A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Well-off noble and bourgeois families bore more children than the poor because they married young and because, as a result of employing wet-nurses, the period of infertility was short. They also raised more, often as many as six to ten reaching adulthood. Guillaume de Coucy, grandfather of Enguerrand VII, raised five sons and five daughters; his son Raoul raised four of each. Nine out of the twelve children of Edward III and Queen Philippa of England reached maturity. The average woman of twenty, it has been estimated, could expect about twelve years of childbearing, with live births spaced out—owing to stillbirths, abortions, and nursing—at fairly long intervals of about thirty months. At this rate, the average of births per family was about five, of whom half survived.

  Like everything else, childhood escapes a flat generalization. Love and lullabies and cradle-rocking did exist. God in his grace, wrote Philip of Novara in the 13th century, gave children three gifts: to love and recognize the person who nurses him at her breast; to show “joy and love” to those who play with him; to inspire love and tenderness in those who rear him, of which the last is the most important, for “without this, they will be so dirty and annoying in infancy and so naughty and capricious that it is hardly worth nurturing them through childhood.” Philip advocated, however, a strict upbringing, for “few children perish from excess of severity but many from being permitted too much.”

  Books of advice on child-rearing were rare. There were books—that is, bound manuscripts—of etiquette, housewifery, deportment, home remedies, even phrase books of foreign vocabularies. A reader could find advice on washing hands and cleaning nails before a banquet, on eating fennel and anise in case of bad breath, on not spitting or picking teeth with a knife, not wiping hands on sleeves, or nose and eyes on the tablecloth. A woman could learn how to make ink, poison for rats, sand for hourglasses; how to make hippocras or spiced wine, the favorite medieval drink; how to care for pet birds in cages and get them to breed; how to obtain character references for servants and make sure they extinguished their bed candles with fingers or breath, “not with their shirts”; how to grow peas and graft roses; how to rid the house of flies; how to remove grease stains with chicken feathers steeped in hot water; how to keep a husband happy by ensuring him a smokeless fire in winter and a bed free of fleas in summer. A young married woman would be advised on fasting and alms-giving and saying prayers at the sound of the matins bell “before going to sleep again,” and on walking with dignity and modesty in public, not “in ribald wise with roving eyes and neck stretched forth like a stag in flight, looking this way and that like unto a runaway horse.” She could find books on estate management for times when her husband was away at war, with advice on making budgets and withstanding sieges and on tenure and feudal law so that her husband’s rights would not be invaded.

  But she would find few books for mothers with advice on breastfeeding, swaddling, bathing, weaning, solid-feeding, and other complexities of infant care, although these might seem to have been of more moment for survival of the race than breeding birds in cages or even keeping husbands comfortable. When breast-feeding was mentioned, it was generally advocated—by one 13th century encyclopedist, Bartholomew of England in his Book on the Nature of Things—for its emotional value. In the process the mother “loves her own child most tenderly, embraces and kisses it, nurses and cares for it most solicitously.” A physician of the same period, Aldobrandino of Siena, who practiced in France, advised frequent cleaning and changing and two baths a day, weaning on porridge made of bread with honey and milk, ample playtime and unforced teaching at school, with time for sleep and diversion. But how widely his humane teaching was known or followed it is impossible to say.

  On the whole, babies and young children appear to have been left to survive or die without great concern in the first five or six years. What psychological effect this may have had on character, and possibly on history, can only be conjectured. Possibly the relative emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the casual attitude toward life and suffering of the medieval man.

  Children did, however, have toys: dolls and doll carriages harnessed to mice, wooden knights and weapons, little animals of baked clay, windmills, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, stilts and seesaws and merry-go-rounds. Little boys were like little boys of any time, “living without thought or care,” according to Bartholomew of England, “loving only to play, fearing no danger more than being beaten with a rod, always hungry and hence disposed to infirmities from being overfed, wanting everything they see, quick to laughter and as quick to tears, resisting their mothers’ efforts to wash and comb them, and no sooner clean but dirty again.” Girls were better behaved, according to Bartholomew, and dearer to their mothers. If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.

  A boy of noble family was left for his first seven years in the charge of women, who schooled him in manners and to some extent in letters. Significantly, St. Anne, the patron saint of mothers, is usually portrayed teaching her child, the Virgin Mary, how to read from a book. From age eight to fourteen the noble’s son was sent as a page to the castle of a neighboring lord, in the same way that boys of lower orders went at seven or eight to another family as apprentices or servants. Personal service was not considered degrading: a page or even a squire as a grown man assisted his lord to bathe and dress, took care of his clothes, waited on him at table while sharing noble status. In return for free labor, the lord provided a free school for the sons of his peers. The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life, to play chess and backgammon, to sing and dance, play an instrument, and compose, and other romantic skills. The castle’s private chaplain or a local abbey would supply his religious education, and teach him the rudiments of reading and writing and possibly some elements of the grammar-school curriculum that non-noble boys studied.

