STRATEGY #3: GET RICH
If you can’t be like Teresa and focus on God, be yourself and focus on greed.
Musical performance in the Middle Ages could be a surprisingly lucrative profession. Some instrumentalists and singers were full-time, salaried employees of city governments. Rigord (c. 1148–c. 1208), a French royal historian, noted that kings paid their entertainers in gold, silver, horses, and robes worth enough money to feed someone for a year. In Iraq and al-Andalus, enslaved women composers and singers were known to become wealthy enough to buy themselves out of slavery. Yes, even if your eardrums hurt while you travel with the bard, you will be able to remind yourself that it’s far nicer to be able to afford an inn than to sleep in a tent.
“Will” is such a subjective word, isn’t it?
Late medieval cities were filled with individual opportunities for musicians to perform for a fee—playing for social dances or in-home private shows, accompanying processions, providing the soundtrack to the calendar of annual religious dramas. Some minstrels were able to befriend a tavern keeper or two, and got them to charge admission on scheduled performance nights. You just don’t want your bard to be barber-surgeon, singer, and poet Hans Folz (c. 1435–1513). The city of Nuremberg passed a law banning him—specifically him, by name—from charging admission to tavern performances of his works.
But cities were also filled with professional musicians wanting to get paid for what they did, and amateur musicians from the bourgeoisie and upper class with the connections to get those roles. (That would include Folz, who was apparently rich enough to buy or rent a printing press.) Other musicians—and even the lucky ones between their paying gigs—had to depend on enough people tossing a coin or two to them. And what part of your quest so far has made you think the bard insisting on coming along is even good enough to play at dances?
Strategy #3 seems less than strategic.
REPLACEMENT FOR STRATEGY #3: CUDDLE WITH THEIR PETS
Most musical performances in the Middle Ages blended into other types of entertainment, like reciting King Arthur stories or acting the fool. Like everyone’s favorite undefenestrated entertainer Monsieur Cruche, itinerant bards often developed other skills that gave them flexibility in employment but still left them sleeping in tents.
If you can’t be like Teresa, if the bard never gets what’s coming, or if they leave you with even less money than you had when you started, well, then you can find your consolation in the most popular second profession: animal trainer.
Nobles from Burgundy to the Swahili city-states to Baghdad to India to China were well-known for keeping menageries for display or performance of tricks. Their collections were typically composed of exotic animals like lions and elephants. And as they needed their animals to perform tricks, they had to bring their pets along on the journey. People in the Middle Ages understood full well the importance of human closeness for training animals, too. One English hunting manual even recommended having someone sleep in future hunting dogs’ kennels to keep the puppies company. (Best. job. ever.) If your eardrums throb during the day, you can at least take consolation in cuddling with furry cuteness at night.
Oh. Right. Itinerant animal trainers in England were known as bearwards. Because the animals they trained were bears. About that “cuddling”…
REPLACEMENT FOR THE REPLACEMENT FOR STRATEGY #3: LEARN TO SING
Be the bard. Make everyone else put up with you.
HOW to BEAT the CHEATS
Henry Pecche had survived the Black Death. But would he survive lunch?
On the mean streets of medieval London, it was hardly a given. Cooks were infamous for stuffing ashes, sand, and “coppewebbes” into their breads and pies to puff up their size and weight.2 And on that fateful day in January 1351, Pecche and two of his friends made the mistake of stopping for chicken turnovers at the stand run by Henry de Passelewe. Chicken turnovers that were, in the words of the jury, “putrid and stinking, and an abomination to mankind.”3
Chicken turnovers that Pecche and his friends had devoured most of before they found this out.
So come lunchtime, don’t be like Pecche. Don’t spend the money or the hours vomiting up three-quarters of a rotten chicken, buying beer at illegal prices, or consuming bread loaves made of horse feed. All too many vendors were eager to skim that last penny, including charging you extra to pay with pennies instead of coins of larger denominations so they could “modify” the exchange rate.
You, of course, would never be so devious. So, you’ll just have to learn about scams to avoid, at the inn and beyond, from things like law codes and merchants’ handbooks. (What to avoid, you understand.) As you might expect, the menu of cons starts with alcohol.
Alcohol’s prominence on the list of scams was even more nefarious than it might seem at first. Plenty of water was available to drink, as long as it was “sweet water” instead of “bitter water,” or perhaps bitter water that had been boiled. But wine, beer, and ale were the all day, every day drinks for Christians and Jews of all ages—the helpful extra calories and taste more or less made them the medieval version of soda.
Still, the number of preachers yelling about how drinking to get drunk was an especially egregious sin suggests that the drinks you’re going to order at the tavern create some additional factors to consider before you imbibe.
The oldest scheme is ancient—as in biblical. Sell the good wine with meals, but as the evening wears on, slip in cheaper and cheaper types to people who can no longer tell the difference. The innkeeper might also lie about which is the good wine and where it’s from in the first place. For example, Augsburg vendors could sell all the French wine they wanted. They were merely banned from selling German wine while claiming it was from France.
