by Ian Mortimer
As you can see, the lot of a woman in medieval England depends very much on her luck in the marriages stakes. Some husbands are absolutely devoted to their wives. This includes kings—Edward I, Edward III, and Henry IV, in particular, all deeply love their wives—as well as magnates and lesser men. In describing her married life, Christine de Pisan writes lovingly of her late husband, telling how, when he married her (when she was fifteen), he did not force her to make love with him on their wedding night, wanting her first to get used to his presence. Chaucer’s own view is unequivocal: “What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.”
At the other extreme, a bad marriage can be fatal, literally, for the woman. That is why it is so cruel for a manorial bailiff to force a bondwoman to marry against her will. There is nothing she will be able to do to stop being bound to a man who will rape her and beat her, take and spend all her wealth, and force her into a life of repetitive drudgery, and then perhaps abandon her. On top of that, with every child she conceives she runs a small but significant risk of a painful death, roughly equating to a one in ten chance of dying over the course of having five children (see chapter 9). Her marriage vows include her oath to remain sexually faithful to her abusive husband—although he himself does not have to promise likewise—and if she leaves him she forfeits not only all her possessions but any dowry which would be rightfully hers should she outlive him. Given that some women find themselves in exactly this situation, it is not surprising to learn that there is a saint, St. Wylgeforte, to watch out for women who are plagued by bad husbands. You cannot help but have some sympathy for those women who have no one else to call on but St. Wylgeforte.
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The Medieval Character
In the autumn of 1379 Sir John Arundel—younger brother of the earl of Arundel—rides up to a convent with a detachment of soldiers, planning to sail to Brittany. He sends for the prioress and asks for accommodation for himself and his men while they wait for the wind to change. The prioress is reluctant, fearing the number of armed youths with Arundel, but, since it is her duty to offer hospitality to wayfarers, including soldiers, she eventually agrees. Unfortunately, the wind does not change. To relieve the monotony the soldiers start drinking and flirting with some of the nuns. Unsurprisingly the nuns refuse their advances and lock themselves in their dormitory. Undeterred, the soldiers force their way in and rape them. This sets off a crime spree. They loot the nunnery. They enter a nearby church to steal the chalice and silverware, and they encounter a wedding party. They draw their swords; remove the newly married bride from her husband, family, and friends; and take it in turns to rape her too. Then, seeing that the wind is at last changing, they take this woman and as many of the nuns as they can out to their ship and set sail. A day or so later, a storm blows up from the east. The ship is swept off course and begins to take on water. Arundel gives the order for all the women to be thrown overboard, to lighten the load. Sixty women are hurled mercilessly into the turbulent sea as the ship heads on towards the coast of Ireland.1
This story is an extreme one, and it would be wrong to suggest it is a typical crime. Nevertheless it is believed in its entirety by the chronicler who writes it down, Thomas Walsingham, and that is the important point here. Medieval people believe that groups of young men do behave like this. Certainly young men can be extremely selfish and destructive, especially when armed, bored, drunk, and in a gang. As most of them travel with a sword, it is inevitable that there are undercurrents of fear and confrontation wherever they go. It is not sexism that prevents a woman from traveling between towns by herself, it is simply a sensible precaution. Add such exacerbating factors as geographical isolation and the relative lawlessness which prevails when there are few means of detecting a criminal’s identity after the event, and you can see why medieval society is more fearful, guarded, and violent than that with which you are familiar.
Common men are conscripted to take part in the king’s wars, and it is assumed that any man can—and will—fight. In many parts of the realm—especially on the south coast and the two Marches (those areas bordering Wales and Scotland)—men regularly have to defend their property from invaders. Also, the gangs roaming the countryside in the early part of the century force people in relatively safe areas to take up arms for the sake of self-preservation. As a result, many men practice archery and swordmanship as a means of self-defense, militarizing themselves in order to protect their property. A streak of violence runs through the whole population, attacker and defender alike.
