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

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  In medieval times Dax was especially busy, as it was located on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella. Hence, it was richly supplied with jewelers’ shops to make settings for the seashells which were the proud souvenirs of anyone who had reached Compostella.

  Today the elegant shops lining Dax’s main streets offer a wonderful array of toys for grannies to bring back to their grandchildren and the most beautiful candy shops perhaps in the world—row after row of footed crystal dishes heaped with chocolates wrapped in gold foil, each variety labeled with a tiny reproduction of a painting by Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, etc. Dax, as it always has been, is a place for the rich and elderly to recover, indulge themselves, and think pleasantly of those back home.

  And the bathing there? The bathers, monkishly sandaled and bundled in hooded white robes as they always have been, hurry through the streets to the bath. Which could hardly be more different from the undercroft bathhouse.

  Along the main street is a marble trough the rear wall of which has a row of Roman bronze lion heads with open mouths, each spewing a stream of hot water. Above the wall of these small but magnificent public spigots rise the weathered columns of the Roman bath, at the street front of a rectangular, roofless, temple-like structure.

  Where the floor of this temple of health would be is the pool, steaming with water from natural hot springs. A crowd of bathers, immersed amid the wreathing steam, soak in hopes of curing everything from rheumatism to varicose veins. Pilgrims too are still there, soaking their blistered feet after their trudge across the Pyrenees and back again.

  Strigils? I mentioned that soap was a Spanish invention of the mid-thirteenth century, so it was probably available at Dax very soon after its first appearance in Spain.

  But how did people wash before that? They rubbed themselves with scented oils and then scraped off the oils, dirt, and shedding skin with a strigil, which looks rather like a marriage of an old-fashioned straight razor with a butter knife—with the sharpness of the latter. The heat of the bath caused pores to open, helping to expel dirt, and the strigil scraped it away, leaving the skin smooth, clean, oiled and scented.

  This was how people bathed in ancient Rome, this was how they bathed in Europe—until the invention of soap, in Spain, which may or may not be an improvement when dry skin is taken into consideration. However, the new Spanish luxury took over and made the strigil obsolete.

  Other means of hygiene associated with Spain were not so universally embraced. Gaius Valerius Catullus, in about 50 BC, pokes a jibe at a Spanish customs of cleanliness in a poem addressed to Egnatius, a young Iberian gentleman overly given to flashing his brilliant smile. Catullus claims he would not be offended by such smiles from people of any of a number of other nationalities, but Egnatius is a Spaniard, and in Spain, according to Catullus, bright, clean teeth were achieved through the use of one’s urine. If this seems shocking, we might take note that synthetic urine (urea) is an ingredient in many modern compounds. No doubt the synthetic variety is to be preferred.

  Cleanliness has meant different things to different peoples at different times. It has always been considered a virtue, in whatever form was current, except of course when it was pursued with excessive sensual gusto. Then it could be a sin. The spa has two-thousand years of history as a treat for the rich and a hope for the sick. And lavender still scents some of our laundry detergents.

  Boundaries: Medieval Women in Medieval Gardens

  by Judith Arnopp

  Most of my novels feature at least one scene with a woman in a medieval garden. It may not be a key moment in the book but I like to illustrate how intricately linked high status women were to their gardens.

  While I was at university I wrote a paper tracing the evolution of the medieval garden motif from its biblical roots through medieval art and on to Chaucer’s development of the garden as a literary device.

  The ideal of the garden was initially evoked in King Solomon’s Song of Songs, and it is there that we see the first links between the enclosed garden and womanhood. The tradition slowly expanded to incorporate the story of the Fall from Paradise and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, until the motif expanded into secular love poetry.

  Medieval literature depicts noblemen striding about the world, galloping into battle in the service of the king, embarking upon arduous pilgrimage and living and breathing upon a vastly dangerous, stimulating stage. These men are shown to be invincible, self-assured, and in control, and there were few limits placed upon them.

  The women in this literature are portrayed very differently; they rarely travel, they never fight and are usually to be found within the vicinity of the castle walls. Their role is to marry, provide heirs, and be an asset to their husband. Life for most medieval woman was closeted; we see them safe within the walls of the castle, sewing, strumming musical instruments, listening to minstrels’ songs or to tales of courtly-love.

  The favoured place for these activities was the garden, and many manuscripts illustrate this. We see women sitting among the flowerbeds, sometimes planting and maintaining the gardens or, more often, we find them in a lovers’ tryst. Other times they are shown sitting in the shade of a tree listening to a minstrel’s tales and, paradoxically, the stories they are listening to are of other women also dwelling within the safety of their own gardens.

  But these fictional women were not always as ordinary as they seemed, and many of them faced complex difficulties. They were invariably highborn, young and fair, and most of them expressed a personal desire that, because they were subject to male authority, could not be fulfilled.

