Catherine, Called Birdy

by Karen Cushman

  After dinner my uncle George came home, surprised but pleased to see me. His mouth smiled and his eyes almost did as I told him of the mad plans of Ethelfritha and how I decided I cannot escape my life but can only use my determination and courage to make it the best I can. He will take me home tomorrow. We will ride, which suits my feet just fine.

  22ND DAY OF SEPTEMBER, Feast of Saint Maurice and his six thousand six hundred sixty-six companions, Roman soldiers of the Theban Legion martyred for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods

  We leave in one hour. In George's garden I saw a toad, may it bring me luck. And as Morwenna says, luck is better than early rising.

  23RD DAY OF SEPTEMBER, Feast of Saint Thecla of Iconium, virgin and follower of Saint Paul. Condemned to be burnt, a storm put out the fire. Sent to be eaten by beasts, they would not. She escaped and lived in a cave for seventy-two years

  I am home again. Such ado! I was kissed and slapped and lectured until my ears turned inside out. I told my tale and then sat to listen to theirs.

  It seems God is indeed watching over me. Or else toads really are lucky. How I know is this:

  The riders from the north did not say that Shaggy Beard comes for his bride, but that he is dead, killed in a brawl over a tavern maid. His son Stephen is now Baron Selkirk, Lord of Lithgow, Smithburn, Random, and Fleece, and wishes to honor the marriage contract in his father's place. He sent me an enameled brooch of a little bird with a pearl in its beak. I am wearing it now.

  My lady mother and the beast my father think it no better and no worse that I marry Stephen instead of Shaggy Beard, but for me it is like moving from the darkness into the light, like coming in from a cold gray mist and seeing the fire make a warm and golden glow in the center of the hall, like the yolk of a boiled egg or the deeper gold in the belly of a rose.

  As I sit here in my chamber watching the sun set, I realize that the fear that drove me this half year is gone. Shaggy Beard is gone. I think I do not truly even remember what he looked or acted or sounded like. Mayhap Shaggy Beard was never so bad as I imagine him. Or mayhap he was.

  In any event, I am, if not free, at least less painfully caged. I am filled with a trembling that feels like feathers fluttering in my gut but I think is hope. All I know of Stephen is that he is young and clean, loves learning, and is not Shaggy Beard. For these alone I am prepared to love him.

  I have been making a list of names for our children. I think to call the first one George. Or Perkin. Or Edward. Or Ethelfritha. Or Magpie. Or mayhap Stephen. The world is full of possibilities.

  I leave in October. Only one month until Stephen!

  ***

  Here ends the book of Catherine, called Little Bird or Birdy, of the Manor of Stonebridge in the shire of Lincoln, in the country of England, in the hands of God. Now I leave it to you, Edward, to judge whether this exercise of yours has indeed left me more observant, thoughtful, and learned. God's thumbs!

  Author's Note

  The England of 1290 is a foreign country. It would seem foreign even to people who have been to England or live there now. Things might look familiar—the same hills and sea and sky. People, young and old, short and tall, wear clothing we could identify and speak a language we might recognize. But their world is different from ours. The difference runs deeper than what they eat or where they bathe or who decides who marries whom. Medieval people live in a place we can never go, made up of what they value, how they think, and what they believe is true and important and possible.

  The difference begins with how people saw themselves. Everyone had a particular place in a community, be it village, abbey, manor, family, or guild. Few people considered moving out of their place. Even people's names were linked to their place—Thomas Baker, William Steward, John At-Wood, Murgaw of Lithgow. Perkin, the goat boy who wants to be a scholar, is unusual.

  Our ideas of individual identity, individual accomplishments and rights, individual effort and success did not exist. Family and community and guild and country were what mattered. No one was separate and independent, even the king.

  This fixture of place was enforced by people's relationship to the land. When William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066, he decided that all the land belonged to him. He parceled out large estates to his supporters—barons and counts and dukes and great churchmen. They in turn rented smaller sections to abbots and knights, who let even smaller parcels to the farmers and millers and blacksmiths in the villages. Those on the bottom paid rent to those above, who paid it to the king, and everyone owed protection to those below them, making a great circle with everyone connected. The king was in cooperation with the lowest landholder, for the small bits of poor land in the farthest village could be traced back to the king, and the king owed patronage and protection to all his people.

  Some great noblemen held many manors with many villages scattered all across England. Some, like Birdy's father, held but one knight's fee—that is, enough land to support one knight and his family, for which the knight owed service or the equivalent in money to his landlord. The villagers then rented parcels from the knight, in exchange for work or goods or money or all three.

  Although great lords lived in castles and lesser lords in large manor houses, most English people in 1290 lived in villages, in small cottages lining the road from manor to church. A village might seem like a miniature to us, with perhaps thirty small cottages, tiny front yards full of vegetables and chickens, and the fields cut into strips so each tenant would have some good and some not-so-good land.

