Going Out for the Evening to Catch a Morality Play
If we describe anyone other than a man of the cloth as “preaching” to us, it’s not generally meant in a positive way. Most of us develop an aversion to being told what to do or how to behave as we grow up, and if we felt that a form of entertainment was explicitly suggesting that we ought to buck up and improve our moral outlook, we’d probably feel a bit insulted.
It’s possible that audiences had grown tired of being force-fed biblical stories via the mystery plays of the earlier Middle Ages, but theatre companies continued to work Christian values into the new breed of morality plays – didactic works that featured characters representing humanity and other characters representing virtues or vices, that panned out to recommend the virtues and expose the vices as inadvisable. The audience would, presumably, walk away with a renewed commitment to not covet their neighbour’s wife – at least for a couple of days – and thus the morals of the nation were, somewhat loosely, upheld. Modern films still tend to depict the triumph of good over evil, but it’s not so much to keep a check on our behaviour as to make us feel slightly less depressed about the state of the world.
Restoring One’s Virginity by Bathing in Water Infused with Comfrey
The sanctity of female virginity was greatly respected in medieval times, and losing it as a consequence of succumbing briefly to forces of lust was deeply frowned upon. Of course, victims of rape were looked upon with a certain amount of sympathy; and the French scholar Jean Gerson even had words of solace for women who lost their moral fortitude in a moment of passion, claiming that if they repented and confessed their sin, that virginity would somehow be restored.
But of course, there’s a physical sign of a woman no longer being a virgin, and restoring that was always going to be rather trickier. In such circumstances, women would turn to comfrey, the wonder herb of the era. Plentiful on British riverbanks, it was exalted for its healing properties, and was sometimes known as “knitbone” for its supposed ability to mend fractures. But it was also supposed to have the power to replace a broken hymen. Women would sit in a bath of water infused with comfrey – a giant cup of tea, effectively – in the hope that the hymen would grow back. It didn’t, but they kept doing it anyway. Today, comfrey is still valued, but more for its fertilizing properties. Plants, that is.
Persecuting Sufferers of Acne, as if they’re Not Suffering Enough Already
If half the people in your neighbourhood suddenly dropped dead of a mysterious disease, you’d want to know what was causing it, and how best you could protect yourself against your armpits swelling up, and unexpectedly vomiting blood. But as we’ve seen already in this chapter, flagellating oneself or masking foul odours didn’t do very much to help against the Black Death, and society was at a loss as to where to pin the blame. While it was generally accepted that the wrath of God had something to do with it, blaming God wasn’t really an option – not least because no one knew precisely where God lived. So other innocent parties got it in the neck instead.
It’s perhaps predictable that Jewish communities were among the first to suffer; they were accused of poisoning the water supply, and were slaughtered en masse in Strasbourg, Mainz and Cologne. “Friars, foreigners, beggars and pilgrims” also found themselves unreasonably picked on. But those with mild skin afflictions would have felt most mistreated. In the rush to stamp out the plague, lepers were slaughtered, followed by anyone who looked a bit leper-y, including sufferers of psoriasis, acne, and congested complexion, which, of course, isn’t remotely contagious. In a final blow to the quarter of European citizens who perished at the hands of the Black Death, cats were killed for being in league with the devil – when they might have been the one species that could have helped by killing the rats that were spreading the disease.
Practising Archery without Due Care and Attention
The arrival of advanced longbow tactics on the battlefield in the early fourteenth century came as something of a shock to soldiers who thought that they were at a safe distance from the enemy, but suddenly found themselves annoyingly slaughtered by a blizzard of arrows. At the Battle of Crécy in 1346, some two thousand French knights were killed by English archers for the loss of a mere fifty men – thus proving the total dominance in combat of sharp things flying through the air extremely rapidly.
Of course, weapons develop and improve over time, and there’s nothing unusual or odd about the coming and going of the bow and arrow. But what was slightly odd was how its importance changed people’s weekends. The “Assize of Arms” already made it compulsory for all Englishmen between the ages of fifteen and sixty to equip themselves with bows and arrows, but Edward III went further in 1363 by ordering the practice of archery on Sundays and public holidays, which must have been a total drag for anyone with a hangover. As if to underline the importance of improving the skills of rookie archers, it was also the case that if you accidentally killed someone while practicing, it didn’t really count as a punishable offence. It was probably a good idea not to accidentally annoy anyone at archery practice.
Paying Someone to Compensate for the Injury you Inflicted on them
For those who thought the biblical approach to redress – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – was unnecessarily brutal, the medieval concept of weregild offered a more practical and peaceful alternative; namely eight shillings for a tooth, and 66 shillings, 6 pence and a third of a penny for an eye. In a neat precursor of today’s compensation culture, the ninth century laws of Alfred the Great laid out various remunerations to be paid to the victims or families of victims – including, for example, six shillings to be handed over if your dog got out of control and bit someone. No lengthy legal procedures, no weighing up the potential loss of earnings, no putting a value on wounded pride or the cost of a recuperative holiday in Wessex – just a flat fee.
