Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  4) Faun tempere—carnation flower pudding: ½ cup beef or chicken broth, 2½ cups milk, ¼ cup white flour, ½ cup white sugar, 5 egg yolks, 9 or 10 carnation flowers (violets or rose petals may be substituted if carnations aren’t available, but nasturtiums have too sharp a flavor), ½ cup skinned and grated almonds, ¼ tsp each cinnamon, galingale, mace and ginger powder. In a pot set into a kettle of gently boiling water (you can use a double boiler) heat milk and broth gradually. Mix the flour, sugar, and spices and gradually add to the milk and broth, stirring constantly for 12 to 15 minutes. Beat the eggs. Put ½ cup of the heated milk, flour, spices and stock into a separate bowl and gently stir in the beaten egg yolks. Add to the main pot, stirring continually as pudding thickens. Pour the pudding into separate bowls and allow to cool. Strew the top with the flowers and serve.

  Further Reading

  Aresty, Esther B. The Delectable Past. Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

  Cosman, Madeleine Pelner. Fabulous Feasts. George Braziller, 1976.

  Sass, Lorna, S. To the King’s Taste. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.

  Tannahill, Reay. The Fine Art of Food. New York: A.S. Barnes, & Co., 1968.

  Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain. Penguin Books, 1984.

  Life in a Medieval Village

  by Katherine Ashe

  When Julius Caesar arrived in Albion, what we call Briton, he reported to the Roman Senate that here was a land completely under cultivation. A thousand years later, when William of Normandy conquered England he had to eradicate numerous villages to plant what is still known as the New Forest to create a future supply of oak for ships.

  What did this long sustained agriculture look like and how was it maintained?

  We don’t know if the “three field system” was already in place in Caesar’s time—it certainly was well before the arrival of the Normans, who were using it on their home fiefs as well.

  Picture a land wide open, dotted with villages here and there, a manor house, often fortified and with a bit of woodland, a hunting chase that would also supply wood for heat and cooking and occasionally a few large timbers for a crook-built building the walls of which, between the supporting timbers, would be woven willow wands—a sort of basketry—wadded with clay and horsehair (a building material called wattle and daub).

  The single village street would be lined with wattle and daub “half timbered” cottages, each set on its own little “toft”, usually planted with a vegetable garden at the back and surrounded by a willow “wattle” fence to keep in the chickens. The cottage would also possess a “croft”, another small piece of land probably planted with a few fruit trees—apple, pear, quince, cherry—and here pigs might be kept.

  These cottages were not the property of the cottagers but belonged to the fief, the whole of the estate that included the village, the manor house, the fields, and the chase. Before the Conquest in 1066 these fiefs belonged to whatever Briton, Saxon, or Dane happened to hold it as overlord from time immemorial or as the results of war and apportionment to the dominant power’s friends.

  With the arrival of the Normans, the fiefs were granted to William’s followers under the feudal system through the King’s direct gift of a multitude of fiefs to his most useful followers, who then apportioned the fiefs under their control to their knights to supply them with a living through specific taxes so that they were free and well supplied when their services were called upon for war.

  But regardless of who might be living in, or rebuilding the great house to suit his tastes, the life of the villagers, or “villeins” as they were properly called with no disparagement intended, remained the same. Even what they paid in duties to the holder of the fief remained the same according to ancient custom.

  For each village had a “wittenmote,” a group of elders who knew the customs of the place: what was owed to the lord of the manor and when, how the cultivated land was apportioned and to whom, what the penalties were for crimes, etc. Thus the wittenmote provided a continuity for village life regardless of who was the dominant force politically at any given time.

  In the 13th century the royal judge Henry de Bracton made a compilation of these customary laws of the wittenmotes, and that collection lies at the foundation of the British and U.S. legal systems based upon precedent, rather than a code of law as is the practice in most of the rest of the world.

  But who were these villagers who had been occupying the cottages from time out of mind?

  Each cottage was held by its “house-bondsman,” the eldest son, or in the counties under the Danelaw, the youngest son. One must suppose this Scandinavian practice of making the youngest son the inheritor, on the idea that the older ones would certainly be old enough to fend for themselves long before their father died, encouraged the expansionary practice of going a-viking—from which nearly everyone in reach of Scandinavian ships suffered.

  The house-bondsman, or “husbandman,” inherited the bond for the cottage and all that pertained to it: the toft, the croft, and a right to a certain number of rows, say three rows for example, in each of the three great fields surrounding the village. Since the land was not of equal quality in all of its rows, the rows were not permanently allotted to specific cottages.

  Each year the fief’s husbandmen drew straws for which set of rows would be theirs to cultivate that year. The unfortunate ended up with that “short straw” and “a hard row to hoe,” but the misfortune would probably be rectified the following year.

