young boys for “true love” relationships and ignored wives except for necessary procreation to produce sons.
This model was still in vogue during early Christian times and appealed to the leaders who were also establishing a patriarchy modeled along Judaic lines. With Paul being a Hellenized Jew, the Greek teaching of misogyny came full circle and was incorporated into early Christian literature, the New Testament. The only early form of Christian marriage was not marriage at all but just a blessing of the couple held outside the church door, so as not to contaminate the “house of god” with carnal lust or the idea of fornication. Until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, marriage in the church was a violation of canon law.
But during the fifth and sixth centuries European Christian priests abandoned the rule of celibacy and took wives, continuing the practice until the eleventh century when papal decree ordered the men to “turn their wives out of their homes and sell their children as slaves.”146 When priests were forbidden by the new orders of celibacy to marry or have legal heirs, all their property reverted to the Roman Catholic Church when they died, greatly increasing the wealth of the Vatican. Nuns were also prohibited from passing along their dower or landholdings to relatives. Remembering that only women of nobility and wealth at this time were permitted to become nuns, and that these women always had both land and money, these prohibitions were to the profit of the Church coffers. In fact, Dr. Achterberg writes, “By the end of the Middle Ages, the Church had garnered over one-third of the land mass of Europe.”147
The peasants in most continental lands held the clear
idea that the Christians opposed marriage. Their own common-law marriages were informal. Living together was a recognized form of marriage and trial marriages called “betrothals” between teenagers were encouraged. Sometimes a child produced by such temporary betrothal made it permanent, but not always. In the older matriarchies, children were always welcomed into the community, cared for, and never shamed. Early Medieval society and peasants continued these customs until the seventeenth century.
European common law was loosely based on its inheritance of the older Roman laws. In the ancient custom of “handfasting,” which simply joined the couple’s hands in the presence of witnesses, a bond was formed. And, until 1563, persisted until in a complete turn about, the Catholic Church mandated a priestly blessing on all marriages and penalized the ancient common law relationships. These changes took centuries to take effect in many rural areas because they were imposed from outside the community by foreigners. The Church by this intrusion also reversed the ancient right of women to hold property, now requiring her property to be granted to the husband. This same church approved the physical abuse of women by their husbands and never rebuked, punished, nor spoke out against the behavior until the woman died. The churchmen’s rationalization was that the innate sinful nature and assumed inferiority of females doomed them to be subordinated by men, particularly husbands.
The theological Rules of Marriage written in the fifteenth century by Friar Cherubino says, “Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her and if this doesn’t work … take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body. Then readily beat her, but not in rage, but out of charity and concern for her soul. So that the beating will rebound to your merit.”148 One might think the Friar’s name was made up as a cruel joke to accompany his treatise on maltreatment and hypocrisy, but it is really a manual of recommended behavior for husbands toward wives. Is it any wonder that noble women fled to convents, townswomen refused to remarry if widowed, and spinsters were more content than we might believe such choices may make women today? Should it, therefore, surprise us to learn how many medieval women assumed they could not love their husbands? Or, that being shackled to such marriages, women of the nobility should invent happier pursuits? Enter then, the all too fleeting phenomenon of “courtly love” flourished only about 150 years, during the peak years of the Crusades, 1100 to 1300 CE.
The Troubadours
Courtly love was the equivalent of a romance novel for the women of the Middle Ages. Only the nobility participated, and only married women were the recipients of the courtship, carried on by younger, single men of lower status, who were creative, inventive, and always handsome. Courtly love was perpetuated by stories, epics and songs carried by minnesingers, the troubadours throughout Europe (see map). In them, noble woman was the object of love to whom the lover gave his total subservience. But these epics and songs also portray the noble woman as healer. In the German epic Gudrun, the wild wise wife knows all the plants which heal. In Tristan and Isolde, the woman has a box of herbs and poisons with the knowledge of their use. In the English Canterbury Tales, Chaucer not only describes the delicious escapades of the Wife of Bath in her red dresses but also the noble lady saving the knight with her healing knowledge. In the Edda, the Scandinavian women know the healing, magical powers of the inscribed rune stones.149
In her unique work The Women Troubadours scholar Meg Bogin says that contrary to popular image, most (male) troubadours were not lutestrumming wanderers, but serious court poets who only rarely were forced to hawk their poem from castle to castle. Following the First Crusade, they were among the first to express what we now call romantic love, as distinguished from, though not necessarily excluding, sexual passion. Their poems were addressed to women of the high nobility, to whom they vowed eternal homage and obedience. In exchange for their prostrations, the troubadours expected to be ennobled, enriched, or simply made “better.”150
What these troubadours did was to create speech and song, spoken in the vernacular language, not in Latin, and elevate it to the level of a new literary language. And because almost all communication between people at this time was still orally transmitted, that accomplishment was to their great credit. The language in which they wrote was close to modern day French Provencal, which has more in common with Portuguese or Spanish, a language then called langua d’oc. This language gives the whole area its ancient name of Occitania, that portion of modern day Southern France extending from the Atlantic along the Pyrenees Mountains and down to the Mediterranean Sea, then northward to the Loire Valley. France as a country did not exist, but was divided into north and south with numerous unaffiliated areas, all speaking dialects different enough from one another to be considered separate languages, not readily understood from one region to the next.