Things became slightly more complex in the case of murder; you couldn’t just buy forgiveness for having disembowelled someone in a wooded glade, but you would have to pay compensation to the family as well as receive your punishment. If you were stupid enough to kill a prince, you’d be talking 1500 shillings. Farmers came in a bit cheaper at a mere 100, while the 40–88 shillings paid to the families of serfs probably came in pretty useful; having a few expendable, mouthy serfs in your family who were likely to annoy fearsome men with big fists was probably a pretty good insurance policy.
Rising up Against the Ruling Classes
There’s a difference between protesting and revolting. The former ranges from penning a mildly disgruntled letter to your local newspaper, to participating in a march chaperoned by a few hundred police officers while you wave a banner and shout about what you want, and when you want it. A revolt, however, abandons any social niceties, swells with thousands upon thousands of furious people, and gets pretty bloody scary.
In a sense, those who participated in the dozens of peasants’ rebellions throughout Europe in the fouteenth century didn’t really have much choice, and certainly had nothing to lose; when lives are so ravaged by disease, poverty and rampant envy of the undeserving upper classes, anger is pretty much all you’ve got left. Tragically, and despite their size and ferocity, every one of those revolts – including the best-documented one in Britain in 1381 – ended in failure, and the word “peasant” gained all its pejorative meanings. The noblemen with the power, money and prestige always came out on top, the ringleaders of the revolt were soundly punished, and all those who had got excited about the prospect of a more equal and prosperous society were dispatched back whence they came, to experience greater inequality and considerably less prosperity. Democracy may have initially felt quite powerful, but eventually we became cynical about that too, and started writing impotent letters to the local newspaper instead.
Being a Soldier While Also Showing Respect Towards Women
Anyone who chooses to fight for their country has always had reserves of courage and loyalty that put cowards like the rest of
us – who, after all, depend on their bravery – to shame. But when you assemble several thousand men in a combat situation, the ensuing flood of testosterone has traditionally resulted in a less-than-respectful attitude towards women. The concept of rape as one of the spoils of war was a constant for many centuries; today, you get the unedifying spectacle of glamour models being flown out to remote war zones to give sex-starved squaddies something to briefly drool over.
Medieval knights, however, combined that courage and loyalty with a gallantry that required them “to do nothing to displease maidens”. It’s not clear why a bloke with a sword on a horse should have more respect for women than a bloke not on a horse, but their duties were to protect the weaker and more vulnerable members of society, and to serve ladies, rather than smack them on the rear as they were passing. Their code of honour also required them to refrain from “baseness”, which presumably precluded them from shouting “Phwoooaargh!” at women they fancied. The sheer effort of maintaining this attitude towards the fairer sex eventually proved too much, and while raping and pillaging are no longer officially sanctioned, you’d have to say that chivalry is now a bit thin on the ground, too.
Informing People that there are Animals who can Lay Waste to Forests with Burning Dung
“Here begins the book of the nature of beasts,” begins a medieval book about the nature of beasts, “of lions, and panthers, and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and apes.” And snakes with wings, and hedgehogs with grapes on their backs, and horned animals that casually throw themselves off mountains. The thing about compiling a book about animals in medieval times is that the writers didn’t have the resources available to the likes of David Attenborough. Rather like Chinese whispers, information about various exotic animals and what they looked like was passed from person to person, with descriptions becoming ever more distorted, so that by the time they were immortalized on the page crocodiles ended up looking more like dogs, and ostriches appeared to have hooves.
You can’t blame the creators of these “bestiaries” for lack of accuracy, but some of the more outlandish claims must have rung alarm bells in even the most credulous and unsceptical of minds. The manticore – a fearsome combination of lion, scorpion and man – took its place in the bestiary alongside doves and pelicans. And the bonnacon, a bison-like creature, was said to emit toxic flatulence and faeces that scorched the landscape. It’s a feat to which many men would lay claim today, but it wasn’t until more enlightened times that the fearsome effluence of the bonnacon was revealed to be the figment of a rather over-active imagination.
Baking an Extra Loaf of Bread for Fear of Being Imprisoned, or Worse
With today’s miracles of technology, it’s possible to shove the ingredients for making bread into a machine, and have a just-about-adequate loaf emerge some two hours later. But we still value the craft of the baker; they’re simply better at it than we are, and in times where decent ovens – and, indeed, electric baking devices with paddle attachments – were scarce, the baker held something of a monopoly over the whole bread production process. And as a result the odd evil baker would exploit his position by making disappointingly small loaves, or padding them out with sand.
The Assize of Bread and Ale, introduced in England in the mid-thirteenth century, finally gave some protection to the consumer by stipulating exactly how much bread you got for your buck. A sliding scale of fines was imposed on the baker, depending on by how much he’d defrauded his customers, and persistent offenders would be punished by being stuck in the local pillories to be pelted with any convenient objects that were lying nearby. The ultimate punishment was the Baker’s Baptism; being submerged in a nearby river for as long as the presiding official thought it necessary. (Also known as “drowning”.) Bakers hurriedly overcompensated to avoid punishment, hence the baker’s dozen; you were given thirteen for the price of twelve. Just in case.
