The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

  With royal patronage on this scale, you might think that you will have no chance of pursuing this sport yourself. But even a moderately prosperous townsman may have a bird of prey, as revealed in the inventory of William Harecourt of Boston (see chapter 7). William has two hawks and “a gentle falcon,” altogether worth £10. There is a whole social hierarchy to bird ownership. The rarest and most splendid breeds are deemed suitable for kings. Golden eagles are considered suitable only for emperors—although, as there are only two emperors in all of the known world (the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine Emperor), there is some flexibility on this. For a king, a gerfalcon is considered appropriate. These magnificent hunters are used to catch large birds, like herons and cranes. Edward III has several and spends more on them than he does on most of his servants. A lord is supposed to hunt with a peregrine falcon, a knight with a saker, an esquire with a lanner, and a yeoman with a goshawk. Sparrowhawks are usually associated with priests (the clergy hunt with birds as well as dogs). In practice, lords are not too fussy about what they hunt with. The young Edward II hunts partridges with sparrowhawks and spaniels, and Edward III keeps goshawks, tiercels, lanners, and several other lesser birds, not just gerfalcons.23 William Harecourt’s birds are probably goshawks or sparrowhawks. The reason his falcon is called “gentle” is not on account of its behavior to other birds—it rips those to pieces—but because it is suitable for a gentleman.

  You will see hawks and falcons in all sorts of places. People have special perches made for them in their bedchambers. They have silver chains made for them. In the streets you will frequently see men walking along with falcons on their arms, or a woman accompanied by a servant holding her bird. This is not just to show off; if you own a valuable bird you want it to become familiar with the noise of the street and your surroundings, so it does not become scared and fly away. Problems arise when young men take their birds into church to attend Mass, or into the law courts. Even the clergy are reprimanded from time to time for paying too much attention to their birds of prey. You might have thought that the abbot of Westminster would be above such things. Not at all: in 1368, worried that his favorite falcon might die, he pays 6d for a wax image to be made of the bird, which he places on the altar of the church as a votive offering for its recovery. The following year he has a special collar made for his greyhound, called “Sturdy”24

  Popular Games

  If you wander through the streets of any town or city, you will come across children playing familiar games. Some will have odd names, such as “pinch me” or “hoodman blind,” but basically they are the same as modern playground games. Hoodman blind, for example, is blind man’s buff but without a blindfold; in the fourteenth century all one has to do is to turn the child’s hood back to front. Catching butterflies in nets and pilfering eggs from birds’ nests are perennial favorites, as are “follow the leader” and “heads or tails.” Froissart mentions playing these as a child, as well as “hare and hounds,” “cow’s horn in the salt,” spinning tops, telling riddles, and blowing soap bubbles in a pipe.

  Most popular amusements are concerned with contests of some variety At a fair you will be able to watch wrestling competitions, with the traditional prize of a ram for the winner.25 As you would expect, clergymen do not approve. According to a Dominican preacher, wrestling is “a foul and unthrifty occupation.” Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester, puts wrestling matches in the same category as gluttony, chatting idly in the market, and anything else which distracts the populace from listening to his sermons.26 Realistically, the wrestling is far less likely to offend your sensibilities than the baiting competitions. Men and women enthusiastically crowd around to watch bearbaiting and bullbaiting (chained bears and bulls being beaten with sticks and attacked by mastiffs and alaunts until they are driven near crazy with rage). Boys and girls love cockfighting and traditionally organize their own contests on Shrove Tuesday, asking adults to bet on their birds.27 They also love cockbaiting. This involves throwing sticks and stones at a tethered chicken. If you are a hungry boy killing the bird with a well-aimed stone is only part of the fun; taking it home for supper is equally satisfying.

  As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as “abominable . . . more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves.” This is football.28 Although that description might sound a little negative, when you watch your first match, you too might think it is nothing more than a mêlée without weapons. Shrove Tuesday is when a large number of football matches are held. The captains of the two sides meet and decide how many people are going to play: dozens or even hundreds might take part in a celebratory game between two parishes. It is the number of people involved which determines the size of the playing field. If more than a hundred people are playing, the goals (two at each end) might be several miles apart. If only two tithings are competing, there might be only a few hundred yards separating them. Balls range in size from small, stuffed leather ones, not dissimilar to a modern cricket ball, to large ones, made of stitched pigs’ bladders filled with dried peas.

  Rules in football (or “campball” as it is normally called, a “camp” being a field) vary from place to place and from match to match. There is no offside rule—or any other rule for that matter. For much of the century the only law relating to football is the one banning it. In 1314 the mayor of London forbids the game being played anywhere near the city. Edward III bans it throughout the kingdom in 1331 and again in 1363. It creates a lot of noise. It distracts people from practicing their archery. It results in damage to property and crops; many people are injured and some are killed. The case of William de Spalding is perhaps the most famous. In 1321 William petitions the pope for an indulgence on account of the fact that, during a game of football, a friend of his died from running into him so hard that his knife went through its sheath and into his friend.29 When medieval people roll on the ground during a football match, you can be sure they are not feigning an injury in the hope of being awarded a penalty.