The northern areas had closer ties to England and to the Germanic peoples, and the south, colonized by ancient Rome, was culturally closer to the Latin roots of Italy and Spain, also not nation states at the time.
The poetry of the troubadour was the “Song of Love,” chanson d’amour, which before long was imitated in Italian, German, Spanish, English and the Northern French dialect called langua d’oil. “The quest for love, with the lady as its guiding light, became a major theme of Western literature.” But, as we have seen, the poetical elevation of women was mythical in comparison with the reality of her life in the Middle Ages. Bodin says that “there has never been agreement among scholars as to just how seriously the troubadours meant their conceits of woman-worship.”151
In a stroke of great good fortune for those of us who live in their wake, Meg Bodin discovered a small group of twenty women troubadours, all of whom wrote and lived in Occitania during the twelfth century. Their very existence, let alone the survival and translation of their poetry, revealing as it does a decidedly female vantage point through which to view courtly love, is amazing.
Only Occitania produced female troubadours. They were all married women of the nobility. The women preferred less word play, choosing more straightforward language, because the relationships they describe are neither totally idealized nor allegorical, but more reality-based and recognizable to us today.
These women do not worship men; they do not behave subserviently toward them nor do they apparently seek to be worshipped by their lovers. These women reject symbolic love and concentrate on the tangible, which is the love relationship itself with all the feelings aroused. Finally, women troubadours wrote as women and were not required to hide behind male pseudonyms to mask their female identity.
In the feudal male society through which female troubadours came into being, all men were inextricably tied to other men in an intricate vertical system of vassalage, wherein from the lords at the top to the serfs at the bottom, every man owed the one above him loyalty and service and then extracted from those beneath him the exact same. When a man was last in the chain, his right was relegated to demands made upon spouse and children, sometimes with less success. This idea of vassalage was the central metaphor of troubadour love poetry, only now it was transmuted from man’s vassalage to man, to become instead man’s vassalage to woman, in an exact reversal of medieval women’s ordinary status as subordinate to men.
But the old laws of Roman Gaul (Occitania) were more favorable to the women of Southern France than elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, largely because the laws of Justinian were greatly influenced by his wife and co-ruler, Theodora. She made sure that a woman could retain ownership of her own land, even though her husband could make use of it, short of selling or gifting it away. Then the Theodosian code of law brought to Occitania by Visigoths in the sixth century gave sons and unmarried daughters equal shares of their fathers’ estates, land and wealth. Therefore, in the tenth century a number of southern fiefs (land holdings) were held by women: Auvergne, Beziers, Carcassonne, Limosin, Montpellier, Nimes, Perigord, Toulouse. During this same time, the weather improved, enabl
ing peasants to make new progress in food production, and the population increased, putting demand on wilderness lands to be brought into field production.
Monastic orders seeking missionary work and conversions, such as Cistercians and Benedictines, moved to previously wild and uninhabited areas building monasteries. They then required the princes and lords of the secular communities to construct towns nearby the new church establishments.
Occitania was a major route for both increased commerce and pilgrimages to the Holy Land. An estimated 500,000 people traveled the pilgrimage route at the height of this movement.152 This commerce accomplished two major changes in the five hundred year feudal system. One, it created a switch from simple barter to trade in monetary coins which in turn created a new class of merchants in towns whose wealth was based in money, not in land (which had always been the calculator of fortunes). Secondly, the towns themselves and the manner in which people accumulated wealth created a new value system based more on individual skills and personal freedoms than on the inherited status into which one was born.
The southern part of Europe tended to divide land more into equal parts between heirs. But in the north, people held to strict primogeniture, wherein the first born son got the land and the title of the father. So, for the men of the old feudal system, many were left without inheritance and, therefore, without much hope for their own future. Many young and middle-aged men were angry and shiftless. The Crusades gave them a way of life and the ability to acquire new fortunes untied to that of their families. The troubadours also saw their reputations grow through their poems glorifying the war of the Crusades and the proud knights of the holy orders. Bodin says that “the most immediate effect of the drastic reduction in male population was to place women in direct control of fiefs that had previously been run by men … In Occitania in particular, women took the reins of power.”153
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