The other option was to grit your teeth for a few years, raise the child as best you could, and then sell it into slavery to make a bit of cash. While conceivably the more humane of the two options, life as a Roman slave wasn’t much of a laugh – except perhaps during Saturnalia – and conquered foes of the Romans generally opted for suicide rather than a life of slavery. So kids were despatched to the galleys or the mines in exchange for a few silver coins. What loving father could do more?
Self-inflicted Welts and Chastity Belts: The Dark and Middle Ages
The general consensus from those historians who know best is that the thousand years following the fall of the Roman Empire was a pretty unpleasant time to be alive. It’s hard to draw meaningful comparisons with the present day – we may enjoy such luxuries as inflatable dinghies and ready-made pasta salads, but we still live under the threats of cancer and terrorism – but medieval times were grim by anyone’s standards. Sure, there would have been glimmers of pleasure – the odd sunny day unblighted by disease, a lilting melody from a passing troubadour – but the years in question consisted largely of incessant toil, inadequate roofing and rough, shapeless clothing that not only failed to accentuate your hourglass figure, but also irritated the skin under your arms. Unless, of course, you were born into nobility, in which case life was all rare beef, silk and falconry.
So our list of idiosyncratic behaviours of medieval times can mainly be attributed to the appalling things people were having to cope with – grim illnesses, crop failure, and a particularly brutal feudal system which saw the gap between rich and poor stretch to unsustainable levels. You wouldn’t have been very optimistic about things getting much better, either; the Renaissance was about to give everyone’s prospects something of a boost, but no one knew if or when it was on its way. So waiting for it to arrive must have been gruelling, to say the least.
Flagellating yourself to Atone for the Sins of Society
There still seems to be a belief that if you deliberately put yourself through a certain amount of physical discomfort, you’ll emerge from the experience as a more well-rounded human being. True, many of us take the opposite approach by swaddling ourselves in a duvet and gorging on marshmallows – but we can still hear phrases in the back of our heads like “no pain no gain” or “if it hurts, it’s working”.
Groups of flagellants took this idea to something of an extreme back in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; instead of just denying themselves the odd treat, they’d savagely and religiously beat themselves with whips in the hope that scarring themselves would eventually take some of the sting out of medieval life. The worse things got, the more flagellants would roam from town to town in militant pilgrimages; as famine took hold in Europe in the 1250s, Perugian flagellants began killing those who opposed their antics, for fear that they were in league with the devil, and the pope was forced to introduce a ban. But around a century later, with the Black Death in full swing, German flagellants returned to the practice with gusto – this time to musical accompaniment called Geisslerlieder. You could recreate this with a modern twist by walking down the high street and thrashing yourself with electric cable to the sound of “Beat It” by Michael Jackson, but it’s unlikely you’ll get many of your fellow citizens joining in.
Tucking into a Tasty Dinner of Swan in Chaudon Sauce
There’s a vague correlation between the attractiveness of an animal and the likelihood of us roasting it on an open fire. We tuck happily into cows and pigs, while giraffes and peacocks are notable by their absence from popular cookery books. (Quite why animals haven’t all evolved extraordinary plumage in order to stay out of the butcher’s and off our dinner tables is worth pondering, extremely briefly.) So the swan, because of its graceful neck and snow-white feathers, has thus managed to avoid being widely eaten since medieval times, when aristocrats would happily chow down on mouth-watering recipes such as this:
For to dihyte a swan. Tak & vndo hym & wasch hym, & do on a spite & enarme hym fayre & roste hym wel; & dysmembre hym on þe beste manere & mak a fayre chyne, & þe sauce þerto schal be mad in þis manere, & it is clept: Chaudon.
A myth still circulates that the Queen owns all the swans in Britain and that it’s an act of treason to eat them. In fact, they’re just protected under the UK’s Wildlife and Countryside Act – as are many other species. But back in 1391, the appointment of a “Keeper of the King’s Swans” made people think twice about having swan fricassee, just in case they were to incur the wrath of Richard II. They tended to just have some chicken instead.