  Chaucer managed to depict the plight of these women so empathetically that there can be little doubt that he was conscious of their predicament. Even when projecting patriarchal prejudices through the mouths of his male narrator, he managed not to indoctrinate but to reveal how flawed male expectations were.

  In The Merchant’s Tale, May is married to a decrepit, selfish old man of higher status than herself. Her needs and wishes are not considered by anyone, and only the narrator takes the time to reflect upon what her reaction may have been to the consummation of her marriage. Her husband, Januarie, builds an idyllic garden in which to make love to her, and the following scenes are a horrific inversion of the story of Eden. The walls that enclose May in the pleasure garden lead her to make dramatic and hair-raising choices, but, instead of condemning her infidelity, Chaucer chooses to ultimately reward her with the “maisterie” that, according to the tale told by the Wife of Bath, all women desire.

  Emelye in The Knight’s Tale is similarly captive within a garden, and its walls serve as a prison cell. She expresses the wish to follow the goddess Diana, to run freely through the woods, to hunt and remain chaste forever, but she is not given the choice to do so. Hotly pursued by Palamon and Arcite who fight in mortal combat for her hand, Emelye is instead given as a prize in the male game of war.

  Throughout The Canterbury Tales, the garden becomes a place of imprisonment; the lovely grounds in The Franklin’s Tale and The Shipman’s Tale become places of sexual transaction and solicitation. In The Merchant’s Tale the garden becomes a place of sexual violence and adultery. Also The Parlement of Foules revisits this idea of feminine entrapment and the question is: why does Chaucer pick the garden, a place of peace and beauty, as the scene for feminine suffering?

  In every way the woman and the literary garden are parallel; they are both fertile, they are both fragrant and decorative, and they are both controlled by a male gardener. Left to their own devices, they will go wild. In both art and literature, the garden wall sometimes encompasses an area so vast that the garden is more like a park. This is a metaphor for the wider boundaries placed upon medieval women, even those that seem to have escaped male rule.

  Eve, the first female transgressor, was sent from the safe walls of Eden on a journey that was to lead her female children to other
gardens. The Virgin Mary, made perfect by the idealisation of man, is painted within her wattle walled garden, a perfect flower of femininity, the fertile, unflawed mother of the perfect child. Wherever we look in medieval art we find women and gardens, walled gardens that secure and encumber the feminine tendency to stray from the path of moral rectitude.

  Women must remain in the garden and those few that do escape into the world, perhaps to go on pilgrimage like the Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the second nun, can only do so because they have managed to escape from the bounds of matrimony.

  Even these empowered women, the female pilgrims, are subject to limitations upon their freedom. The nuns are answerable to the male authority of the church, and the lusty, unrepentant Wife of Bath must, unless she wishes to lose her independence by remarrying, remain chaste.

  A medieval woman was monitored for signs of wildness just as a garden was, and this provided Chaucer with the perfect allegory. A garden, cultivated like May and Emelye, is a controlled environment where the gardener maintains constant vigilance in case his flourishing flower beds should run rampant and wild seeds take hold.

  There is a wonderful example of a medieval garden at Tretower in Powys, and it is well worth a visit.

  A Seer, a Prophet, or a Witch?

  by Sandra Byrd

  And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams....

  –Acts 2:17 (KJV)

  Five women in the Bible are expressly stated as possessing the title of prophetess: Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, Noahdiah, and Isaiah’s wife. Philip is mentioned in Acts as having four daughters who prophesied, which brings the number of known Biblical prophetesses to nine. There is no reason to believe that there weren’t thousands more, undocumented throughout history, then and now. According to religious tradition, women have often been powerful seers, and that is why I’ve included them in my novel The Secret Keeper: A Novel of Kateryn Parr.

  Hundreds of years before the renaissance, which would bring about improved education for women, Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) wrote medicinal texts and composed music. She also oversaw the illumination of many manuscripts and wrote lengthy theological treatises. But what she is best known for, and was beatified for, were her visions.

  Hildegard said that she first saw “The Shade of the Living Light” at the age of three, and by the age of five she began to understand that she was experiencing visions. In her forties she was instructed by God to write them down. She said:

  I set my hand to the writing. While I was doing it, I sensed, as I mentioned before, the deep profundity of scriptural exposition.... I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!’

  Spiritual gifting is not given for the edification of the person receiving it, but for the church at large. Hildegard wrote three volumes of her mystical visions, and then biblically exegeted them herself. Her theology was not, as one might expect, shunned by the church establishment of the time, but instead Pope Eugenius III gave her work his approval and she was published in Paris in 1513.

  Several centuries later, Julian of Norwich continued Hildegard’s tradition as a seer, a mystic, and a writer. In her early thirties, Julian had a series of visions which she claimed came from Jesus Christ. In them, she felt His deep love and had a desire to transmit that He desired to be known as a God of joy and compassion and not duty and judgment. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, is said to be the first book written in the English language by a woman. She was well known as a mystic and a spiritual director by both men and women. The message of love and joy that she delivered is still celebrated today; she has feast days in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions.