  At fourteen or fifteen, when he became a squire, the training for combat intensified. He learned to pierce the swinging dummy of the quintain with a lance, wield the sword and a variety of other murderous weapons, and know the rules of heraldry and jousting. As squire he led his lord’s war-horse to battle and held it when the fighting was on foot. He assisted the seneschal in the business of the castle, kept the keys, acted as confidential courier, carried the purse and valuables on a journey. Book learning had little place in this program, although a young noble, depending on his bent, could make some acquaintance of geometry, law, elocution, and, in a few cases, Latin.

  Women of noble estate were frequently more accomplished in Latin and other school learning than the men, for though girls did not leave home at seven like boys, their education was encouraged by the Church so that they might be better instructed in the faith and more fitted for the religious life in a nunnery, should their parents wish to dedicate them, with suitable endowment, to the Church. Besides reading and writing in French and Latin, they were taught music, astronomy, and some medicine and first aid.

  The last of the Coucys entered a world in which movement was limited to the speed of man or horse, news and public announcements were communicated by the human voice, and light ended for most people with the setting of the sun. At dusk, horns were blown or bells rung to sound curfew or “cover fires,” after which work was prohibited because a workman could not see to perform creditably. The rich could prolong time by torchlight and candles, but for others night was as dark as nature intended, and stillness surrounded a traveler after dark. “Birds, wild beasts and men without any noise did take their rest,” wrote Boccaccio. “The unfallen leaves did hang upon the trees and the moist air abode in mild peace. Only the sta
rs did shine to light his way.”

  Flowers covered the fields and forest floor and formed a cherished element of daily life. Wild flowers and garden flowers were woven into chaplets worn by noble men and women, strewn on floors and tables at banquets, and scattered in the streets before royal processions. Monkeys were common pets. Beggars were ubiquitous, most of them crippled, blind, diseased, deformed, or disguised as such. The legless dragged themselves along by means of wooden stumps strapped to their hands. Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration. Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted. Steam was unharnessed, syphilis not yet introduced, leprosy still extant, gunpowder coming into use, though not yet effectively. Potatoes, tea, coffee, and tobacco were unknown; hot spiced wine was the favorite drink of those who could afford it; the common people drank beer, ale, and cider.

  Men of the non-clerical classes had abandoned the gown for divided legs clad in tights. They were generally clean-shaven, although chin beards and mustaches came in and out of fashion. Knights and courtiers had adopted a fashion of excessively long pointed shoes called poulaines—which often had to be tied up around the calf to enable the wearer to walk—and excessively short tunics which, according to one chronicler’s complaint, revealed the buttocks and “other parts of the body that should be hidden,” exciting the mockery of the common people. Women used cosmetics, dyed their hair, plucked it to broaden their foreheads, and plucked their eyebrows too, although by these practices they committed the sin of vanity.

  Fortune’s Wheel, plunging down the mighty and (more rarely) raising the lowly, was the prevailing image of the instability of life in an uncertain world. Progress, moral or material, in man or society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the conditions were fixed. The individual might through his own efforts increase in virtue, but betterment of the whole would have to await the Second Coming and the beginning of a new age.

  Time, calendar, and history were reckoned by the Christian scheme. Creation of the world was dated 4,484 years before the founding of Rome, and modern history from the birth of Christ. Historical events thereafter were chronicled by papal reigns beginning with St. Peter’s, which was fixed at A.D. 42–67. Current events were recorded in relation to religious holidays and saints’ days. The year began in March—the month, according to Chaucer, “in which the world began, when God first made man.” Officially it began at Easter, and because this was a movable feast falling anywhere within a period of thirty days, historical dating was imprecise. Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime. The reckoning of time was based on the movements of sun and stars, nature’s timekeepers, which were familiar and carefully observed. About the time Enguerrand VII was born, the mechanical clock was coming into use on town-hall towers and in homes of the rich, bringing precision with all its possibilities for scientific observation.

  People lived close to the inexplicable. The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and fissures of an earthquake or the setting afire of a tree by lightning, the supernatural was close at hand. Storms were omens, death by heart attack or other seizures could be the work of demons. Magic was present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls touched and manipulated human lives; heathen superstitions and rituals abided among the country folk, beneath and even alongside the priest and sacraments. The influence of the planets could explain anything otherwise unaccounted for. Astronomy was the noblest science, and astrology, after God, the greatest determinant of affairs.

  Alchemy, or the search for the philosopher’s stone that would transmute base metals into gold, was the most popular applied science. At the end of that rainbow lay also the panacea for ills and the elixir of longevity. Inquiring minds investigated natural science through experiment and observation. A scholar of Oxford kept a seven-year record of the weather through the years 1337–44 and noted that the sound of bells heard more clearly or at a greater distance than usual was a sign of increased humidity and a prediction of rain. Mental depression and anxiety were recognized as an illness, although the symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth. Surveying by triangulation was practiced, and the height of walls and towers measured by a monk lying prone with the aid of a stick. Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.

