by Robert Lacey
The chant was the heartbeat of religious devotion in England in the year 1000. It was the channel by which man spoke to his God, either directly or by catching the ear of Mary or one of the saints. Its rhythmic beauty was an act of homage as well as an enticement to the divine listener, and as each monk made his music, he knew that he was practising for the glorious day when he would stand as a member of one of the choirs of angels in Heaven, and raise his voice in the very presence of God Himself.
The chanting of the liturgy was one of the centralising forces of Christendom. Today it is usually referred to as the Gregorian chant, from the tradition that it was developed by Pope Gregory the Great - the same Gregory who dispatched missionaries to England - and one can certainly imagine the good Pope singing with Augustine and his companions as they dedicated themselves for their mission to the distant islands of the northwest. But there is no evidence that Gregory himself was particularly involved in the collecting together of these mesmerising melodies which had their roots in the Hebrew chants that were taken over and adapted by the first Christians. The chant was the product of practice and elaboration by the countless churchmen and women of the first millennium whose lives were given meaning by this inspiring and transcendent sound.
The chant uplifted people spiritually - and it provided physical uplift as well. The decades following the year 1000 saw a significant growth in the building of monastic infirmaries, which were medical institutions in the modern sense of the word, but also offered refuge to the old and dying, as well as accommodation for travellers and pilgrims. “Let all guests who come to the monastery be entertained like Christ Himself,” wrote St. Benedict, “because He will say, ‘I was a stranger and you took me in.’ “ (74) Many of these infirmaries were built on deeply symbolic thoroughfares, beside bridges or rivers, or much-travelled roads, and though they could offer rest and seclusion and simple herbal remedies to those who were sick, the main constituent of their healing regimen was the primeval resonance of the Mass and the deeply affecting rhythms of the chant.
The monks rose in the middle of the night to sing their first prayers. Signing up for the monastic life meant saying goodbye forever to a full nights sleep, since two hours after midnight was the time set for the night office. Many monastic buildings had a staircase that went straight down from the dormitory into the chapel to ease the pain of going from sleep to their work of prayer in the cold and dark of a winter’s night. This service in the small hours was called Matins, and afterwards the community went back to bed and slept again for three hours, before rising for good at 6 o’clock to sing Prime. Five other prayer times punctuated the day - Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, which was said at 7.00 p.m. in winter and 8.00 p.m. in summer, after which everyone went straight to bed.
Study and contemplation were the guiding themes of monastic life between prayer times. Every refectory had a pulpit or lectern from which one of the brethren would read while his comrades ate in silence - and a document of the time sets out the signals and sign language with which the monks were taught to communicate in the absence of speech. St. Benedict insisted in his Rule that monks should be silent for as much of the day and night as possible, but he also ordained that they could communicate with signs, and the details of these signals have come down to us through an Anglo-Saxon manual of monastic sign language from the cathedral at Canterbury.
The manual was almost certainly produced in the same Canterbury writing studio as the Julius Work Calendar, and at about the same time, and it provides some rich insights not only into the lives of monks, but into many practical details of daily existence in the years around 1000 a.d. (75) So you would like a little wine?”Then make with your two fingers as if you were undoing the tap of a cask.” Pass the butter? “Stroke with three fingers on the inside of your hand.” A little pepper perhaps? “Knock with one index finger on the other.” Salt? “Shake your hands with your three fingers together, as if you were salting something.” Reading the 127 different signs set out in Monasteriales Indicia, one gets the impression that mealtimes in a Benedictine refectory were rather like a gathering of baseball coaches, all furiously beckoning, squeezing their ear lobes, meaningfully rubbing their fingers up and down the sides of their noses, and smoothing their hands over their stomachs.
