by Jack Lindsay
An element of the English situation which did much to inspire such men to start their quests was the strong interest in the calendar and technical chronology, which had existed in monastic circles since Bede’s time. We see this interest in Byrhtferth’s Manual early in the eleventh century and in the works composed by Abbo of Fleury for the Ramsey monks. It was still alive in the later part of the century, especially in the group around Wulfstan at Worcester. Wulfstan’s friend, the Lorrainer Robert of Hereford, introduced the Chronicle of Marianus Scotus (an Irish monk living at Mainz) into England, and Wulfstan had a copy made. This led to the connecting up of the English history in that large work to bring about the Chronicle that goes under the name of Florence of Worcester. These studies, which led to much interest in mathematics and astronomy, were linked with the Easter Tables worked out at Worcester. A second Lorrainer, Walcher, prior of Malvern, seems to have been the centre of another scientific group in the west country; he was one of the few men to whom William of Malmesbury admitted a debt. He seems to have been the first man in England to use the Arabian astrolabe; and he acted as interpreter or amenuensis to a converted Jew from Spain, Petrus Alphonsi, who arrived some time after 1106 and was Henry I’s physician. Petrus clearly did much dissemination of information and helped to set curious minds off on further quests. A twelfth-century book from Worcester contains works by Petrus, Robert of Hereford, Walcher, and Adelard. If we consider a few of Adelard’s comments, we see what a vast gap lies between his thought and that of men like Lanfranc and Anselm. Nature, he says,
is not confused and without system, and so far as human reason has progressed, it should be given a hearing. Only when it fails utterly, should there be a recourse to God.
Those now called authorities reach that position first by the exercise of their reason...So, if you want to hear anything more from me, give and take reason.[519]
Chapter Fourteen – Portents and Prophecies
We have dealt so far mainly with the social, economic and political aspects of the changes going on in the medieval world between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Now we shall look at some of the expressions of the inner strain born from the many conflicts and contradictions which resulted from those changes. Tenth-century folk had felt increasing fears of the end of the world, which seemed likely to come with the year 1000. For some time there had been warnings that the ‘world was growing old’ and that certain signs foretold the end. A donation of Arnaud count of Carcassone et de Cominges to the abbey of Lezat in 944 remarked, ‘world end is approaching’. In 948 the deeds of the foundation of the priory of Saint-Germain de Muret echoed familiar phrases, ‘the end of the world approaching and ruins multiplying’. In 909 the council of Trosly had invited bishops to be ready to give an account of their acts, as the day of Judgment was near. About 940 Abbo of Fleury, while a youth in Paris, heard a preacher announce that the world would end in moo; he also heard later (about 975) in Lorraine that the world would end when the day of the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday, as would happen in 992. He wrote a book attempting to discredit these fears. In England the main authority on the end of the world was Bede, who based his account on Tyconius, a commentator of the African church in the fourth century (when violent social struggles had been going on among Christians). Bede took over from Augustine (through Isidore of Seville) the scheme of six ages. The sixth reached from Christ’s incarnation to the end of time; the seventh would be the eternal Sabbath of the new Jerusalem. Bede was cautious about giving an exact date for the end of the world.[520]
When the year 1000 was at hand, there seemed to be many portents.’ Gerbert the learned pope was said to be a diabolical magician, a sort of anti-Christ; famine and pestilence were widespread; there were signs in the sky, meteors; and the church of St Michael the Archangel, ‘built on a promontory of the Ocean, and which had always been a special object of veneration in the whole world’, was soon after burned. The abbess of Jouarre and the abbot of Rebais organized a big procession. Many people went on pilgrimages or haunted monasteries. Relics were found and displayed. Wulfstan in his homilies of the early eleventh century saw ‘many signs of world-end’. There was complete breakdown of all social bonds, he said. The relations of thrall and thegn were reversed; a thrall often bound the thegn his master and forced him into thralldom; one Dane in battle often put to flight ten or more English; women were outraged; the bonds of kinship were broken; brother would not protect brother, father his child or child his father. When Jerusalem fell in 1009-10 many people again saw it as an unmistakable sign of the end.[521]
Famines had preluded the year 1000 and they continued. Glaber of Cluny tells of the years after 1032-4:
Famine extended its ravages to such an extent that one feared that almost the whole human race would disappear. Climatic conditions were so unfavourable that the weather was never suited for sowing, and through the floods there was no way of harvesting...Ceaseless rains had so drenched the earth that for three years a man couldn’t dig small furrows capable of receiving the seed...If by chance one could find food for sale, the seller could exact as excessive a price as he liked. However when men had eaten wild animals and birds, under the impetus of hunger they collected dead carcasses and things too horrible to speak of...Raging hunger made men devour human flesh...Some persons travelling from one place to another to flee the famine and finding hospitality on the road had their throats cut in the night and served to nourish those who welcomed them.