  The fields, and the rows in them, were demarcated by posts—palings or “pales.” To trespass on someone else’s row was to “go beyond the pale.” Don’t picture these rows as the little scraping of the soil you might do in your veggie garden—these rows were huge, and S shaped, giving the fields something of the look of a sea ruffled with waves as high as a man’s waist and sometimes wider than one might be able to jump over. The S shape was the result of the wide turning radius of the ox drawn plows in use.

  Though the Minoans apparently had huge bulls and the Romans had what look like the beautiful modern, good-sized, and cream colored Charolais, England’s oxen in the Middle Ages were not very big at all, their backs reaching only to about the height of a man’s chest.

  For those not familiar with cattle raising, oxen are castrated bull calves. Since a cow, to be milk-able, must bear a calf, and since half the calves born are likely to be male and useless as milkers, it is these bull calves that supply the meat—as of course do the old cows past milking age. When needed, a strong bull calf would be kept for breeding, or castrated and trained to the heavy wooden oxbow that would couple him to another ox and enable him to be hitched to a plow or wagon.

  These little cattle were not very strong; a team for plowing would require six of them, a heavy wagon might require a team of ten or more. So the husbandman would share his two oxen with his neighbors who had rows of a sufficient distance from his that the team, wending its way through the row’s S curve, would take up the neighbor’s row at the right place in the curve.

  Where were all these oxen kept when they weren’t plowing? Here we come to the three field system. The oxen lived on that year’s fallow field, helpfully manuring it. The three fields in which the principal manor lands were divided followed a regular three year cycle.

  The Fallow Field, on which nothing was planted, rested and was renewed with manuring by the village animals. The next field in the cycle, known as the Spring Field, was planted with oats, peas, beans, and barley—all nitrogen-fixing plants. Because these four plantings required different growing conditions regarding moisture, the slope of the row was used like a little hillside with the four different kinds of plants each in its own row along the incline. After harvesting, these plants would be plowed into the soil, enriching it even further.

  The third field was planted with wheat (called “corn” but not at all the Indian corn we designate
by that name now), which requires a great deal of nutrients. Grains will exhaust the soil in a short time if those nutrients are not replaced—and that is why modern farmers are so dependent upon chemical fertilizers. The three-field system, because of its cycle of two years of nutrient replacement before a piece of land was planted again with grain, was endlessly sustainable.

  A certain number of rows in the field belonged to the manor house although, managed by the lord’s steward, it took its chances in the row selection along with everyone else in many places. The husbandmen, in part payment of the “bond” for their holdings in the fief, gave service by plowing, seeding, and harvesting the lord’s crops. They also might owe a hen or eggs every now and then, especially at Christmas time.

  How their debt of labor was paid was specific to the customs of each fief and was well known to the wittenmote. Much distinction was made between a water “bidreap” and a beer “bidreap” when the steward of the manor was required to serve the plowmen beer when they rested.

  Regarding local law and order, the principal person responsible in the village was the husbandmen’s chosen “reeve.” The reeve had a horn that he blew whenever there was an emergency, such as when the sheep had gotten into the meadow or a cow into the corn—Little Boy Blue was a typical reeve.

  For crimes, there was a system of fines. Even murder was squared with a fine, a very heavy one that economically crippled not only the perpetrator but his entire family. The amount of fine for a murder depended upon the social status of the victim, fundamentally his lifetime’s worth in earning ability, his value to the community. Except of course for aristocrats, who might be seen as having very little value to the local community but whose murder commanded so high a fine that the convicted, or a relative taking his place, would languish a lifetime in prison for the unpayable debt.

  If the husbandman was the eldest, or youngest son in the Danelaw, what became of his brothers and sisters? Some migrated to the cities, learning crafts, becoming a new middle class of merchants and artisans. Some became servants in the manor house.

  Many of the excess population of the fiefs peopled the enormous religious houses with their vast communities of low level monks and nuns, and some of these rose through education to become priests, and even bishops, as in the case of the brilliant Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, author of the standard published work on manor management of his time, translator of the Old Testament from Hebrew, mathematician, scientist, theologian, and author of “On Kingship and Tyranny” and hence instigator of the movement that resulted in the first Parliament with power over the Crown.

  One of Grosseteste’s acts as bishop was to establish a system for legitimizing bastard children. By the old system, only the husbandman (husband) could marry, for only he could provide a stable living for a family. It was a system that just about guaranteed a goodly supply of bastards. Grosseteste’s solution was to perform marriages for those who weren’t husbandmen, to cover the couple’s children with a sheet until the end of the wedding ceremony, then to whisk away the sheet, revealing the couple’s children as “new-born” in legitimacy.

  One wonders if Grosseteste, whose name is not a surname but means “the fat-head,” was himself illegitimate, though such a history might impair a person’s qualifications for the priesthood.

  Each fief’s village would have a church, and the lord of the manor would have the right, called “advowson,” to designate whom the priest would be. With the appointment went a modest “living” charged against the local husbandmen.