We learn of the hierarchy inside the monastery. The sign for the abbot was to put two fingers to one’s head and take hold of a hank of hair, as if tugging the forelock - and indicating, perhaps, that below the bald patch of the tonsure, monks grew their hair quite long. The provost, or bursar, was indicated by a single index finger raised over the head, the sign of the ox, because he was the provider of such things, while the cellarer was indicated by a circular turning of the hand and wrist, as if unlocking a door with a key. The sign for the “master of the boys” (putting two fingers to one’s eyes and holding up the little finger) reminds us that the monasteries were educational establishments - the only schools in the England of 1000 a.d. - and also suggests how the learned and humorous Aelfric of Cerne Abbas would have been referred to by his colleagues. Signs 47 and 48, however, also provide a reminder of how Aelfric would have kept discipline in the classroom, since these two instructions explain how to call for the cane or the scourge - the cat o’ nine tails - in accordance with St. Benedicts instruction: “Let the abbot restrain the badly behaved, and the inflexible and proud, or the disobedient, with blows or chastisement of the body.”
More than half a dozen gestures for different types of candle, taper, wick, lantern, and lamp bear witness to a world lit only by fire. Signs for a bedcover and a pillow (“Stroke the sign of a feather inside your left hand”) suggest that the monks slept quite comfortably between prayer times, while signs 91 and 92 make clear that the brethren put on both slippers and socks when they rose in the night to go down to the chapel. Sign 102 (“Stroke with your two hands up your thigh”) tells us that the brothers wore underpants under their black Benedictine habits.
Towards the end of the manual are two signs that refer to the king and to the king’s wife, and it might seem strange that tenth-century monks received instruction in how to hold their hands over their heads with all their fingers splayed out in the shape of a crown (sign 118 - king), or to stroke their scalps in a circular fashion and then pat their pates (sign 119 - queen). But these secular signals help explain why English monasteries were so healthy in the year 1000. The entire generation of monastic settlement inspired by St. Augustine and his successors in the seventh century was wiped out by the Vikings in the waves of attacks that were finally checked and reversed by King Alfred in the 890s, and it was only in the tenth century that there had been a rebirth of the monasteries. This had been accomplished by an alliance between the church and the crown, symbolised by the solemn anointing of King Edgar at his coronation in 973, the first time that a king of all England had been blessed with this sacrament that was jealously reserved by the Roman church. The kings of Scotland had to wait for it until 1331. The coronation of Edgar raised English kings to the level of emperors, and it initiated the mystical and sometimes almost sacerdotal status with which the English royal family was to wreath itself for centuries to come.
It was a two-way deal, since Edgar was anxious to assert his royal authority, while Dunstan of Canterbury and other reform-minded clerics were keen to revitalise the church. So the bishops inserted prayers for the royal family in their liturgies, while the royal family deeded lands to the church, thus enhancing the grandeur of England’s cathedrals, and also making it possible to reestablish a network of monastic settlements across the land. All of England’s monasteries in the year 1000 had been founded or refounded in the previous fifty years. Crown and church had a common interest in strengthening national respect for institutions of authority, and the monasteries were the crucial factor in fostering Alfred’s secret ingredient for national success: the monks spread knowledge through their schools, and they also amplified knowledge through their effective monopoly over the written wor
d.
In the scriptorium, or writing studio, of every monastery the brethren dipped their sharpened goose quills into their phials of coloured acid and bent over their transcriptions of ancient manuscripts. The writing stand of each monk held two books, the manuscript on which the scribe was working and the volume from which he was copying, for to be learned in the year 1000 was to copy. You did not innovate. You learned by absorbing and reproducing the wisdom of earlier authorities.
It does not seem creative by modern standards, this relentless consigning of old authorities to the deep-freeze cabinet, but the monasteries of the first millennium were creating the cultural Noah’s Ark on which our own understanding of the past is based. It is thanks to their copying - and to the documents preserved by the Arabs who controlled the Mediterranean - that we can today read the words of Plato and Aristotle or Julius Caesar. And from copying came, slowly, what we would nowadays describe as creativity.
