Once again we are back here in the laborious classification of language and the mastery of letters, words and grammar as the first steps towards enlightenment. Grosseteste’s work on optics was itself concerned with the properties of light. Like God himself, light was invisible yet everywhere, essential to man’s illumination. Without it there could be no understanding. One of the greatest surviving works of English medieval art, the Gloucester Candle Stick, made for Gloucester Abbey before 1113 and now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, consists of an elaborate intertwining of men, beasts and foliage, all of them struggling upwards towards the illumination cast by the candle that once stood at its centre: the light of God embodied in bronze and beeswax. It was these same metaphysics of light that underlay a great revolution in architecture, from the 1120s onwards, first pioneered in northern France but rapidly adopted in England, by which building itself was raised to ever greater heights and flooded with an even greater quantity of light. Through the use of flying buttresses, the outer stone-skeleton of a building, previously massively thickened in order to support the weight of the roof, could now be pierced with many dozens of windows, themselves filled with stained glass, using light itself to expound the mysteries of God.
These new buildings – one thinks in England of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, rebuilt following a disastrous fire in 1174, and pre-eminently of Salisbury Cathedral, first planned in the 1190s but not begun until after 1217 – are grouped together by art historians under the catch-all term ‘Gothic’, intended to distinguish them from the earlier style known as ‘Romanesque’, derived ultimately from the building practices of Rome. Such buildings could be made to seem almost to dissolve in light, their solid forms carved and traced into such a refined series of pinnacles and points, none more impressive than the great spire of Salisbury, that the border between light and stone was itself rendered almost invisible. Even in celebrating God’s mysteries, however, builders also celebrated the achievements of mankind. The raising of such vast stone monuments speaks of an age still committed to epic ventures.
Salisbury Cathedral is a massive statement of the power of the Church, now, in the aftermath of Becket’s martyrdom, claiming independence from royal authority, released from its former captivity within the shadow of the royal castle at Sarum and physically brought down the hill to the valley of the river Avon. Canterbury Cathedral, rebuilt after the fire of 1174, which was caused by the furnaces of the royal mint at Canterbury becoming overheated, represented a massive reinvestment of the resources now made available from the profits of Becket’s shrine and was itself intended as a celebration in stone of the cult of St Thomas, England’s newest and most popular saint. The rude Norman past was not entirely to be swept away. Its most precious relics, such as the crypt of Lanfranc’s cathedral at Canterbury, were to be preserved beneath a modern superstructure. Rebuilding Westminster Abbey after the 1240s, King Henry III and his architects seem deliberately to have preserved an ancient wooden door, once an internal fixture, now reused for a stairway, as a reminder of the old church built by Edward the Confessor that they were in the very process of demolishing. Even so, this was an age in which kings and bishops still believed in man’s ability to conquer both time and space.
Grosseteste’s work on optics emerged from the same world which produced the angel choir in his own great cathedral at Lincoln: a gallery of many hundreds of statues in which the angels, God’s invisible ministers, were embodied in stone. Nature and the supernatural marched hand in hand. An interest in optics and the properties of light led not just to angels but to the grinding of glass and the manufacture of lenses such as the first primitive magnifiers used as early as the 1260s by Roger Bacon, like Grosseteste a master of the schools of Oxford. From magnifying glasses came spectacles, recorded by the 1290s, which in turn carry us back to writing and languages comprehended through the eyes as the chief agents of understanding. Books themselves could come to resemble machines, as in the ‘volvelles’ or revolving parchment discs with which Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans and chief chronicler of the court of Henry III, adorned his manuscripts. One of Paris’ manuscripts, a book of prophecies, itself seems to have been supplied with a series of cog-wheels inset within its wooden covers. By spinning the cogs, the reader could learn his fate, being directed to a series of names and numbers, each with its own particular meaning: a mechanical device for the exploration of time, six centuries in advance of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine.
Like the most luxurious of modern ‘pop-up’ books, Matthew’s manuscripts were not only adorned with gadgets but lavishly illustrated, and, in the case of his ‘Great Chronicle’ (the ‘Chronica Majora’), supplied with an entire volume of appendices and supporting documents itself cross-referenced in what amounts to one of the earliest uses of footnotes. At much the same time, a team of Englishmen working in the schools of Paris, including Richard of Stainsby, brother of the bishop of Coventry, compiled the fullest index to scripture ever yet accomplished: a concordance to trace the appearance of every significant word or name in the Bible. Preaching and the exposition of scripture was itself becoming more ‘scientific’, with another group of Englishmen, including Thomas of Chobham, canon of Salisbury, contributing practical guides on how to preach and not least on how to answer the more awkward questions posed by hecklers. Even the word of God had to be more scientifically analysed and delivered.
