The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  Especially in the north and the Danelaw, Christianity must often have been not even a veneer; everywhere the old faiths were very much alive, directly and indirectly. Church-reformers were particularly interested in black magic and murder. Under the stress of the invasions there must have been a more active reversion to pagan ideas and practices, with a deepened sense that dark forces were at work. About 1020 Bishop Aethelric of Dorchester brought an action against Thorkell the Tall, Jomsviking of East Anglia, and his second wife Edith, after a witch confessed to being accessory to the murder of Thorkell’s son by the stepmother. The earl ignored three summons, so the bishop bided his time till he could draw Cnut in. The king, told of the earl’s contumacy, summoned him to court. Thorkell and Edith attended and were accused by the bishop. The judgment was that the earl with eleven compurgators and Edith with as many female ones should clear themselves by oath at a site appointed by Aethelric. The latter chose the meadow where he said the murdered child was buried, and bade the abbey of Ramsey bring out its best relics for the oath ordeal. Before a great crowd of clerks and laymen, Thorkell swore his own innocence, and then, to save Edith, swore on his beard that she too was innocent. His beard came away in his hand. Edith denied the charge. The bishop ordered the secret tomb to be opened. Then she broke down and confessed. Thorkell was found guilty of perjury and Edith of homicide. Penances were laid on them; and Thorkell gave Aethelric a piece of land for flouting his jurisdiction, which land he transferred to Ramsey. In 1021 Thorkell was outlawed, but we do not know if there was any connection with the trial. The story has come down to us only because the chronicler of Ramsey abbey wanted to explain the gift of land. There must have been many lesser cases of witchcraft that we know nothing of, but in any event it was only some three centuries later that the western church felt itself capable of trying to extirpate witchcraft.[530]

  William of Malmesbury tells of a Berkeley witch, ‘I heard it from a man of such character that I’d blush to disbelieve him, and he swore he had seen it all.’ The witch was skilled in augury and devoted to gluttony and lewdery, ‘as she wasn’t old, though fast declining in life’. One day as she ate, her jackdaw, a great favourite, chattered more loudly than usual; she dropped her knife, paled and groaned. ‘This day my plough has finished its last furrow; today I’ll hear and suffer some dreadful disaster.’ At that moment a messenger arrived: ‘I bring news from the village of the death of your son and the whole family by a sudden accident.’ She took to bed. The disorder approached her vitals, so she wrote to her surviving children, a monk and a nun. ‘I’ve constantly administered to my wretched circumstances by demoniacal arts. I’ve been the sink of every vice, the teacher of every allurement. Yet, practising these arts, I soothed my hapless soul with the hope of your piety.’ Now, near her end, she begged them ‘by your mother’s breasts’, that if they couldn’t revoke the sentence passed on her soul, they might perhaps save her body.

  Sew up my corpse in a stagskin, lay it on its back in a stone coffin, fasten the lid down with lead and iron, set on it a stone bound round with three chains of enormous weight, let psalms be sung for fifty nights and masses said for fifty days, to allay the ferocious attacks of my adversaries. If I lie three nights secure, on the fourth day bury your mother in the ground, though I fear the earth so often burdened with my crimes will refuse to receive and cherish me in her bosom.

  They obeyed. On the first two nights, when a choir of priests was singing psalms, the devil burst the huge bolt on the churchdoor and broke two outer chains; the middle one stayed fast. Next night about cockcrow the monastery seemed to overturn; a yet more huge and terrible devil smashed the gates as the priests stood with hair on end. He called on the woman to rise. She replied that she was chained. ‘You shall be loosed and to your cost.’ Breaking the chain, he bashed the coffin lid in with his foot, took her hand, and dragged her out. At the doors appeared a black horse with iron hooks bristling all over its back. She was set on it and the whole group vanished, though her cries were heard for four miles around.[531]

  William of Newburgh tells how a man, riding home from North Barton in the East Riding, heard sounds of merriment coming from Willy Howe (an early round barrow).