A recluse by a church in the wood of Chatenay buried the remains of his victims; forty-eight skulls of men, women and children he had eaten were dug up.[522] After 1033 (taken as a thousand years after the Cruxifixion) there was a brief period of peace and plenty; hence the councils ushering in the Peace of God.
In such a world dreams and prophecies were taken very seriously. Many that have come down deal with the royal family. Of Edward the Confessor William of Malmesbury says: ‘He was famed both for his miracles and for the spirit of prophesy.’ His future reign had been, shown in vision under Cnut to the bishop of Wilton, who was brooding on the extinction of the English royal line, when he saw ‘Peter consecrating as king Edward, at that time an exile in Normandy; his chaste life too was pointed out, and the exact length of his reign, twenty-four years’. To the inquiry as to what would happen after him came the reply, ‘The kingdom of the English belongs to God; after you he’ll provide a king according to his pleasure.’ At an Easter banquet at Westminster, as Edward sat crowned amid a crowd of nobles all greedily eating after the fast of Lent, he grew abstracted and burst into laughter. Harold, a bishop, and an abbot later helped him to unrobe and asked why he had ‘burst into a vulgar laugh while all others were silent’. He said that he had seen something wonderful. After much entreaty he explained.
The Seven Sleepers in Mount Coelius had now lain for 200 years on their right side, but that, at the very moment of his laughter, they turned upon their left; they would go on lying like that for 74 years, which would be a dreadul omen to wretched mortals. For everything would come to pass in these 74 years which the Lord had foretold to his disciples about the end of the world. Nation would rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; earthquakes would be in various places; pestilence and famine, terrors from heaven and great signs; changes in kingdoms; wars of the Gentiles against the Christians and also victories of the Christians over the Pagans. Telling all this to his wondering audience, he descanted on the passion of these sleepers and the make of their bodies — things quite unnoticed in history...
So the listeners sent a knight, a priest and a monk to Byzantion; the emperor there sent them on to the bishop of Ephesus, who showed them the relics of the Seven. The Greeks had a tradition that they lay on their right sides, but they were now on their left. What Edward had foreseen came to pass: irruptions of infidels in the east, rapid changes on the imperial and papal thrones, troubles brought on Rome by the Germans, the death of Henry of France, and a comet. William I was said to have his o
wn astrologer, who was in one of the ships lost during the crossing of 1066; later at Ely he was said to have used a witch. Margaret of Scotland foretold certain things, says Turgot her biographer of his last visit to her: her own death and ‘the elevation of sons and daughters of hers to the summit of earthly dignity’. Some years later, about 1106, he considered it astonishing that she was proved right by her son Edgar being king of the Scots and her girl Maud (Matilda) queen of England.[523]
The death of Rufus begot a number of omen tales, which are of interest in bringing out how any strange event, or one which took place at a moment of great change or conflict, was liable to be seen as revealing some deep plot of fate or of spirit powers. FitzHamon, a friend, was visited by a monk who had had bad dreams the night before: he saw Rufus enter a church and tear a crucifix to pieces. ‘The image at length struck the king with a foot in such a way that he fell backward; from his mouth, as he lay prostrate, issued so copious a flame that the volume of smoke touched the very stars.’ FitzHamon, alarmed, told the king, who, with much laughter, exclaimed, ‘He is a monk and dreams for money like a monk; give him a hundred shillings.’ Here we see Rufus as the devil despoiling the church. But in the version of the Brut he himself dreams ‘that he was [let] blood, and bled a great quantity of blood, and a stream of blood leapt on high toward heaven more than a hundred [fathom]; and the clearness of the day was turned all to darkness’. He is also said to have had visions in which bishop Gundolf, who had warned him to amend his ways, appeared as a herald of approaching doom. We learn that he couldn’t sleep the night before his death, ordered lights to be brought into the chamber, and made his chamberlain talk with him. The dream of spouting blood presents Rufus as the cosmic victim, the fellow or the opposite of Christ. In another dream, he went alone into a forest chapel, where the walls were hung with purple tapestries of Greek work, embroidered with ancient legends; suddenly the trappings all vanished, walls and altar were bare; and on the altar he saw a naked man, whose body he tried to eat. The man said, ‘Henceforth you shall eat of me no more.’ In another version the body on the altar is that of a stag. Here the rejection of Rufus by Christ whose flesh and blood is consumed in the rite of communion is repeated by the world of nature, by the animal on whom predatory human beings live and who was the special prey of kings.[524]