Living Every Day as if it’s your Last
This is a phrase that we use to describe unabashed extroverts who bungee jump off tall buildings, spend money like water and make inexplicably successful advances to members of the opposite sex who are, theoretically, way out of their league. We partly admire them for their gall, while also mocking their stupidity and being glad that we have some savings, some dignity and all our limbs intact. But citizens of medieval Europe lived every day as if it was their last because, well, it might just have been.
You wouldn’t have been eager to get into the life insurance business back then. All the awful endings that could befall the average human – war, starvation, plague, being accused of a minor crime (see Applying Overwhelming Perfumes to your Wrists and Neck) – reduced life expectancy to depressingly low levels, and proud great-grandparents were pretty thin on the ground. The Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory featuring skeletal representation of everyone from barons to bakers, was a subtle reminder to people from all walks of life to be prepared for death, and texts such as the Ars Moriendi (or Art of Dying) advised people that hey, actually, dying isn’t so bad – for one thing, it’s a blessed relief from worrying about anything bubonic – and went on to give a few hints on how to “die well” (that is, don’t make too much of a fuss, because dying is a perfectly normal thing to do, after all).
Covering up Foul Odours in the Hope it would Ward Off Disease
While we have a compulsion to recoil from powerful smells – sewage, rotting fish, Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume (see Torture: the only limit is your imagination) – getting a whiff of these odours doesn’t actually do us any harm (unless of course we’re talking carbon monoxide or mustard gas). But the belief that noxious airs, or miasmas, were responsible for the outbreak of disease was prevalent from ancient times, even until the time of Florence Nightingale. Occasionally, some dangerous crank from the Far East would suggest that perhaps germs had something to do with it, but we’d smugly bat their suggestions away and focus our attention on getting rid of smells.
Of course, odours are removed by cleaning, which in itself is helpful in preventing disease. This may be why the miasma theory persisted for so long: it was almost right, but not quite. But this crucial error allowed diseases like cholera to run rampant for much longer than they should have done. What with people dropping dead of bubonic plague throughout the fourteenth century, the “pocket full of posies” (as immortalized in the children’s rhyme) formed an ineffective front line of defence against the plague; today we deploy antibiotics instead, and for all their drawbacks, they’re substantially more successful than a nosegay or pomander.
Establishing Someone’s Innocence by Torturing Them
Don’t think “innocent until proven guilty” – think “subjected to unbearable pain until such time as your innocence has been determined by a process as random as flipping a coin”. With such a terrifying lose-lose legal system as “trial by ordeal” in operation, your fear wasn’t of being found guilty – it was of being unfortunate enough to be accused in the first place. Noblemen who might or might not have committed a crime would have been made to hold a red-hot iron bar, or walk across hot coals; if their badly burned extremities didn’t show signs within three days that God was helping them heal, they’d be pronounced guilty. As antiseptic wasn’t that plentiful in medieval times, conviction rates tended to be high. Common folk, meanwhile, would be invited to plung
e their hand into a cauldron of boiling water, or oil, to retrieve a stone, to which their reply must surely have been “Oh no, must I?” A neat take on ordeal by water was to throw someone in a river with a heavy weight attached, with survivors proclaimed innocent – although witches suffered from a neat switcheroo to this plan (see Accusing Pretty Much Every Unusual Woman of being a Witch).
Trial by combat was another quaint but highly dangerous legal process, where the innocent of two parties was deemed the one who managed to beat the other one in a fight. If you were fit, healthy and good at scrapping, you’d get away with murder – although, strangely, women, elderly and the infirm could nominate someone to fight on their behalf. Trial by combat was still legal in Britain until 1819, but the jury system became standard in the twelfth century – much to the relief of weedy criminals across the land.