  Time in these villages moved slowly—not in a line from hour to hour, past to future, but again in a circle, marked by the passing of the seasons, the cycle of church festivals, and yearly village holidays. Daily life was marked by the rising and setting of the sun, for there were no watches or clocks, no gas lamps or electric lights, and candles were expensive and dangerous to use in a house of thatch and wood. Most people did not know what century it was, much less what year.

  The future, then, to most medieval English meant not next week or next year or 1300, but the world to come, the afterlife, eternity, Heaven and Hell. Since the Church had a say in who went where in the next life, it had great authority in this one. The Church had power, lands, and riches. Church courts could condemn someone to death for heresy. Blasphemy was not only a sin, but also a crime. Almost everyone loved God and worshipped Him in the same ways at the same times in the same kinds of places. The Church said God hated those who didn't—heathens, heretics, pagans, and Jews—so they were slaughtered in His name. Everyone hoped the world to come would be better than this one.

  Children, too, were part of the great circle of life, learning from their elders and passing that knowledge on to their own sons and daughters. Village children lived at home, learning at a young age to help about the cottage or fields, tending animals or those children younger than they. Children in town often were apprenticed to craftsmen or sent to be servants.

  Noble children, both boys and girls, were sent to another noble home to be fostered. Once when a visitor from Italy asked why parents sent their children away, he was told, "Children learn better manners in other people's houses."

  Boys like Geoffrey served the lord of the manor while they trained to be knights. Girls like Birdy and Aelis went to a wealthy manor, such as Belleford, where they attended the lady of the manor and learned music, sewing, household skills, and manners. They also learned doctoring, since the lady of the manor provided the only medical help most people got. Broken bones, bloody cuts, coughs, and even fatal diseases were treated by the lady with remedies she grew, picked, brewed, and bottled herself. Some herbal remedies were effective, such as the use of poppy flowers to ease pain. Some were not, as when a plant was used for ailments of the heart or liver because its leaf was shaped like a heart or a liver. There were no cures for most illnesses, no treatments for most diseases, no real alternatives to herbs, magic, and luck.

  Girls were mostly trained for marriage. Marriage a
mong the noble classes was not a matter of love but of economics. Marriages were arranged to increase land, gain allies, or pay back debts. Women were essentially property, used to further a family's alliances, wealth, or status. Birdy fought years of training and tradition in opposing her marriage to Shaggy Beard. Most girls would have consented, knowing no alternative.

  When looked at from a safe, warm, well-fed perspective, the foreign country of medieval England might seem like a place of hard work, cruelty, and dirt. But the English of the Middle Ages also had a fondness for merriment, dancing, crude jokes, and boisterous games. Many households, such as Birdy's, entertained themselves by the fire with riddles, roasted apples, and music. Villagers put aside their hard, tedious lives to dance around the Maypole, jump the bonfires on Midsummer Night, and share Christmas dinner with their lord and lady.

  Can we really understand medieval people well enough to write or read books about them? I think we can identify with those qualities that we share—the yearning for a full belly, the need to be warm and safe, the capacity for fear and joy, love for children, pleasure in a blue sky or a handsome pair of eyes. As for the rest, we'll have to imagine and pretend and make room in our hearts for all sorts of different people.

  Books that will help young readers learn about medieval England include Joseph and Frances Gies's series Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Village, and Life in a Medieval Castle; Dorothy Hartley's Lost Country Life; Madeleine Pelner Cosman's Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony; Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell's A History of Everyday Things in England, 1066—1799; and Alfred Duggan's Crowing Up in Thirteenth Century England.

  Readers who want to get a sense of the Middle Ages from first-hand accounts are directed to Bartholomaeus Anglicus's On the Properties of Things; The Medieval Woman's Guide to Health; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; The Bahees Book: Medieval Manners for the Very Young; and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

  These stories set in or near the Middle Ages may be found at local libraries:

  Marchette Chute, Innocent Wayfaring

  Marguerite De Angeli, The Door in the Wall

  Elizabeth Janet Gray, Adam of the Road

  E. L. Konigsburg, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

  Norah Lofts, The Maude Reed Tale

  Katherine Marcuse, The Devil's Workshop

  Mary Stolz, Pangur Ban

  Rosemary Sutcliff, Knight's Tee and The Witch's Brat

  About the Author

  Karen Cushman has a long-standing interest in history. She says, "I grew tired of hearing about kings, princes, generals, presidents. I wanted to know what life was like for ordinary young people in other times." Research into medieval English history and culture led to the writing of Catherine, Called Birdy, her first book.

  Ms. Cushman was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received an M.A. in Human Behavior and one in Museum Studies and is now Assistant Director of the Museum Studies Department at John F. Kennedy University in the San Francisco Bay area. She and her husband share their Oakland, California, home with two cats, a dog, and a rabbit. They have a daughter, Leah.