  Since the “living” might be given as an income to someone who didn’t live in the village, indeed never showed up to preach or otherwise, there was a need for some currency. This was solved by fairs held in the nearest town. The husbandman’s wife (which word incidentally means “carver of the loaf”) would take the fruits and vegetables from her toft and croft, or a hen or eggs, in a basket and would walk to the nearest fair. If more money was needed she might have her child come with her to drive along some geese or a pig.

  If these images of the Goose Girl or Little Boy Blue the reeve, and phrases such as “going beyond the pale” ring deep in our psyches, it’s not only because we saw illustrations in books when we were very small, but because, if they dwelled in Europe, this was the life that most of our ancestors lived.

  And on inspection at this remove, it seems not such a bad life, given they had no expectations of plumbing, heating, or modern means of travel and communications. There were, actually certain advantages, certain absences of stress regarding expectations of achievement—life would be what it had always been.

  Further Reading

  Homans, George Caspar. English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960.

  Medieval Bathing for Cleanliness, Health, and Sex

  by Katherine Ashe

  There is a quite erroneous notion that medieval people didn’t bathe.

  Some Tudors may have been proud of bathing once a month whether they needed to or not, but their ancestors had looked upon bathing as one of the sensual pleasures of life. King Henry III even had a special room for the purpose of washing his hair.

  True, the poor had little access to bathing facilities other than the local well, and hefting buckets of water home for cooking purposes was probably quite enough of a burden. What personal washing was to be done could be done with a bowl of water.

  Laundry might be done in a village washhouse where once in the spring and once in the autumn stream water could be diverted to large stone tubs. Pounded lavender and soapwort made the washing compound, for soaps were not invented until the mid-thirteenth century. Soap was then imported from Spain and was only for the rich. Note, however, the shared linguistic root of “lavender” and “laundry,” shared with the French word lavande and the Latin, heard in the Mass as the priest says, “Lavabo—I will wash.” Not too bad, having your laundry smell of lavender—even if it’s only twice a year.

  In cities the early mornings began with the water sellers wheeling their barrow-like barrels through the streets and selling door to door. Few houses, even of the wealthy, would have their own tubs for the immersion of a full grown person.

  Personal washing would be accomplished with a bowl, filled by a servant with one pitcher with very hot water from a cauldron in the hearth and another pitcher of unheated water from a barrel or stone tank in the kitchen or cellar. The desired temperature was achieved by mixing the water from the two pitchers. This arrangement would prevail for most people until the mid-nineteenth century.

  So much for washing, but what of bathing? To bathe, medieval men and women went to a bathhouse.

  Picture a vast cellar, an undercroft with broad columns supporting the building, or multiple buildings, up above. The ceiling is low and groined and there are no windows. Iron chandeliers or candle stands, rusted to a mellow brown, bear numerous fat, white wax candles giving off a scent of honey. At one end of the room is a huge hearth hung with several cauldrons, each giving off a different perfume: attar of rose, mossy vetiver, musk or the haunting sweet aroma of civet (refined from the chokingly foul odor of the civet cat’s spray to make one of the loveliest of perfumes). The atmosphere in the low, dim room is dense with mists and laden with seductive aromas.

  Arranged in aisles between the sturdy columns are curtained booths, their drapes hung from tall stands to provide total privacy—or, for parties of a racy nature, the curtains could be drawn back. Within each booth is a standing rack for clothing, a small table equipped with fruit, sweets, a carafe of wine and goblets, and soaps, oils, and strigils (which we will discuss below).

  The central feature of the booth is, of course, the tub, made of wood like a huge bucket and equipped with seats inside so that the bathers may be immersed up to their necks when sitting. A friend of mine recently bought just such a tub from Russia, where apparently such bathing has
continued in some places, sans plumbing, to this day. Such a tub will accommodate at least two people.

  If this sounds a bit like the modern “hot tub” and the pleasures of the “fast set” in places like Las Vegas, you’ve got it about right. While such bathhouses were where one went to seriously wash, they were also popular with married couples with sensual tastes, were notorious trysting places for clandestine lovers, and were a favored workplace for courtesans.

  Priests and street corner preaching monks inveighed against them as halls of sin and depravity, and seem to have succeeded in reducing their presence until their reincarnation (with plumbing in place of hot and cold running servants) in modern times. Most illustrations from medieval manuscripts disapprovingly depict the bathhouse of the brothel variety.

  What of bathing for health? Spas developed all over the Roman empire, wherever there were hot springs and waters with minerals thought to heal or restore health and vitality. Many of these spas have never been out of business since Roman times. Probably everyone knows of Bath and its Pump Room, made the height of fashion by Beau Nash in the mid-18th century. So I’m going to describe a somewhat less grand, and more close to ancient usage, spa—that of Dax, in England’s medieval dukedom of Gascony in southwestern France.