Composing Riddles
If someone came up to you at a house party and introduced themselves by saying “My first is in castle, my second in moat, my third is in river, but never in boat” – you might reasonably ask him to shut up before mooching off into the kitchen. There’s a sneering edge of superiority about a riddle – “I know what I’m going on about, you work it out” – and it’s no coincidence that there are Norse tales of gods vanquishing foes by posing particularly baffling riddles. Striking them down with thunderbolts would probably be faster, but Odin in particular seemed keener on mental humiliation.
Medieval riddles, or enigmata, while still requiring a bit of brainpower to solve, weren’t quite as irritating, as their purpose was more bawdy double entendre than bamboozlement. In their seventh- and eighth-century heyday, hinting at sexual topics in verse wasn’t really the done thing, but if you could pretend it had a weighty subtext you’d probably get away with it; the phrase “fair maiden filled me with breath” might have had people fainting with shock, until you pointed out that you were actually talking about a wind instrument. Aah. I see. The collection of one hundred or so of these riddles in the Exeter Book – the most notable collection of Old English writing – has turned them into something of a distinguished literary form, but these days we vastly prefer our puzzles to come in jigsaw format.
Getting a Barber to Pull out your Troublesome Tooth
You’d be unlikely to let your butcher do your accounts, or your bank manager to give you a pedicure, and of all the people you might choose to extract a rotting tooth or remove your appendix, your hairdresser would have to come pretty low on the list. But in medieval times that’s just how it was; in theory, monks had the job of performing operations on fellow humans but an inconvenient papal decree actually forbade them from spilling blood, which rather reined in their surgical ambitions. So they had to find assistance from people who had a handy set of sharp cutting implements; barbers got the job whether they had the skills to deploy these tools or not, and they set about sticking sharp objects into us with gusto.
People are nervous enough about going for a dental appointment these days, despite the availability of both local and general anaesthetics on hand to stop us screaming, and a dentist with a few letters after their name. But back then, the choice was stark: either continue putting up with the pain you’re suffering, or see someone who has a slim chance of being able to sort it out. By 1308 the Worshipful Company of Barbers had been founded in England, cutting both our hair and our skin as necessary, and in 1540 the Company of Barber Surgeons acknowledged their status. Barbers still retain the red and white striped pole outside their premises, as a reminder of the time when they’d do much worse than accidentally nick your ear with some clippers.
Locking your Wife’s Genitalia up for safe Keeping
With rape a regular occurrence in the middle ages, travelling soldiers managed to persuade their female partners that the cast-iron chastity belt was an important personal protection device that should be worn for their own safety. Of course, it had the convenient side effect of severely limiting the woman’s sexual freedom, which would have been a boon for men of a severely jealous disposition. Of course, a soldier had carte blanche to rape and pillage as he liked while gallivanting abroad, but back at home his wife would be struggling with clumsy, slightly rusting metal underwear that allowed stuff to get out but, crucially, allowed nothing to get in.
A visiting Italian noted that British men of this period were either “the most discreet lovers in the world, or incapable of love,” while women were “very violent in their passions” – so maybe men believed they had cause to be concerned about the rampant sexuality of their wives. But locking up a woman’s genitals isn’t the soundest base for a loving relationship, and while chastity belts were still knocking about until late in the nineteenth century, this was more to keep a check on masturbatory habits (see Being Terrified of what Might Happen to you if you Masturbated) than to prevent extramarital liaisons.
Predicting the Future Using Sand
Every era has its hare-brained methods of attempting to predict the future, all of them singularly unsuccessful and always superseded by something equally lacking in scientific reasoning. The auspices of Roman times (see Making Major Life Decisions Based on how Birds Fly Past) were replaced with geomancy, a method of divining that had made its way from Islamic countries of the Middle East during the eleventh century. What geomancy had going for it was its sheer complexity; its interpretation of patterns of sand or soil depended on referring to various indices, matrices and tables, which considerably boosted its credibility.