The Julius Work Calendar is an example of this. There are similar calendars dating from late Roman times in which each month is illustrated with a particular practical task, and the lilting, sing-song text of the Julius calendar of 1020 can be traced back a century earlier to the reign of Ethelred’s great-uncle, King Athelstan. Sometime in the 920s, the king, who inherited his grandfather Alfred’s love of books, commissioned some work on a beautiful psalter - an illuminated book of the psalms - which had found its way into the royal library from the diocese of Liege in the Low Countries.
Athelstan seems to have decided to enlarge and personalise this handsome volume from Liege with a metrical calendar of the saints, and thus came about the earliest surviving version of the 365 lines of verse that later found their way into the Julius Work Calendar. Athelstan’s list of saints’ days had no illustrations, however, and the list of feast days included an unusual number of saints that were associated with the Pas de Calais, the long-settled farming area just across the English Channel. This suggested that the poem itself, or the scribe who composed it, came from northern France, (76) though his list of saints also included a surprising number of Irish saints and feast days. This added to the confusion - to the modern way of thinking at least - but this was the essence of the medieval system of learning through precedent and accretion: a beautiful Flemish book of psalms, embellished with a list of saints from northern France, turned into verse, quite possibly, by an Irish monk, or a scribe who was looking at a list of saints from Ireland - and all this under the patronage of an English king in Winchester.
A hundred years later, the Julius Work Calendar took the process of elaboration one stage further. Perhaps Canterbury borrowed the Athelstan Psalter, with its 365 lines of verse, under one of the many exchange schemes by which England’s newly reestablished monasteries lent each other texts to reconstitute their libraries. We know that Canterbury happened to possess in these years another beautiful illuminated document, the so-called Utrecht Psalter, created around 830 in the diocese of Rheims in northern France, and characterised by vivid and almost impressionistic sketches of daily life. These lifelike drawings took their theme from ancient illustrations, and later versions had brought the classical prototype up to date with such contemporary details as the latest weapons and farm implements, as well as current fashions in clothing.
The novelty of the sketches in the Utrecht Psalter was clearly the inspiration of the dramatic line drawings that bring such life to the Julius Work Calendar. We can imagine the Canterbury scribe with the old rhyming catalogue of saints from Winchester on his copying stand. What could he do to enhance the list and make it particular to Canterbury, the headquarters of the English church? Somewhere in the writing studio were lying the parchment leaves of the Utrecht Psalter, quite possibly unbound at that date, so their catchy, challenging, and very modern style of sketching could also be propped up in front of him. Outside in the southern English countryside, where he was expected to work regularly as part of his monastic duties, were the haymakers swinging their scythes. So the scribe set to work sketching, catching the fatigue and sweat on the brow of the bald-headed reaper pausing for breath on the right hand side of his July drawing, while, on the other side, another of the reapers stood back to sharpen his scythe with his honing stone. Today we admire the drawings of this talented but unknown artist for what they tell us about life in early eleventh-century England, but his fellow scribes and monks probably praised his illustrations for their rootedness in the tradition of the Utrecht original, with all its classical precedents.
The glory of medieval manuscripts lies in the drawings which are aptly described as illumination. Their sense of colour and sinuous inventiveness bring light to what would otherwise seem dark and routine - and that is certainly the case with the sketches of the Julius Work Calendar, which have no added colour at all. Their life derives from the vigour of their line and from their sharpness of observation. Look at the drawing for the month of May, with the baby lamb suckling its mother. On the hillside beside the sheep the two shepherds lean together chatting, deep in gossip and conversation, while one of them scratches the back of his head. This is reportage based on firsthand observation. The drawing for the month of February shows the pruner tackling the tree on the left by cutting upwards from below, which was the correct way to lop off a heavy branch.
To the modern eye these drawings are secular. There are no halos or crosses. There is absolutely nothing otherworldly about them, for while the words of the calendar are looking heavenwards, these drawings focus on man in a profoundly humanist fashion - and on that group of men who, for the most part, occupied the humblest and least privileged ranks of society.