A lot of this ‘science’ is very far from what we would today regard as scientific ‘truth’. Neither Robert Grosseteste nor Roger Bacon had the remotest understanding of how sight actually operates. They believed, in accordance with the learning of classical antiquity, that it in some way involved active physical processes, with the eye sucking in, or being bombarded with, rays of intelligence from outside objects that themselves were capable of transmitting both good and evil properties. Just as a man might damage his natural humoral balance (yet another concept bequeathed from classical science) by listening to unpleasant sounds, or smelling evil odours, he might also do himself harm by gazing on the ugly or the obscene. The smell of camphor could cause impotence. Women who stared at deform-ities risked giving birth to deformed children, just as those with evil intentions could transmit disease by a single look. To call one’s neighbour ‘whore’, ‘liar’ or ‘churl’ was positively to harm both the speaker and the person described, since such words acted on the sentient organs like so many shards of broken glass. Particular colours had particular effects. Night-time was all the more terrifying for being both silent and black, so much so that babies were best accustomed to the dark by being given black and noiseless toys to play with. In the same way, objects such as jewels were all the more prized, not only because of their monetary value, but because they were believed to emit rays of light, just as stained glass or the cloth of gold worn by courtiers were perceived as naturally luminescent. Jewels themselves were symbols of England’s wealth, extracted from the furthest corners of the earth, from India and beyond. No wonder that King John had a large collection of them, including a stone hung around his neck which he believed would preserve his empire from any threat of dismemberment. His son, Henry III, was given a similarly valuable stone, to protect against thunder (itself produced by demons in the upper atmosphere), of which Henry had a morbid fear.
The willingness to invest mankind with a sympathy for phenomena in the natural world, and to pursue God’s secrets not only in nature but in the body of the human enquirer brings the medieval scientists closer to their modern equivalents than might be supposed, representing one of the first real engagements with experiment as a means to the discovery of truth. Like Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century, risking blindness by using his own eyes as a laboratory for the investigation of sunlight, Robert Grosseteste and his contemporaries were in some ways closely allied to, in other ways entirely divorced from, the tendencies of modern science. Photons and neutrons have now displaced angels and bodily humours as the agents of light or of human sensation. Even so, we still seek to prote
ct children and the vulnerable from bullying or from obscene and violent images. Today we guard against the psychological effects of such things. In the Middle Ages, the connection between words, images and the human body was believed to operate according to a more directly physical process of cause and effect.
Bodily and spiritual health
We seem to have wandered a long way here from the Plantagenet court, and yet in many respects it is in the court and its literature that we come closest to the medieval understanding of bodily or spiritual health. For the health of their souls, kings, from Henry I onwards, had their own personal confessors: Henry I’s became the first bishop of Carlisle. For the health of their bodies they had physicians, the best of them either foreign trained or at least adopting foreign sounding names. Many centuries before the establishment of any sort of National Health Service, kings such as Henry II were making grants to monasteries specifically ‘for the health and wellbeing of my realm’. The king’s interventions in the treatment of particular diseases were amongst the most remarkable ways in which royal authority was articulated. Both Edward the Confessor and Henry II ‘touched’ for the king’s evil, claiming that by the mere laying on of their hands they could cure the disfiguring skin disease later diagnosed as ‘scrofula’. By the late thirteenth century, the King’s touch was being marketed on an almost industrial basis, with as many as 1,000 individual sufferers being brought before King Edward I each year for healing.
This connection between skin diseases and royalty was itself perhaps derived from the particular obsession displayed in the Biblical book of Leviticus (Chapter 13) which required the identification and exclusion of those suffering from what in the Latin Bible was described under a catch-all term definition as ‘leprosy’. Leprosy in the Middle Ages was a term applied to a wide variety of pathologies, from severe psoriasis to full-blown Hansen’s disease, the bacterial infection that afflicts today’s clinically diagnosed lepers. Since it was believed to be a highly contagious punishment for sin, particularly for sexual misconduct, and since it was disfiguring, with the loss of fingers and toes, destruction of the nasal cartilage, hoarsening of the voice and progressive deformity, leprosy was feared. What is more surprising is the degree of specialist care devoted to its sufferers. In the twelfth century, there was an increasing tendency not only towards the segregation of those with Hansen’s disease, revealed from the skeletons of large numbers of those buried in leper hospitals, but to the regulation and, in so far as was possible, amelioration of their affliction. Where lepers in Anglo-Saxon England seem to have received no specialist care, at least 320 leper hospitals were established in England between the Norman Conquest and 1250, many of them founded by the King. The gathering of alms for such houses became a regular social obligation, again frequently supported by the King. When collecting alms, lepers were permitted to carry a wooden clapper or rattle. This was not done in the Hollywood sense, in order to frighten away the public from the possibility of contagion or the ‘unclean’. Rather, the leper’s wooden rattle distinguished this particular group of alms-seekers from the clergy ringing bells to summon the faithful to Mass or to announce that the consecrated host was being carried through the streets.