There were also tales about the foreknowledge of his death and the impossible speed at which news of it spread. Within a few hours it was known in Italy and in more than one place in England. In Belgium, Hugh abbot of Cluny was warned of the death the night before. On the day of his death Peter de Melvis in Devon met a rough common man with a blood dart, who said, ‘With this dart your king was killed today.’ The same day the earl of Cornwall, walking in the woods, encountered a big black hairy goat carrying the king’s figure. When questioned, the goat replied that it was the devil taking Rufus off to judgment. Anselm heard the news in Italy through a splendid young man who told the clerk on guard at the door that all dissension between king and archbishop was now at an end. A monk of the same order as Orderic had a vision early in the morning after his death. Chanting in church, he saw through his closed eyes a person holding a paper on which was written: King William is dead. Opening his eyes, he saw no one.
Some of these tales clearly reflected the hatred felt by ecclesiastics who wanted to make his death a portentous warning. But perhaps the manner of his death in the forest stirred fantasies among the English that the king had indeed been a sacrificial victim and that his death would somehow shake the power of the aliens. To see him as a victim of the old religion, a seven-yearly sacrifice of the king or some leader, is going too far, however, though the day of his death, we may note, was 2 August, the Morrow of Lammas (1 August), and Lammas was one of the four great festivals of the old creed in Britain.[525]
Rufus was a strange man, probably reckless in blasphemy rather than a heretic or a pagan with worked out ideas. We saw how he liked to set Jews and Christians arguing. To a monk who denied that his house had any money to give the king, one of his ministers said, ‘Have you not chests full of the bones of dead men but set about with gold and silver?’ Rufus himself declared that neither St Peter nor any other saint had influence with God, and that he’d ask none of them for help. When fifty deer-stealers cleared themselves by ordeal, he remarked that God didn’t know the deeds of men or else he weighed them in an unfair balance. He was angry if anyone added the proviso of God’s will to some work he undertook or was ordered to do. The monks insisted that Ranulf, his chief adviser, was the son of a pagan or witch. He had an odd oath, ‘By the face of Lucca!’ which we find him using furiously when arguing with the bishops.
Dreams seem to have entered much into daily life and its problems. Peter, prior of the Holy Trinity, London, 1197-1221, wrote a huge compilation of revelations from the other world; he also held strong millenary beliefs. He tells us about a man John of the village of Orpington, who recounted events connected with his father Jordan and his grandfather Ailsi. Ailsi lived in Cornwall, intent on pleasing God and St Stephen, so he clung to the canons at Launceston (Llanstephen), from whom he held his land. The saint ‘familiarly revealed to him many hidden matters and prophecies, and graciously cherished him in all his anxious cares, and often healed his infirmities’. He used to appear as a man of venerable aspect. Ailsi acted as treasurer for the canons when they were building a tower for their church; he attended ‘not only to the work itself, but also to the workmen and servants’. The saint would come to him in visions and ‘show him how he wished all things to be done, diligently teaching him which of the workmen were faithful and should be kept, which were faithless and should be sent away’. Three of his miracles are recorded. Once Ailsi was diseased in the eye. Leaving his work, on his way home he lamented, ‘O blessed Stephen, for long I’ve toiled in your service, yet now it seems in vain. If I’d served the earl of Moreton, who’s now Lord of Cornwall, as faithfully as I’ve served you, he’d have enriched me with many gifts. But you, to whom I’ve committed myself and my whole soul and all my property now give me over to torture.’ He reached home as he was thus inveighing; but that night the saint visited him with gentle rebukes and cured his eye by touching it.