It must be assumed that the monk who illustrated the Julius Work Calendar with such lively interest and compassion was a believer. Everybody believed in the year 1000 - especially the pagans and those whom the church condemned as heretics. The sin of the heretic was to believe the wrong thing. But the modern viewer can sense a change of emphasis in these very human monthly labours. There is something of the agnostic detachment which was to alter the unquestioning nature of medieval thought in the next five hundred years. In this old and very traditional document we can sense the beginning of the probing and sceptical spirit that would bring the Middle Ages to the triumphant climax of the Renaissance and also inspire the ages of exploration and science.
August: Remedies
August 1, Lammas day, is one of the oldest English country festivals. Shakespeare’s Juliet had her birthday “come Lammas eve at night,” and to this day Lammas is one of the quarter-days in Scotland’s financial year. Lammas sounds as if it had its origins in some sort of religious festival deriving from “lamb” and “mass,” but its origin was actually the annual Anglo-Saxon round of farming and survival. Lammas was hlaf-maesse, loaf-mass, the day when the hungry gap ended and the first loaf could be made from the new harvest. “I must sustain myself till Lammas when I hope to have harvest in my barn,” declared Piers Plowman. “Then I can have the kind of meal I like.” (77)
The Julius Work Calendar drawing for August makes clear that harvesting for the loaf-mass was an activity that involved the whole community. No less than seven labourers, more than in any other drawing in the cycle, are gathered together, busily sweeping their sickles, cutting the wheat, binding it into sheaves, and loading it into another neatly carpentered Saxon cart. “Ten hours of darkness, fourteen hours of daylight,” noted the calendar’s hour count for August, and every single working hour of the month was filled with urgency, since the bread harvest was the very fulcrum of survival. More than meat, milk, or any type of vegetable, bread was the staff of life for people in the year 1000. “I make people’s hearts strong,” boasted the “Baker” in Aelfric’s Colloquy.”I am the stamina of men.” (78)
The bread of the early Middle Ages was round, coarse, and quite flat by modern standards, not baked in a tin, with the texture of a pita bread, nan, or chapati today. The natural gluten in wheat bread provided a “raising” agent which gave it more air than brea
d made with rye or barley, but it was probably quite old and tough by the time most people ate it, since outside the towns and the monasteries there were few specialised bakers producing fresh bread every day. Country people must have regularly eaten bread that was a week or more old, softening the crust by dipping it into the gruel-like pottage of grain and vegetables which was the plain but healthy staple of the Englishman’s diet. In Central Europe the peasants ate rye bread, but in England wheat was the grain of choice, and barley was definitely judged second-best. Saints demonstrated their humility by eating barley bread, and one hagiography relates how the emperor Julian took offence at being offered barley bread by St. Basil.”Barley is only fit for horses,” declared the emperor indignantly, and offered the holy man some grass in return. (79)
Grain was ground into flour in one of the recently constructed watermills. When the Normans carried out their 1086 Domesday inventory of the land they had conquered, they discovered that England contained 5,624 watermills, just about one for every village and hamlet, and many of these must have been in operation by the year 1000. The mill, like the plough team, was a communal facility that the village operated jointly, adding sophistication to the economy, and providing yet another incentive for people to make use of cash. The mill wheels were generally built of oak, the internal gear wheels of elm, with power transmitted through a solid oak shaft banded with iron as reinforcement. Turning only slowly, the early medieval watermill put-putted along with the horsepower of a modern moped or small motorbike. (80)
August was the month when flies started to become a problem, buzzing round the dung heaps in the corner of every farmyard and hovering over the open cesspits of human refuse that were located outside every house. If the late twentieth century is scented with gasolene vapour and exhaust fumes, the year 1000 was perfumed with shit. Cow dung, horse manure, pig and sheep droppings, chicken shit - each variety of excrement had its own characteristic bouquet, from the sweet smell of the vegetable eater to the acrid edge of gut-processed meat, requiring the human nose of the year 1000 to function as a considerably less prissy organ than ours today.