Placing a Curse on a Book in Order to Dissuade Thieves from Nicking it
Copying a book these days can be as simple as an alt-click-drag on a computer desktop. Before the printing press, the process took several million times longer, and a copy of a book was, inevitably, vastly more precious as a result. Theft of manuscripts by bibliomaniacs with a hunger for knowledge or, more likely, an urge to sell the book on for a few hundred shillings, was a constant threat, and a security system had to be devised that would dissuade people from such thievery. Simply blessing the book or praying for its safety had little effect, but the introduction of a deterrent in the form of a written curse was a great deal more successful.
It was the one part of the book where the scribe had free rein to use his own imagination and write whatever he wanted, and the variety of punishments dreamt up for thievery were magnificently vicious. “Let him be struck with palsy”, wrote one, “and all his members blasted”. Nasty. “Let bookworms gnaw his entrails”, read another. Rather than risk the possibility of having one’s entrails gnawed by bookworms, thieves tended to steer clear and concentrate on a target that hadn’t been inscribed with phrases like “let him be frizzled in a pan”. Like pans, for example.
Bleeding to Death and Malodorous Breath: 1450–1650
The arrival of the Renaissance coupled a welcome diminishing of the likelihood of succumbing horribly to the Black Death with huge advances in intellectual rigour. But a revolution in thought doesn’t happen overnight; scientists may well have made huge strides forward in their understanding of the workings of the human body, but they continued to recommend the application of leeches to get rid of “bad blood”. And as “being a bit scientific” became trendy, gentleman hobbyists took up the cause with gusto, spending far too much time attempting to turn everyday substances into gold – probably more motivated by the possibility of having something named after them than the advancement of humanity.
Developments in the arts brought a new realism in painting, and the emergence of complex polyphony in music would one day give birth to respected works by such renowned artistes as the Spice Girls (see Imagining that Girl Power would Change Society). While people waited fruitlessly for such sonorous delights to evolve, however, they had to pluck ineptly at hurdy-gurdies. But on the whole, life was looking up – unless you were a woman with a passion for acting, in which case theatrical etiquette dictated that you had to sit grumpily through plays, watching vastly inferior male thespians battling their way across the stage in gaudy dresses and unconvincing high voices.
Punishing One’s Wife with Disproportionate Acts of Violence
It would be safe to say that wife-beating isn’t as socially acceptable as it used to be. Lawful disagreements with one’s spouse consist of a blazing row plus finger wagging, and, thankfully, the authorities refuse to sanction any kind of domestic violence. Some generations of women, however, lived in fear of being slapped about by their husbands if they transgressed unwritten rules – and not necessarily because the men were psychopathic thugs, but because that’s just how things were. Common law in Britain once permitted men to inflict “moderate correction” upon their wives (with the dubious reasoning that men have to “answer for their misbehaviour”) thus bracketing them with unruly children and servants who dare to answer back; for example, “nagging” women might be paraded around town in a brank – an iron mask that clamped onto the head with a metal bar going into the mouth, while women who “conned” a man into marriage by using excessive make-up (see Informing People that there are Animals who can Lay Waste to Forests with Burning Dung) or “lift-and-separate” undergarments to lure him into the relationship, could equally expect to be on the receiving end of some kind of vicious discipline.
Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries of The Laws of England (1765) marks the decline of the law:
“In the politer reign of Charles II, this power of correction began to be doubted … Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their ancient privilege, and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a
wife of her liberty.”
The methods of restraint that were permitted are unclear, but seem to have been anything up to the point at which the woman started bleeding. But courts were even lenient on men who had “unintentionally” beaten their wives to death. An undeniably effective, some might say ultimate restraint, but now frowned upon by the European Convention on Human Rights.
Turning a Mythological Animal into a Dining Sensation
The cockatrice was an animal that appeared in medieval bestiaries (see Make-up whose use is no longer sanctioned by the British Skin Foundation), but it’s not clear whether Renaissance thinking had yet managed to convince people that this mythical half-lizard, half-rooster was merely a figment of someone’s over-active imagination, or whether gaggles of them were thought to lurk in nearby forests at the dead of night. Had the cockatrice existed, you’d have had good reason to be scared of it; it had a deadly gaze that could either turn you to stone or kill you – depending on how vicious it was feeling – and touching it or even being breathed upon by it led to a similar fate. Only the humble weasel, it seems, was immune to its attacks – a clear indication that the authors of the bestiaries were making it up as they went along.
Anyway, whether it was to display supremacy over the non-existent cockatrice or simply because it was funny, Tudor cooks decided that reconstructing one out of available materials (er, dead farm animals) and serving it up for dinner would be a magnificent idea. Pig and chicken were spliced together in a vague approximation of rooster’n’lizard, and the resulting winged pork delicacy would be cooed over by wealthy diners. Today, the cockatrice has been banished to the realms of video games such as Fighting Fantasy (as a much-feared adversary, rather than an enormous dinner).
The Next Big Thing Page 4