You can’t get scammed over an evening of drinks if you don’t have the money in the first place. No, if someone needed to fund a frantic escape or a quest, you—I mean, they—should wheedle their way into the spice trade. Given the loose western European definition of spice as “something expensive from far away,” you can be confident that with a few good days of work, you’ll either be really rich or really in jail.
As with all true international traders, bribes are just another line to itemize in your budget. You’ve got real scams to run—I mean, to worry about. Spices were sold by weight in large, bundled quantities, and generally on the basis of small samples. So, don’t let the seller choose the sample for you. You can’t trust anyone.
In the course of your quest, you should expect to face sellers who tare their scales unfairly. Or, as an example that takes things one step further, the Venetians grumped about Armenian wheat traders, who (according to the Venetians) invented their own weight measures altogether. You’re a foreigner; what do you know? And even balancing out a scale to both sides’ satisfaction won’t prevent a vendor from giving the weight of their product a little boost.
Honestly (…), you should be expecting a certain amount of sand or dust mixed into any spice you buy. Really—London had an actual guild of people whose job it was to sort out the actual spices. Of course, if you were the one selling it to a London merchant, the so-called garblers wouldn’t help; and if you were the London merchant buying the spice, you’d pay the garblers instead; indeed, it was a business in which everyone was as dirty as their sacks.
And before you go thinking that sand is the only problem you’ll face, the fourteenth-century book Zibaldone da Canal—you want to use the Italian title because it’s more fun to say than “scrapbook of someone probably from the da Canal family”—includes a massive section explaining how to identify a quality spice from a knockoff.
With spices, as with almost any food-related product you may want to buy, the best way to detect a problem is to taste the sample. Mind you, two of the more valuable spices were tutty and ambergris, which is to say chimney scrapings and dried whale vomit—so not everything is going to taste good. And from that end, not everything is meant to be tasted at all. Orpiment
was a mineral used in dyes. It was fine if fresh, but degraded, it became… arsenic.
In the end, the spice trade as a whole functioned because traders depended on reputation and repeat business. Unlike an innkeeper who could reel in one-time foreign visitors, merchants would be out of business if they became known for conning people more often than other merchants did. Unless, of course, a merchant similarly specialized in one-off transactions.
So, my dear first-time foreign visitor, be careful what you eat.
2. Henry Thomas Riley (ed.), Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis (Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), 3: 415.
3. Henry Thomas Riley (ed. and trans.), Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries: Being a Series of Extracts, Local, Social, and Political, from the Early Archives of the City of London (Longmans, 1868), 266.
HOW to FLIRT with the BARMAID
Hey, baby, want to go back to my monastery and discuss our celibacy vows?
Hold up there, tiger or tigress. (Point of order: medieval descriptions of tigers describe cheetahs.) Chivalry is for nobles, especially for noblemen who want to pretend they’re knights glowing with battle glory. For you, on the other hand, there are two possible outcomes for flirting with the barmaid during a quest. First, she pretends to play hard to get and finds an excuse to join your party. Second, someone sees you flirting and gets angry, and after the ensuing bar fight, she’s forced to flee along with the rest of your party.
So don’t worry that your best pickup line is I’m afraid I’ll have to hang you from my gallows, because you just stole my heart. You’ve got three other questions to consider before you’re remotely ready to speak aloud. Can you flirt with a barmaid? Do you want to flirt with a barmaid? And finally, should you flirt with a barmaid?
CAN YOU FLIRT WITH A BARMAID?
Nothing is fair in love or war, so this question itself has three subquestions.
Can You Flirt With a Barmaid?
Hey, baby, want to go confess the sin of lust?
Your pickup line is just like a city in Europe: hearing it will kill people faster than new ones can be born to replace them. When medieval European towns were called “population sinks,” it wasn’t because people went there to get clean. Because no matter how much you may want to, you can’t flirt with a barmaid if she’s died of plague.
But while natives alone couldn’t make their cities grow and prosper, immigrants got the job done. Over the course of the Middle Ages, urban populations exploded as people moved from the countryside to nearby cities in search of work. The closer you went to Belgium, the more teenage and twentysomething women hoping to earn their way to bigger dowries you would see. (Belgium, that famous land of love.)
In other words: you can indeed flirt with a barmaid, because a whole lot of young urban women are single, working, and looking for a long-term relationship.
But…
Can You Flirt With a Barmaid?
You might have to burn at the stake, baby, because you just cast a spell on me.
Your pickup lines are like a medieval marriage: not so good when arranged in advance.
It was a borderline requirement for marriages among Europe’s upper crust to be arranged, and for every other reason in the world than mutual attraction. If you’re so bad at flirting that Hey, baby, wanna come to a joust? I can show you the difference between a knight and a squire is the best you can do, then a means of courtship that precludes flirting should come as a relief.