This violence runs hand in hand with another dislikable aspect of the medieval character. People can be exceedingly cruel to one another. When you witness the punishments meted out to wrongdoers you begin to understand something of how the medieval mind works—how it seeks to expiate crime through the most hideous punishments, including hanging, disemboweling, and quartering. In the modern world we understand that the greater the severity of a crime, the longer the punishment should be. In the medieval world the worse the crime, the more extreme the nature of the punishment. Cruelty appears in day-to-day life too. People have few or no qualms about inflicting pain on animals and children. It is universally believed that beating dogs is the correct and best way to treat them, to get them to behave. Cockfighting is thought of as a children’s game. Women as well as men love to watch bearbaiting and bullbaiting. These are not minority interests but hugely popular forms of entertainment. Anything that involves bloodshed is bound to draw a crowd.
Just as women married to brutal husbands can expect to suffer domestic violence, so too can children and servants. Children can expect to suffer as much from their mother’s hands as from their father’s. One educational tract, How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, states that “if your children are rebellious and do not bow, or if any of them misbehave, do not curse them, but take a smart rod and beat them in a row, till they cry mercy and be aware of their guilt.”2 Likewise “the good lady” in Chaucer’s “Sea Captain’s Tale” is described as having “a little girl for company, a pupil under her authority, quite young, and as yet subject to the rod.” A dialogue book from the period states that “if ye have children, so chastise them with the rod and inform them with good manners [all] the time that they be young.”3 some men maintain that a good father will beat his children at every opportunity, instilling in them a fear of breaking the law, whereas a lenient father is negligent of his duties. That children as young as seven can be hanged for theft perhaps goes some way to explaining these extreme measures (in the sense that violent discipline is part of a stiff moral education). But even so, boys are bound to grow up with an understanding that there is nothing wrong in a man exercising violence against children, servants, animals, and women. Give a gang of such boys swords at the age of seventeen or eighteen, and give them a lot to drink and put them under the command of a man like Sir John Arundel—and the result is a tragedy.
In such a violent environment it is important to know who your friends are, so great value is set upon loyalty. When lords fall out with each other, all their retainers and servants fall out with their opposite numbers too. In 1385 two men in the service of the king’s half brother, Sir John Holland, have an argument with two esquires in the service of the earl of Stafford. Stafford’s esquires murder Holland’s men. Holland himself then takes up his dead servants’ cause with Sir Ralph Stafford, the earl’s eldest son. Unfortunately Sir Ralph stands resolutely by his father’s servants. In the heat of the argument, Holland draws his sword and kills young Stafford, creating a state of war between the two houses.
Nor is this violent loyalty confined to secular lords. On one occasion in 1384, after the bishop of Exeter has refused to let the archbishop of Canterbury visit his diocese, three of his household esquires force the archbishop’s messenger to eat the wax seal of the letter he is carrying. 4 several members of the archbishop’s household exact revenge by seizing one of the bishop’s men and making him eat his own shoes. It is not exactl
y behavior appropriate for the servants of the highest-ranking clergy in the realm.
In any society as violent as this, it is vitally important to belong. Men from one town belong to that town in order to give them some protection when they venture to another. Men of one manor likewise belong to that place, for the sake of their security as well as their livelihood. Many men regard their membership of a town community as no less important than their nationality. When an untrustworthy trader (such as a fraudulent innkeeper) is made to forswear his trade and leave the city, he is not only losing his livelihood but also the companionship of those whom he could count on to protect him.
Sense of Humor
The passions of a violent society spill over into the sense of humor you will encounter. Yes, there is humor, lots of it, amid the violence and sexism. But whether you will find it funny is quite a different matter. For example, here is a medieval joke. One merchant asks another, ‘Are you married?” “I had three wives,” the second merchant responds, “but all three hanged themselves from a tree in my garden.” The first merchant retorts, “Pray, give me a cutting from this miraculous tree.”