  Energy depended on human and animal muscle and on the gear shaft turned by wind or water. Their power drove mills for tanning and laundering, sawing wood, pressing olive oil, casting iron, mashing malt for beer and pulp for paper and pigment for paints, operating fullers’ vats for finishing woolen cloth, bellows for blast furnaces, hydraulic hammers for foundries, and wheels for grindstones used by armorers. The mills had so augmented the use of iron that timberland was already being deforested to supply fuel for the forge. They had so extended human capacity that Pope Celestine III in the 1190s ruled that windmills must pay tithes. Unpowered tools—the lathe, brace and bit, spinning wheel, and wheeled plow—had also in the last century increased skills and powers of production.

  Travel, “the mother of tidings,” brought news of the world to castle and village, town and countryside. The rutted roads, always either too dusty or too muddy, carried an endless flow of pilgrims and peddlers, merchants with their packtrains, bishops making visitations, tax-collectors and royal officials, friars and pardoners, wandering scholars, jongleurs and preachers, messengers and couriers who wove the network of communications from city to city. Great nobles like the Coucys, bankers, prelates, abbeys, courts of justice, town governments, kings and their councils employed their own messengers. The King of England at mid-century kept twelve on hand who accompanied him at all times, ready to start, and were paid 3d. a day when on the road and 4s. 8d. a year for shoes. Befitting the greater majesty of France, the French King employed up to one hundred, and a grand seigneur two or three.

  An average day’s journey on horseback was about 30 to 40 miles, though it varied widely, depending on circumstance. A messenger on horseback, without riding at night, could cover 40 to 50 miles a day and about half as much on foot. In an emergency, given a good horse and good road (which was rare) and no load, he could make 15 miles an hour and, with changes of horse awaiting him, cover 100 miles a day. The great merchant cities of Venice and Bruges maintained a regular postal service between them so highly organized that it covered the 700 miles in seven days. Packtrains made about 15 to 20 miles a day; armies, when slowed by baggage wagons and retainers on foot, sometimes covered no more than 8 miles a day.

  The length of France from Flanders to Navarre was generally reckoned a journey of 20 to 22 days, and the width, from the coast of Brittany to Lyon on the Rhône, 16 days. Travelers to Italy across the Alps usually went by way of the Mont Cenis pass from Chambéry in the territory of Savoy to Turin. Snowbound from November through May, the pass took 5 to 7 days to traverse. Traveling from Paris to Naples via this route took five weeks. The voyage from London to Lyon took about 18 days and from Canterbury to Rome about 30 days depending on the Channel crossing, which was unpredictable, often dangerous, sometimes fatal, and could take anywhere from three days to a month. One knight, Sir Hervé de Léon, was kept 15 days at sea by a storm and, besides having lost his horse overboard, arrived so battered and weakened “that he never had health thereafter.” It was no wonder that, according to a ballad, when pilgrims took to sea for the voyage to Compostella or
beyond, “Theyr hertes begin to fayle.”

  Except for galleys powered by oarsmen, ships were at the mercy of the weather, although rigging had been improved and the swinging stern rudder gave greater control. Maps and harbor charts were in use and the compass was allowing navigation to leave the coastline and merchant cargo to take the risk of crossing the open sea. As a result, larger ships capable of carrying 500 tons or more of cargo were being used for these voyages. Barge transportation by river and canal was much cheaper than packtrain, even given the tolls imposed by local lords at every convenient point. Along the busy Seine and Garonne, tolls succeeded each other every six or seven miles.

  Wagons and peasants’ two-wheeled carts were used for short hauls, but since roads were usually impassable by wheeled vehicles in winter and there was no connected system of roads and bridges, the mule train remained the essential carrier. Four-wheeled covered wagons drawn by three or four horses in tandem were available for ladies and the sick. Ladies who rode sat astride under flowing skirts, but the sidesaddle was to appear before the end of the century. For a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.

  Travelers stopped before nightfall, those of the nobility taking shelter in some nearby castle or monastery where they would be admitted indoors, while the mass of ordinary travelers on foot, including pilgrims, were housed and fed in a guest house outside the gate. They were entitled to one night’s lodging at any monastery and could not be turned away unless they asked for a second night. Inns were available to merchants and others, though they were likely to be crowded, squalid, and flea-ridden, with several beds to a room and two travelers to a bed—or three to a bed in Germany, according to the disgusted report of the poet Deschamps, who was sent there on a mission for the French King. Moreover, he complained, neither bed nor table had clean linen, the innkeeper offered no choice of foods, a traveler in the Empire could find nothing to drink but beer; fleas, rats, and mice were unavoidable, and the people of Bohemia lived like pigs.