Dress and uniform
This was a society increasingly obsessed with categories and their definitions, be it in language or health or in social distinctions. Certain types of people should be permitted to dress in certain types of clothes. The clergy should not be mistaken for laymen and should therefore avoid wearing gaudy or luxurious cloaks. Jews should dress differently from Christians. After 1215 and the rulings of the greatest of the medieval Church Councils, the so-called Fourth Lateran Council summoned Pope Innocent III, Jews and Saracens were obliged to wear distinctive badges. In England, the Jewish badge was modelled on the ‘tabula’, the image of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments with which Moses returned from Mount Sinai. Jews themselves were prepared to pay heavy fines to avoid wearing it, since it clearly became a mark of shame or ridicule, but this was not the original intention. Rather, the badge was intended to implement the Jews’ own regulations on the wearing of distinctive dress and the Biblical prohibitions against the mingling of cloth or seed. A king might hunt with an eagle, but a bishop should not. Men should not dress as women or behave in an ‘unmanly’ way. A priest might ring a bell, but a leper should make quite another sort of sound. All of this suggests a society in turmoil, to which the authorities, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded with attempts at definition, regulation and segregation. From such regulation came some of the earliest expressions of state control, from the charitable provision of leper houses for those now expected to live beyond the edges of towns, to the enforcement, or more often the relaxation, of the obligation that Jews and prostitutes wear distinguishing signs.
The regulation of those beyond the confines of the ‘normal’ – the sick, the criminal, the unbeliever – has always been one of the particular responsibilities and advertisements of power. It is no coincidence that Henry II, besides being a generous founder of leper hospitals, is the first English king known to have legislated against heresy. A group of foreign weavers, denounced at Oxford in the 1160s and declared heretical by the church authorities, was handed over to the King’s officers for punishment. They were branded on the face, their houses and all their property were ritually purified by burning, and they themselves were expelled from the town, to face starvation in the winter cold. By such gestures against outsiders was the realm itself defined and the King’s royal authority expressed. After 1200, burning was to become the standard punishment for heresy, perhaps first implemented at London in 1210. Previously it had been used to punish petty treason, the murder of a husband by his wife, and it is possible that an association between betrayal of one’s lord and betrayal of the Lord God explains the future close connection between heretics and burning. Even so, through to the late fourteenth century when things began to change, England as a whole was not a land either of heresy or of holy bonfires. Isolated instances, and even, in the 1230s, a brief attempt to introduce the papal Inquisition to Yorkshire, tend to suggest the rarity rather than the spread of heresy. England, in European terms, was so over-governed and over-regulated a nation that heresy had little chance to take root.
To write of such a society as primitive or superstitious is to assume a false superiority for modern ideas of the complex or the rational. The response to Aids and its sufferers in the 1980s was not markedly more rational or more charitable than the medieval response to leprosy. Child molesters today inspire a similarly horrified reaction to that, in the 1160s, which greeted heretics. The way in which medieval fashions were worn as badges of rank or social function was often a great deal more sophisticated than the modern aesthetics of jeans and trainers. The King himself said special prayers before embarking on the cross-Channel voyages that were so necessary for the maintenance of communications between his lands. On occasion he called for particular holy relics, the hand of St James for example, normally stored at Reading Abbey, to be brought to bless his sailings. Yet he also travelled with a trained physician. One such royal doctor, Ralph de Beaumont, physician to Henry II, was drowned crossing from Normandy to Portsmouth in March 1170, during a violent storm that carried off as many as four hundred other courtiers. No wonder that the King regularly confessed his sins before boarding ship. The crossing between England and France was an extremely dangerous one, against whose perils even medical expertise could prove futile. Despite the jokes of William Rufus, that no king had ever been lost at sea, the wreck of the White Ship had proved that royal blood was no guarantee against shipwreck. In seeking divine protection for his crossings, the King thus acted in an entirely rational way.
English territories in France
Henry II’s relations with the sea brings us back to one of the principal characteristics of Plantagenet kingship: the continuing involvement of England in French politics, as part of that vast assembly of lands that Henry II acquired as duk
e of Normandy, duke of Aquitaine and count of Anjou. Accounts of this cross-Channel ‘empire’ have generally taken one of two forms. They have either become bogged down in the question of the extent to which Henry’s ‘empire’ was truly ‘imperial’, or dissolved into an equally trivial discussion of personalities and in particular of the volcanic relations between Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine: a marriage generally portrayed as one long saga of infidelity, harsh words and broken crockery. In terms of empire, it is clear that what Henry II ruled was not the equivalent to an empire such as that of Rome. Each province within his dominion was governed according to its own laws and traditions. Henry and his sons, in so far as they had a home, were natives of the Loire valley, raised in the castle-strewn hills between Le Mans and Chinon, with the river Loire, the wide brown Mississippi of western France, as the dominant feature of a landscape much of which was still unploughed ancient woodland. Although their lives were passed elsewhere, with Anjou itself serving as no more than a corridor for communications between Normandy and the south, it was to the great nunnery of Fontevraud, in the forests south of the Loire, that Henry II and Richard I, together with the wives of both Henry II and King John, looked for burial.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 23