Sarcasm might be commonly referred to as the lowest form of wit in our own time, but in the fourteenth century it is just about the highest. It is arguably the only form which does not require the humiliation of a victim. One of the most famous humorous letters of the century is written by the young Edward II to Louis d’Evreux, in which he promises to send him a present of “some misshapen greyhounds from Wales, which can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and running dogs which can follow at an amble, for well we know how you love lazy dogs.”5 Similarly, if you visit court in late 1328 you might be amused by Roger Mortimer’s sarcastic reply to a letter from the earl of Lancaster, his avowed enemy. Having been accused of impoverishing the Crown, Mortimer denies everything vehemently and then adds, “But if any man knows how to make the king richer, he is most welcome at court.” 6
Practical jokes are perhaps the most common form of humor. Men and women are often amused when other people injure themselves. Take hocking, for example: at one level this is the Hocktide custom of capturing men and women and holding them prisoner and releasing them for a fee, in order to raise money for the parish. On Mondays men are captured by women, and vice versa on Tuesdays. But sometimes it gets out of hand. A group of lads lay a noose on the ground and wait for an unsuspecting passerby to step into it. Then they hoist him up, suddenly, by his ankles, often bashing his head on the ground in the process. Watch out at dusk, when it is difficult to see the rope against the mud of the street. Otherwise you will be kept hanging by one leg until you have paid a ransom. Those who see the spectacle will laugh heartily at your embarrassment.
In a violent society even the humor is violent. One day King Edward II is riding along the road behind one of his kitchen staff, called Morris, who falls off his horse. Something is wrong with Morris for he is unable to keep his balance and falls off again. Does the king ride up and offer him a helping hand? Or send a servant to inquire after the man’s health? Nothing of the sort. Instead, he laughs and laughs and laughs. Wiping away a tear, he gives the man the equivalent of a year’s salary as a present, not to help him get better but for making him laugh so much. 7 Sometimes such violent ribaldry is enshrined in annual games, such as the Haxey Hood game, which permits the man playing the Fool to kiss any girl or married woman he meets. At the end of the celebrations he will be cut down from the bough of a tree above a fire and burnt badly for his amatory indulgences.
There is a fine line between this brutal sense of humor and plain trickery, which is not so funny. You will be surprised how many people laugh at the idea of a man persuading a woman to sleep with him after promising to marry her, with his sole guarantee of good intentions being a ring made of wound rushes—which soon falls apart, like his promise of marriage. The idea of a young woman cuckolding her old husband with a handsome young man is one which constantly entertains and delights people. Chaucer uses it to brilliant effect in discussing the relations between men and women in his Canterbury Tales. Of course, in Chaucer’s hands, even plain trickery can be hilariously funny. The end of “The Miller’s Tale,” where the carpenter cuts the rope holding his washtub in the rafters and falls to the floor, is slapstick at its very finest. But for every Chaucer there are ten thousand less-witty tricksters. In 1351 the mayor of London has to pass a bylaw prohibiting boys from playing practical jokes on the members of Parliament. Among other things, they had been running up behind them and stealing their hoods.