  He saw a door open in the side of the mound, and riding close to it, he looked in and saw a great feast. One of the cup-bearers approached and offered him a drink. He took the cup, threw out the contents, and galloped off. The fairy banqueters gave chase but he managed to outdistance them and reached home safely with his prize. The cup is said to have been given to Henry I.

  But despite all these superstitions there were also mockers such as William Rufus. Girald of Wales said, ‘Many hide secretly their unbelief among us today.’ One priest remarked to another, who criticised him for his indecorous way of celebrating mass. ‘Can you out of this bread make flesh? Out of this wine make blood? Could you imagine that God the creator of all took flesh of a woman and wished to suffer? Do you think a virgin can conceive and remain a virgin? Do you think our bodies, reduced to dust, will rise? All that we do is hypocrisy.’ Such ideas were in part stirred by the arguments going on about the Real Presence in the elements of communion. Lanfranc set out the plain magical belief in transubstantiation:

  We believe that the earthly substances which are divinely consecrated at the Lord’s Table through the priestly mystery, are by ineffable incomprehensible wondrous operation of the heavenly power, converted into the essence of the Lord’s Body, while the appearances and certain other qualities of the same realities remain behind, in order that men should be spared the shock of perceiving raw and bloody things, and that believers should receive the fuller rewards of faith.

  This position was accepted at the Lateran council of 1215. But Berengar of Tours had declared that the elements cannot be ‘the very body and blood of our Lord’, and ‘cannot be handled by the hands of the priest or broken or crushed by the teeth of the faithful with the senses’.

  *

  Perhaps because of the complexity of the struggle between ancient pagan ways and the imposed Christian creed in England, we find that it was a source of fantastic literature. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the greatest figure in the invention of fantasy-history and the embellishment of old traditions; but his writings were part of a wide trend. William of Malmesbury and others loved a tale full of marvels. William gave the first full series of tales about the magical powers of Gerbert, Pope Silvester II, the encyclopedist humanist who was an important precursor of the cultural outburst of the twelfth century, who in the legend sold his soul to the devil after seducing the daughter of his Moslem host in Spain and stealing a book that ‘held everything that is to be known’, and who had a human head cast that answered all questions. John of Salisbury was the first writer to mention the stories of Virgil the Magician, which became very popular. Probably through Petrus Alphonsi many eastern legends reached Britain and were there disseminated in Latin form. England contributed the fullest accounts of journeys to the other world; Henry of Saltrey, Adam of Eynsham, the Yorkshire Orm, and Thurkill with his vision first told by Ralph of Coggeshall, all carried on a tradition going back to Bede. Under Henry I, with the queen as patron, Benedeit made an Anglo-Norman version of St Brendan’s Voyage which, after many wonderful and colourful romantic scenes, ended in paradise. We may mention also the English illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth century, dealing with Bestiaries, Herbals, Lapidaries, the Marvels of the East, and later the Apocalypse; the menagerie kept by Henry I and the abbreviation of Pliny’s Natural History made for Henry II.[532]

  Though attempts to put the Virgin Mary at the heart of the scheme of redemption had got under way in the eleventh century, with men like Fulbert at Chartres and Anselm at Bec prominent in the movement, no signs of the impact of their thought can be noted in Anglo-Saxon England. Yet the church there pioneered in observing the feast of the Conception of the Virgin; and in the twelfth century England seems to have been the key source of Mary legends, which spread abroad with vast popularity.
They widened the vein of fantasy in tales of miraculous cures, and stimulated devotional practices that had begun in the late eleventh century. The practices arose in the monasteries, and there also no doubt the stories, especially at Canterbury, Bury, Malmesbury, and Evesham; but they were aimed at drawing the laity in. Anselm, nephew of the archbishop, abbot at Bury in 1120, seems to have been the first to think of collecting the tales. He started off with several from foreign sources, but on arriving in England he encountered the wealth of recent inventions. In his final collection (about 1125) were some forty tales. Dominic, prior of Evesham, made his own collection at about the same time; and soon afterwards William of Malmesbury in his old age gathered some fifty-five stories, adding a devout preface. Then Master Alberic, canon of St Paul’s, arranged the tales from Anselm, Dominic, and William; and his work became widely known. It was translated into French verse by another Londoner, a cleric Algar; and after that the tales appeared in all sorts of arrangements and versions in the vernacular of all European countries.[533]