But if you meet the legal requirements for marrying the barmaid (male and at least fourteen years old; she only has to be twelve), hold on. You probably want to talk to Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre and William, duke of a lot less territory than he wanted.
Jeanne’s parents (that would be the king and queen of Navarre) had arranged a marriage between their daughter and William, a German duke with delusions of rebelling against the Holy Roman emperor. On her wedding day in 1541, the twelve-year-old princess had to be carried down the aisle of the church—sobbing. Subsequently, William’s rebellion ended poorly, as did his marriage, with Jeanne winning an annulment in 1545.
On the other hand, Jeanne participated eagerly in the arrangement of her marriage with Antoine de Bourbon in 1548, a marriage that would eventually make her son the king of Navarre—and the king of France. When she fell out of love with her husband, she said, “No matter,” and concentrated on aiding the rise of his house. She made herself the leader of the heretical Protestant movement in France and Navarre, and then declared it the official religion of Navarre. The little girl who sobbed at her first marriage became the leader who made Catholicism a heresy during her second.
Arranged marriages: just don’t do it. Which brings us to:
Can You Flirt With a Barmaid?
We’ve established this.
No.
DO YOU WANT TO FLIRT WITH A BARMAID?
Did I just walk into the Renaissance? Because you are truly a work of art.
Your pickup lines are just like 10 to 25 percent of women in medieval cities: never going to end up in marriage.
That number doesn’t mean 10 to 25 percent of medieval women, not counting nuns, were exclusively attracted to other women. (And it definitely doesn’t mean that 10 to 25 percent of them are attracted to you.) Male writers spent enough time defining women by sex; don’t help them! Medieval women could stay single for the independence, or because they didn’t want kids, or out of religious desire, or for a thousand other reasons that we’ll never know because women didn’t write them down.
On the other hand, the lives of those (legally) single women offer glimpses into ways that medieval women who loved women—be it crush or girl crush—might have arranged their lives together. In 1493, Thomasina of (presumably) London shared a room in London with a woman identified only as “a concubine.” Gertrude of Offenburg (d. 1335) was a wealthy widow who opened her house to Heilke of Staufenburg, a young unmarried woman. The two of them schemed to win Heilke’s full inheritance from her brothers to better support themselves, and stayed together until Gertrude’s death—thirty years and twenty-eight weeks later. Nicole of Rubercy and a woman identified only as Contesse rented rooms in the same hostel around 1270. Despite their own poverty, they each worked extra jobs when the other was sick in order to support them both.
Again, don’t draw conclusions about any particular case here. They provide templates for same-sex love. Undoubtedly, though, they show that medieval Europe had perfected the art of the girl crush. As was said about Gertrude and Heilke, “Together, they shared a household and suffered together through both bad and good just as if it were meant for both of them. When one of them was ailing, so was the other… They helped each other to bear this suffering as friends in the name of God. And they lived a happy and blessed life together.”4
So if you think she’s cute, why not flirt with the barmaid? It may or may not be 10 to 25 percent exactly, but there’s a good chance she’ll flirt back.
Which brings us to the final question. Male, female; married, single; attracted to her or not…
SHOULD YOU FLIRT WITH THE BARMAID?
Hey, baby, wanna come to my castle and explore a tower?
Your pickup lines are like bar fights: they have no place in a family establishment. And guess what: there’s a high chance the alehouse you’re patronizing is indeed a family establishment.
Maybe a father owned the tavern on the bottom floor of his house and trained his son to take over the family business. A mother set up some tables from time to time, when her husband’s income had taken a dip. A widow converted part of her house into a public space.
Yes, sometimes a medieval tavern was a classic stand-alone business, with a stand-alone building, maybe its own brewery, and a large staff who served in various roles. (And yes, sometimes “tavern” was a euphemism.) But even into the early modern era, which saw a general reduction in formal employment options open to women, smaller taverns were common, often woman-owned bus
inesses that were operated out of a home and run by a family—the whole family.
Jacques le Francois was reminded of this arrangement one year in Pitres as he was minding his own business over a quiet mug of ale—and for no reason at all, the tavern keeper’s family tried to throw him out of the house. (The tavern owner’s account of the incident, unsurprisingly, filled in the blanks behind “no reason at all” with Jacques being a violent, drunken lout who attacked the family. A neighbor’s account of the incident filled in the blank behind “being a violent, drunken lout” with “Jacques and the tavern keeper’s family were feuding over some land.”)
In other words, that barmaid stands a good chance of being the tavern keeper’s daughter. And even if she’s a servant, well, medieval men and women sued their servants frequently for courting and marrying without their permission.
The innkeepers are on their guard for stopping patrons’ violence, for getting customers drunk enough to buy more ale or beer, and for watering down ale or beer to make a larger profit. But if they’re even slightly good parents or employers, and “tavern” is not a euphemism, they’re probably also keeping half an eye on that cute barmaid—and on you.
How to Slay a Dragon Page 5