Ailsi often talked with the saint ‘as a man speaks with a friend’. Afterwards he described the meetings to his friends, so that he was called the Holy. His children, ‘who were also justified in their kinship to him’, he used to call the Half-Saints. He had four sons ‘over and beyond the daughters he begot’. The two eldest, Bernard and Nicholas, ‘through their learning and their virtues earned the familiarity and affection’ of Henry I, ‘and were esteemed first among the foremost of the court’. They gave the saint’s church a blue banner embroidered with gold, in the middle of which was shown the Lamb, with the stoning of Stephen below and the symbols of the four evangelists in the corners; they also gave a carpet and a silver-studded ivory casket full of relics (the casket had been their writing case and still held their great silver inkstand).
The third son, Jordan of Trecarl, a layman like Ailsi, was the heir. ‘To his servants and serfs he was almost a companion. He was learned in secular law and customs beyond all his brothers.’ Many persons asked for his help, ‘but he would take no cause for gain unless he knew it to be just’. The fourth son, Paganus, was not baptized till he was twelve and died soon after. God ‘sent to Ailsi in a vision of the night his son Paganus’ to tell him about the pains and rewards of the afterworld, ‘to lead him down to the place of hell-pains and up to the mansions of the blest’. Peter the prior recounts the dream in much detail, ‘until at last both child and vision melted away together, and the father awoke to find himself in his own house, much troubled by reason of the dream’. (The fourth son’s name, Paganus, and his late baptism, are strange in this pious setting.)
*
To understand the pressures which made men grasp at wild intuitions of unknown forces ceaselessly playing upon them, we must look at the vast changes taking place over
the whole of western Europe. England was involved in these changes, though with her own particular situation, and her own way of refracting the general ideas and images of clash, conflict, change, hopeless suffering and desperate hope. The expansive movement in western Europe from the eighth century onwards, which brought about increases in population and a fuller use of economic resources, also had its oppressive and dislocating aspects.
The Viking migrations were the last great movement inwards of barbarians (that is, of peoples outside the Roman and the Christian enclave), but they were followed by the crusades, which, despite their religious aspects, reflected the same desire of warrior groups for loot and land. And at home, in the regions where agriculture and industry were most successful, there were many painful changes going on, uprooting people, destroying them, and combining them in new forms of association. There was overpopulation (in terms of the capacity of the regions to employ and feed people) from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, especially in the area between the Somme and the Rhine, with its concentration of people in the parts that the counts of Flanders were seeking to control. Already in the eleventh century the lowlands and the Rhine valley could not support their populations under the existing agricultural systems, though the situation was slightly alleviated by efforts to reclaim land from sea or marsh and to cut down woodlands. The Germans were moving back eastwards into areas where the Slavs had settled. The same centuries saw the growth of the great cloth industry in what is now Belgium and north-east France. The Rhine valley was closely linked with this development through its merchants, who by the thirteenth century dominated the markets of north Europe. Through them Flemish cloth found its way to new markets in central and south Germany and in the Levant. Cologne was a point where many routes met, with fine textile and copper industries. Impoverished or landless peasants were drawn in. Some settled to the industries and crafts, some got lesser jobs, towing boats, hauling merchandise and so on, while others gave up the land and its way of life without being able to satisfy their new needs. Beggars crowded the markets and roamed in gangs from town to town. Landless men swelled the bands of mercenaries. But campaigns were short and the soldiers were continually in desperate straits. The name Brabacons came to mean marauding bands of soldiers from Brabant and around it. In Flemish towns, with populations of 20-50,000, the wretched went down as they could not have done in the villages; kin groups could not persist or guild-substitutes take form, except in the settled crafts. So we get a mass of journeymen, unskilled workers, peasants with no land or tiny plots, beggars, vagabonds, and workless men on the edge of disaster. Such folk provided a miserable and restless herd (unlike anything in Viking days), which was one of the great unsettling elements of the period.