  It had been for good cause that Hildegard and Julian kept their visions to themselves for a time. Visions were not widely accepted by society as a whole, and women in particular were often accused of witchcraft.

  This risk was perhaps an even stronger danger in sixteenth and seventeenth century England when “witch hunts” were common. While there is no doubt that there was a real practice of witchcraft occurring in some places, the fear of it whipped up suspicion where no actual witchcraft was found. Henry VIII, after imprisoning Anne Boleyn, proclaimed to his illegitimate son, among others, that they were all lucky to have escaped Anne’s witchcraft. The evidence? So obviously bewitching him away from his “good” judgment.

  In that century, the smallest sign, imagined or not, could be used to indict a “witch”. A gift handling herbs? Witchcraft. An unrestrained tongue? Witchcraft. Floating rather than sinking when placed in a body of water when accused of witchcraft and therefore tested? Guilty for sure. Women with “suspicious” spiritual gifts, including dreams and visions, had to be particularly careful. And yet they, like Hildegard and Julian before them, had been given just such a gift to share with others. And share they must.

  One woman in the court of Queen Kateryn Parr is strongly believed to have had a gift of prophecy. Her name was Anne Calthorpe, the Countess of Sussex. One source possibly hinting at such a gift can be found at Kathy Emerson’s terrific webpage of Tudor women: Emerson says that Calthorpe,

  was at court when Katherine Parr was queen and shared her evangelical beliefs. Along with other ladies at court, she was implicated in the heresy of Anne Askew. In 1549 she was examined by a commission ‘for errors in scripture’ and that ‘the Privy Council imprisoned two men, Hartlepoole and Clarke, for lewd prophesies and other slanderous matters’ touching the king and the council. Hartlepoole’s wife and the countess of Sussex were jailed as ‘a lesson to beware of sorcery.’

  According to religious tradition women have often had very active prophetic gifts; we are mystical, engaging, and intuitive. I admire our sisters throughout history who actively, risk-takingly, used their intellectual and spiritual gifts with whatever power they had at hand.

  Money Lending in the Middle Ages, or You Think Your Visa Card’s Rates Are Bad?

  by Katherine Ashe

  “His lord answered and said unto him, ‘Thou wicked, slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.’”

  –Matthew 25:26-27

  That is the Parable of the Talents, Jesus’ teaching regarding money lending. Granted, he was using this story as a parallel of what he expected of his followers in terms of making things of the spirit known and not hiding them. But he hardly would have used the example of usury if he opposed it—though he didn’t think it a proper activity in the Temple itself, obviously.

  There is an impression abroad that money lending was forbidden to Christians during medieval times. It certainly was not. In fact, the principal bankers to the lordly class were the knightly Orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars, and the Church itself was not above acting as collection agent for even the worst of usurers.

  Regarding the knightly Orders, this business of theirs came about naturally in the course of their leadership in crusades to the Holy Land. A lord, leaving home for a venture to the Middle East that would last several years in all likelihood, needed to be able to draw funds in Palestine. Secured by his rents back home, he took a loan, payable at the Templars’ or the Hospitallers’ headquarters at Acre.

  The loan entailed interest, for the knightly bankers took risks: would or could the properties entailed actually be able to repay the debt? Like any anxious banker, the knights charged what interest the business could support, sometimes 20% to 30% per annum.

&n
bsp; The lord, upon signing for the loan before leaving home, received a written receipt cashable for silver or gold coin at Acre. This was not the beginning of notations of debt standing in the place of actual money. For that one must look back to ancient Egypt and temple credits and debits for the faithfuls’ contributions to Ra, or taxes owed and paid to pharaoh. (See David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years for an intriguing summary of the subject by an instigator of “Shut Down Wall Street.”)

  Apart from the Templars and Hospitallers, one could, in the 13th century, take a loan from the bankers in the French city of Cahors. Let’s have a look at one such debt.

  In the year 1232, Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, died, leaving a note for a debt of 200 marks, owed him by his young cousin Simon de Montfort. The note went as payment of a debt Ranulf owed to Piers Mauclerc, the Count of Brittany, and Piers sold the debt for quick cash to a money lender of Cahors—though the interest rate with this banker was 60% per annum.

  The Cahorsine banker did nothing to inform Montfort of his receipt of the debt and application of the 60% interest rate to it, but let it accumulate that monstrous interest for five years, at which point the debt amounted to 2,080 marks. Even then he did nothing to collect but instead, at considerable profit to himself, sold the interest-heavy debt to the Bishop of Soisson—and left him to collect the full amount.

  The Bishop wrote to Montfort, informing him of the debt and demanding payment of 2,080 marks. Montfort, under the impression that this interest rate was ludicrous—and that Ranulf had lent him money interest free in the first place (he had already repaid most of what his cousin had lent)—refused to pay anything more than the originally owed 200 marks. At which the Bishop of Soisson excommunicated this debtor.