  Other outdoor games you are likely to see include bowls, ball-and-stick games (especially hockey), quoits, and tennis. Lawn tennis is not wholly a nineteenth-century invention; its earlier “real tennis” form comes to England in the late fourteenth century. Chaucer refers to it as being played with racquets in Troilus and Criseyde, and it is also mentioned in The Second Shepherds’ Play, the most entertaining of the Wakefield Cycle of mystery plays. Do not expect to see a neat rectangular court marked with lines. You might not even have a racquet. The word “tennis” refers to the server’s exclamation as he serves. When played without a racquet it is called handball or jeu de paume. Some towns have bylaws banning it from being played in their high streets or in their guildhalls. Your fellow players will sling a net across the road and that will become your court. You score extra points for hitting the ball through someone’s window. Blocking the street with a net and hitting around a hard projectile is hardly the way for young men to endear themselves to the urban authorities.

  The foremost popular sport is archery. When Edward III prohibits football, it is very much with the idea that men should spend their time shooting longbows. From 1337 archery becomes almost the only legal sport for commoners. There is a rather extreme proclamation in that year that the penalty for playing any other game is death.30 In 1363 this proclamation is reissued in a slightly more lenient form, forbidding men playing quoits, handball, football, hockey, coursing, and cockfighting on pain of imprisonment. Archery is once more emphasized as the sole sport approved by the king. There is good reason, as you will realize when someone puts a longbow in your hand. It is about six feet long, made of yew, with the springy sapwood on the outside and the harder exterior wood facing you. The handle is six inches in circumference. A hemp string is looped over notches in each end, or over horn nooks. The arrows, made of poplar or ash, are about three feet long and an
inch thick, tipped with a three-inch-long iron arrowhead, and fletched with goose or peacock feathers. In order to draw a longbow to its fullest extent, and shoot the arrow for five hundred yards, you have to bend it so far that the flight of your arrow is beside your ear. The string at that point should make an angle of ninety degrees. The draw weight is 100 to 170 pounds.31 That requires huge strength. In addition, archers in battle are expected to repeat the action of shooting this weapon between six and ten times per minute. Men need to start practicing with small bows from about the age of seven in order to build up the muscles necessary and to continue practicing in adulthood—hence the king’s proclamations of 1337 and 1363. Before long, men are trying to split sticks standing in the ground at a distance of a hundred yards or more and telling tales of Robin Hood as a folk hero.32 And England has the most powerful army in Christendom.

  When the weather keeps you from playing bowls, and when archery practice is over, what indoor games might you play? Cards are unlikely. Although there are card makers in France in the fourteenth century, card games have yet to catch on in England—although they soon will. Alternatives are “cross and pile” and dice. The former you know as heads or tails (all medieval silver pennies have a cross on one side and the king’s head on the other). Dice games are enormously popular. Many members of the aristocracy lose large sums on a regular basis. Even Edward III is prone to losing at dice, paying out nearly £4 on a single day in 1333.33 The same goes for his much more conscientious grandson, the future Henry TV, in 1390.34 If you want to join in, the most popular versions are raffle (using three dice) and hazard (two dice). Remember that, despite the huge popularity of these games, not everyone looks kindly on those who play. People have been known to gamble themselves into poverty and even nakedness—their clothes left in pawn with the tavern keeper who advances them the money for their last bet. For this reason, several towns ban dicing altogether.

  Chess, tables (a form of backgammon), draughts (checkers), and merrils (nine men’s morris) are the most popular board games. Chess is the preferred indoor game of the aristocracy. Some sets contain carved pieces of the most exquisite workmanship. In 1322 Lord Mortimer has a nutmeg gaming table and a gold-painted chess set, and his wife has a set of ivory chessmen.35 Henry IV commissions new chess pieces while he is in Venice in 1392.36 Edward III, his mother, and sister all have crystal and jasper chessboards, with carved crystal (white) and jasper (black) pieces to match.37 If you challenge any of these lords and ladies to a game, bear in mind that the modern rules have not yet fully evolved. Although it is accepted by about 1300 that pawns can move two squares on their first go, the queen (normally called the prime minister) can only move one square in each direction. Also, the bishops (or elephants, as they are still called) can only move two squares along their diagonals, although they can jump over other pieces.

  Pilgrimages

  Let us say you find yourself out at sea in a storm. The small ship is pitching and rolling terribly, falling forty feet or more with each huge wave. The wind is blowing incessantly, and it is beginning to grow dark. The ship’s captain has already cut down the mast, and over the noise of the wind you hear a shout that water is pouring into the hold. The horses down there in their panic have kicked at the caulked timbers and are now swimming, terrified, in the bilge. The ship is beginning to break up. All the lanterns are out, the spray and sea fret having extinguished every flame. You are cold, soaked, in utter darkness. You have no idea in which direction the nearest land is. At such moments there are only two things you can do. The first is to tie yourself and any members of your family with you to a large piece of wood, so that when your bodies are found, you can all be buried together—which is what the earl of Warwick decides to do in the fifteenth century. The second is to pray. If you go for the latter option, then the chances are that your conscience will enter into a sort of bargaining arrangement with God in which, in return for your being returned to dry land safely, you will promise to go on a pilgrimage. Or two pilgrimages. Or five, as Edward III does when caught in a storm at sea in 1343.