  Though in medieval society the class divisions were deep, the way in which people were thrown together in this world governed by direct personal relationships ensured that there was much cultural interplay between the different levels. For long the centres of cultural creation were located in the higher literate groups, especially the more active and responsive churchmen. Already in Merovingian times we find a deliberate use of popular elements, which we can call folklore, to bring home a message to wider circles; the climax of this development appeared in the sermons of the Friars, which sought to reach the hearts of the townfolk, shake and terrify them, and exhort them to live better lives. But the same sort of drawing on popular levels for images and themes can be found throughout medieval literature from the twelfth century on. The traffic was indeed two-way. Ideas and values from the courtly level, such as the models of perfect knight and perfect clerk which we discussed, reached downwards, while elements from folklore, from folk custom and song, played an important part in courtly culture. We may note as instances the mayday dances and songs, with the theme of conflict between young lover and jealous old man, which is one key ingredient in the troubador ethic, and the pastoral imagery, with its interest in shepherds and rustic entertainments, which emerges in the fifteenth century. The resulting patterns of interaction of courtly and popular culture were highly complex.

  *

  England, like other lands of the Christian west, revealed in its culture an intense contradiction between the prevailing sexual morality and the symbolism of the church. Churchmen, sworn to celibacy and expressing the utmost horror of the sexual act, conceived the relation of Christ to the church or to its devout members as one of married copulation. Glaber writes: ‘Each bishop, as the bridegroom of his own see, shows the likeness of the Saviour.’ Pope Paschal objected to kings making church appointments because ‘it is not right that a Mother should be so delivered into slavery by her son as to be given a husband whom she has not chosen’. Such imagery was universal and was consciously worked out. Hincmar in the ninth century stated that ‘marriage lacks the symbolism of Christ and the Church if it is not treated as marriage, that is, if there is no intercourse of sexes’. Peter Lombard said that in a marriage based only on consent, the union of Christ and his Church was symbolized, since it was a union forged by charity, but in a consummated marriage the union of the members of Christ’s body was signified, both being complementary aspects of a single sacramental union. We may note too the stress on the church as the mother. The woman, rejected from a system where a male Trinity ruled and expressed the universe, reappeared as mediator; the faithful were reborn in her womb. As the deep cleavages of early feudal society were partly veiled and modified by the beginnings of a burgess class, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained a new momentum.[534]

  Out of the same general development came new attitudes to love and women in secular literature. In many ways the Conquest, with its intensification of the concept of private property, and its emphasis on war and law, brought about a fall in the moral and social position of women among the upper classes. An estate had to be kept intact; daughters and younger sons could rely only on the father’s generosity. A woman could still inherit land and in theory alienate it; but she was not supposed to appear in court or make a will without her husband’s leave. The reformed church stood out strongly for womanly submission to the male. Even a woman freed by widowhood from male guardianship could, if an heiress, be forced by the king into a new marriage; or he might instead take money from her. The first glimmer of women’s rights appeared when Magna Carta laid down that a widow could remain single if she promised not to marry without the lord’s consent. Yet, when the chance came, women showed themselves as capable of wielding power as men, even of fighting as brutally (as we saw with Robert Guiscard’s wife). A baron’s wife was left with only a third of her husband’s land by law; but a villein’s widow could hold all the land as long as the customary service was done; her place in the home was secure as long as she stayed unwed. A labouring woman in general, as in almost any society, was freed to some extent by her need to mix with people and do her job.