The Warrior’s Love of Flowers
You might now be thinking that the medieval English character is composed of cruelty and violence. If so, you would not be far wrong—it has been formed through an intense awareness of both. But it is also composed of many other things. Just as a biographer only begins to understand his subject when he comes to terms with the contradictions and tensions within the character, so too you will only begin to understand the medieval mind when you begin to realize its contradictions. For example, the supreme masters of violence are those military commanders who can direct sudden and overwhelming force at their enemy. But when you begin to examine their true characters, these men are rarely brutal. Henry, duke of Lancaster, is one of the greatest military leaders of the century. He leads an Anglo-Gascon army to victory after victory in 1345. And yet what are his pastimes and pleasures? He likes all the usual things—hunting, feasting, and, by his own admission, seducing women, especially peasant girls—but he also loves the song of the nightingale and the scents of roses, musk, violets, and lily of the valley. The image of a great war leader closing his eyes and inhaling the aroma of flowers reminds us that some medieval lords are very far from being two-dimensional violent thugs. Henry even writes a book of spiritual devotion. There is poetry and sophistication in such men, intellectual awareness, human kindness, and generosity of spirit. And there is deep sincerity too. When the same duke swears an oath not to give up a siege until he has planted his banner on the walls of the castle, you can be sure that he intends to fulfill it. Not even a direct order from the king himself can persuade him to do otherwise. Perhaps one of the things which will amaze you most of all is how often a man in armor—a fighting machine—will resolutely stand by what he personally believes is virtuous. And how easily he can be moved to tears.
There is no more obvious contrast to the bawdy, insensitive humor and violence of the time than people’s spirituality. To be modestly religious in the fourteenth century is to be fervent by modern standards—you will find the depth of religious feeling in daily life quite astonishing. Many people attend Mass every single day. Many give alms to the poor every day. Many will go on four or five pilgrimages a year, and some will visit more than a hundred different churches annually. You might think that this is all a show of religion, a demonstration of piety, in order to encourage the lower classes to believe their superiors are closer to God. But such a view would not only be extremely cynical, it would be wrong. Just as there is a violent streak running through the whole of society, so too there is a religious one. One of the greatest fighting heroes of the century is Sir Walter Manny, a personal friend of King Edward III and Queen Philippa. He is the sort of swashbuckling character who will throw himself at a horde of French knights with the conviction of an indomitable man; he has been known to rush out of a besieged town and attack a siege engine just because it is disturbing his dinner. And yet he is also the sort of man who establishes a great monastery—the London Charterhouse—and who buys enough land so that the poor of London have somewhere to bury their dead during the Great Plague. He might be a fighting machine, but when he removes his armor he is a man of sympathy and piety, and these virtues are as much a part of his character as his military prowess.
The key to understanding such men is the notion of respectability. If you want to flatter a man in any walk of life, tell him he is of noble bearing and behavior and deserving of respect. Men want to serve in important p
ositions of office in towns and manors—it adds to their stature. Men want to be seen to be valued by the great men of the realm, especially the king. Most of all, men want to be honored and loved in death. It is no exaggeration to say that at some great funerals you will see more than ten thousand people in mourning. The greater the numbers at your funeral, the more loved, the more honored, and the more respected you must have been in life. Hence great men start rewarding paupers for attending their funerals. When Richard Gravesend, bishop of London, is buried in 1303, a total of 31,968 poor people attend the ceremony.8 such determination to appear dignified and respected is common to most men and women. Cursing or defaming someone is a serious offense, and the victim’s pride may well cause the defamer to be hauled up in court. It is perhaps this very straightlaced respectability that explains why people find it so funny when a proud man has his hood stolen or gets hocked by his ankle and lifted into the air.
Education
To what extent is character a result of education? In the Middle Ages it is arguable that the answer is “not very much.” Alternatively, you could turn the question around and say the opposite. The shortcomings of medieval education have a profound effect on the people.
In the towns and villages you will find the younger children being taught about the seven deadly sins once a week by the parish priest. Otherwise most forms of education are intended to do no more than equip boys and girls for the occupations for which they are destined. A knight’s son will be sent off at the age of seven to serve in the household of another knight, often his maternal uncle. Great lords’ sons and daughters are given their own private tutors. The children of an agricultural worker will be out in the fields at the age of seven. Craftsmen’s sons likewise become apprentices at a young age, learning how to keep accounts—whether in a written form or on tally sticks—as well as the techniques of the trade. Those destined for the Church are sent off at seven to be tonsured, which entails the rather severe haircut which commences a career of worship. Education—like so many other aspects of medieval life—is a practical exercise.