  Reasons for going on pilgrimage vary greatly. You might do so because of a pact with God, or the saints, along the lines mentioned above. Or you might want to confess to a particular sin. If you have committed adultery, for example, you might not wish to confess to the priest if he happens to be your spouse’s brother. Traveling a long way to confess, and atone, is the perfect answer. On the other hand, if you need to get away from where you live—if you wish to commit adultery, for example—what better way is there of leaving the gossips in your home town? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who has “thrice been to Jerusalem” and has also visited the other major shrines of the Three Kings at Cologne, Santiago de Compostela, and Rome, is well versed in the art of love. She is only too happy to conflate “wandering” geographically with “straying” morally. On a more conscientious level, a man who has fought in a battle might wish to undertake a pilgrimage in order to give thanks to God for his survival. A man or woman whose spouse is extremely sick might wish to leave his or her side to make a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine, to ask for the help of a local saint. The merchant in Chaucer’s “Sea Captain’s Tale” remarks to his wife that failed merchants go on pilgrimages to escape their creditors.

  As that motley crew who set out with Chaucer on his journey to Canterbury indicate, you do not have to wear any special clothes to be a pilgrim. The knight—returning from a military expedition—wears a coarse tunic besmirched with rust from his chain mail. His esquire wears a short, embroidered gown, with sleeves cut long and wide, in the latest fashion. The knight’s servant, a yeoman, wears his coat and hood of green, carries a bow, arrows, sword, and dagger and wears a leather bracer on his arm. The merchant is adorned in a multicolored tunic with a fashionable beaver hat from Flanders. Thus everyone is wearing their usual attire, from the sea captain in his knee-length woollen gown to the Wife of Bath and the physician, “dressed in Persian blue and scarlet, lined with taffeta and fine sarsenet.” It is true that you will come across the odd die-hard pilgrim wearing the traditional long, wide-sleeved cassock of russet, patched with crosses. No doubt he is also carrying a staff and wearing a wide-brimmed hat adorned with scallop shells and pewter badges from all the holy places he has visited. But such stereotypes are the minority and more like traveling hermits than pilgrims.

  If you set out on a pilgrimage, the chances are that very soon you will fall in with other pilgrims heading in the same direction. It is a good idea to stay with them, for the sake of company and entertainment as well as the extra security. As the theologian Wycliffe points out to the archbishop of Canterbury, when men and women go on pilgrimages they sing “wanton songs” and play bagpipes, so that

  every town they pass through, what with the noise of their singing and the sound of their piping, and the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and the barking of dogs after them, they make more noise than the king would, if he were to come that way, with all his clarions and minstrels.38

  Interestingly the archbishop does not deny such accusations, but rather explains that the reason why the pilgrims have pipers and singers in their company is so that, if one of them should strike his foot upon a stone and make it bleed, the musicians can take away the pain with mirth.

  Where should you go on your pilgrimage? For the truly dedicated there are the great pilgrimage destinations of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, Rome, the shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, and Jerusalem itself. However these journeys are expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous. For most people, keen to go on a pilgrimage but reluctant to sail abroad, the greatest draw is not a particular church but the choicest relics. Just as God, Jesus, and the saints are the stars of the mystery plays, so the shrines of the saints are the most holy destinations. Chief among these is the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. It attracts about two hundred thousand pilgrims every year, each one of them paying Id or more to see the sights: the place where Becket was struck down,
the point of the sword that killed him, his tomb, and so on. This generates more than £900 yearly, not to mention the many gifts from visiting dignitaries.39 The shrine itself is entirely covered with plates of pure gold and studded with sapphires, diamonds, rubies, balas rubies, and emeralds, with carved agate, jasper, and cornelian reliefs. The most stunning jewel of all is one particular ruby, no larger than a man’s thumbnail, embedded in the wall to the right of the nearby altar. Even though the church is quite dark, especially near the shrine, this ruby radiates an intense red light, which causes everyone who sees it to marvel at it.40

  With treasures like this on display, the fame of Canterbury spreads even farther, across Europe. And so more visitors come. If you visit you may be encouraged to buy lead and pewter ampullae: small vessels supposedly containing holy water mixed with St. Thomas’s own watered-down blood. This water is supposed to have a wide range of medicinal and spiritual properties. Alternatively, you may buy a pewter badge showing the sword that killed Becket, or a badge showing him being killed.41 So the fame of the saint and the church is spread farther by pilgrims proudly taking these souvenirs back home. It is big business—and so is the pilgrim trade in all the other major churches where there is a saint’s body. You may not be familiar with the name of St. William of Perth but income from pilgrims visiting his tomb in Rochester Cathedral pays for the central tower to be rebuilt in 1343.