  The extension of church controls also helped to darken the whole idea of womanhood, strengthening the denunciation of sexual activity as evil and of woman (Eve) as the agent of man’s fall. Peter Lombard accepted the maxim: passionate love of one’s wife is a form of adultery. Even when the scholastics played chop-logic with the theme (as when Aquinas said that the evil lay, not in the carnal desire and pleasure, but in the suspension of intellectual activity), the essential horror was there. Yet, as a result of the same general forces that issued in the cult of the Virgin Mary, we find the advent and growth of the idea and practice of Courtly Love, finding its first great expression in the troubadors. They almost inverted Peter Lombard’s maxim and said: ‘Then let adultery be our passionate love’. The whole complex dialectic of their poetry, as it developed through the twelfth century, was a retort to the ecclesiastical notion of Woman. They used paradoxes of loss and absence to define the psychological and social situation in which they adored Woman as the ultimate source of joy and satisfaction, of life itself, but in which they felt cut off from that source, an unbridgeable gap between actual and potential. The troubador ethic and aesthetic had little direct effect on twelfth-century England; but it did have effects on the position of women, with which it was both directly and symbolically concerned. We may therefore glance at the cultural role of upper class women at this time.

  The literature of the first half of the century was the work of clerks, whether regular, secular, or merely literate. But patrons played an active role. We must visualize the nobility as living most of the year in castle or manor, in a rather isolated way. They looked in at the patronal feasts of religious houses which they or their fathers had founded. A chaplain lived with them or was borrowed from the nearest monastery, combining religious work with work as secretary, librarian, and tutor. Every morning the family attended chapel; and if there was no fighting, the day might be taken up with hunting or games of backgammon or chess in bad weather. Orderic gives us a good glimpse of the high-spirited sort of horseplay that the men indulged in. ‘Once Rufus and his brother Henry played with tesserae [dice] as is the custom of soldiers’ on the solar in a house in the castle of L’Aigle. Hearing an uproar below, they poured down water on their brother Robert and his men (apparently outside the house). Robert rushed into the dining room to retaliate. Rufus and Henry seem to have been in a first floor hall; Robert dashed up an external staircase and found them at their game in the hall (such as we see at Christchurch or Boothby Pagnell). Tales would be told when the tables were taken away or the nobility retired to the room called the solar, where Rufus and Henry were playing. Though children had to be superintended as they came from the nursery, and husbands or guests required food and entertainment, the ladies were often left alone for long periods and wanted distraction. They discussed things with the chaplain. Books were needed.
They were borrowed from neighbours and supplemented with story-telling, family traditions, local legends, lives of patron saints, romances or songs gathered from wayfaring minstrels. Thus the ladies could become the centre for tales and poems from all sorts of quarters, where the creation of new works was stimulated and various influences converged. Though men did most of the travelling, wives too moved about, to pilgrim shrines, to friends in England or across the Channel, where the family might also have estates. Soon the universities were to be in full swing and town life was to grow richer; but the lords’ country houses survived in one form or another as important social and cultural centres until the eighteenth century.[535]

  A graceful tribute to the way the lady’s chamber became a centre for the culture of the feudal world appears in the poem that Baudri of Bourgueil wrote for Countess Adela, daughter of William I: a detailed vision of her vast and magnificent bedroom. The poet had no doubt never seen the room; he described it as it should be. On the walls of the alcove are tapestries depicting the battle of Hastings; on the other walls the story of man’s creation and fall is shown, with Old Testament history up to the Kings; then comes Greek mythology and the story of Rome’s foundation, with the names of a hundred kings. The ceiling is painted to represent the heavens, with zodiac, planets, sun and moon; on the floor is a mappa mundi, with the sea and its monsters, its fishes, the rivers and the continents, together with all the marvels of nature. Lastly comes the bed, adorned with statues representing Philosophy and the Seven Arts. As an example of the way in which the lady in her chamber could help in the development of poetry, we may take Benedeit and his poem on the Voyage of St Brendan, perhaps the oldest work written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, which, we noted earlier, was dedicated to Maud, great-niece of the Confessor and wife of Henry I. This poem, derived probably from an Irish imram, seems to have been written first in Latin, then translated into Anglo-Norman for the queen, her ladies and maidens. It is full of vivid marvels: a deserted city of great splendour, an Easter feast on the back of a sleeping whale, a paradise of birds with its choir of fallen angels, a frozen sea, a magic, intoxicating spring, fights between sea-monsters, griffins and dragons, the smithy of hell, the volcano of Hecla (where Judas is imprisoned), and at last paradise itself.[536]