Geomancy was said to deal with straightforward yes-or-no questions best of all (presumably because it had a fifty-fifty chance of success) rather than imponderables such as “why don’t nice girls like me?” which were far harder to assess via sand analysis. It took until the 1600s for humans to completely lose faith in the pronouncements of the geomancer, and while we might be surprised that the practice lasted even that long, you only have to look at the substantial earnings of tabloid astrologers to know that we’re still desperate to believe that our lives are guided by an otherworldly force, and at the time the geomancer gave as good a reassurance as any. Today, you can recreate the uncertainty of medieval times by purchasing geomancy software, which reduces all the complex number crunching into one handy mouse click.
Jokes that aren’t as funny as they were at the time
There wasn’t a great deal to laugh about in the Middle Ages. People occasionally fell over on their arses, sure. Children did pathetic but endearing impressions of Ethelred the Unready. Dogs sneezed. People made amusing quips that made the passing months seem a little less tortuous – but the few examples of said humour that have filtered down to the present day certainly couldn’t be worked into a sitcom script or a stand-up routine, lest the audience start to turn nasty and loudly voice their disapproval. Here’s an example from the oldest surviving joke book called the Philogelos, written by a thigh-slapping double act called Hieorcles and Philagrus in around the fourth century AD.
An intellectual was eating dinner with his father. On the table was a large lettuce with many succulent shoots. The intellectual suggested: “Father, you eat the children; I’ll take mother.”
It looks like a joke. It sounds like a joke. But there’s something missing: humour. On the other hand, it’s possible that there are hidden subtexts or double entendres relating to, well, salad, that the modern mind can no longer comprehend. Aside from reliable old warhorses such as farting, jokes are very much of the culture and time in which they were created, and if people were flagellating themselves with whips, eating swans and locking up their wife’s genitals, no wonder we don’t get their jokes. The only joke of modern times that concerns lettuce is a predictable knock-knock gag that you’ll find in any kids’ joke book – and that isn’t very good, either, so maybe this all just has something to do with lettuces.
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and we find a popular practical joke of medieval times based around an object known as the puzzle mug. Deployed in taverns on unsuspecting regulars who had already dr
unk too much, the gag involved a ceramic vessel with discreetly placed holes bored in it; when someone tried to take a swig without covering the correct holes with their fingers, they’d get covered in beer. Cue widespread hilarity. It probably won’t ever stop being funny to see someone accidentally fail to get some drink into their mouths, but it’s not quite as funny if you know that it’s coming. Today, we’d be more likely to warn them of the puzzle mug’s idiosyncrasies in order to avoid scenes of social embarrassment.
Shakespeare’s jokes used many of the devices we still use to make each other laugh – allusions to sexual activity, withering criticism, excruciating puns – but we tend not to understand his jokes unless they’re flagged up in bold type in a book of English-Language exam revision notes, or signposted with exuberant smiles and expansive gestures by a couple of enthusiastic actors. The Georgian era saw a collection of one-liners in the 1739 book Joe Miller’s Jests which, again, had recognizable themes running through it (the supposed stupidity of the Irish, people lying about their age, titillating mentions of women from certain parts of the country who have loose sexual morals) but the very fact that these 250 jokes were published in book format meant that they very quickly lost their cachet; any rubbish old joke eventually came to be known as a “Joe Miller” as a result. But the Victorians, for all their alleged humourlessness, did have the odd joke that was verging on comprehensible, even funny, to the modern ear.
Bm-tsh! By the 1930s, we start getting shaggy dog stories that form the basis of the rambling comic monologues we hear today, then post-war we see an explosion of elephant gags, injured baby gags, filthy jokes, bumper stickers, and forwarded emails which come in the form “You know you’re ____ when you’ve _____.” Of course, jokes are never as funny as when we heard them the first time. And it’s something of a tribute to the human mind that we’re still able to make each other laugh after several millennia of sitting around feeling a bit bored and trying to be funny.
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