Reading, Insulting, Taxing, Finding and Stealing - medieval news roundup

What did people read in the Middle Ages?

A new book is looking at how people in late-medieval London read. Arthur Bahr, a professor of literature at MIT, found that many people maintained eclectic reading habits.

In his latest work, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations in Medieval London, shows the ways people in the Middle Ages would create books that included a wide variety of different texts, including chronicles, letters, literature and religious texts. For example, Andrew Horn, the chamberlain for the city of London in the 1320s, bound together various texts, including legal treatises, French-language poetry, and descriptions of London.

Arthur Bahr comments, “Horn actually uses the construction of his books to create literary puzzles for his reader. One poem just doesn’t make sense, but if you read the poem in juxtaposition with the legal treatise that comes after, then the two pieces make sense. He’s suggesting that the law and literature are sort of the yin and the yang, you need both. And that is kind of amazing, really.”

Click here to read more from MIT News.

Top Five Insults from Medieval Flanders

Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, who did research on Flemish rebels in the later Middle Ages, found that these men could hurl insults with the best of them. The top five were:

1.  ‘A bad chicken was brooding’ 
2.  ‘Son of a bitch’ 
3.  ‘I shit on you’ 
4.  ‘Liver eater’ 
5.  ‘Kill! Kill!’

Some of these insults are rather obvious, others take a bit of understanding. Check out the article The five most common insults and slogans of medieval rebels from Oxford University Press to learn more.

Taxes between Wales and England

Nia M.W. Powell of Bangor University writes about at taxation records from England and Wales between the 13th and 17th centuries. While it seems in the Middle Ages it could be quite difficult for the crown to get consent for tax subsidies from the commons, efforts were made to make a more uniform tax regime during the 16th century.

Powell adds, "Early modern Wales has been presented so frequently as “poor little Wales”, a land of backward impoverishment lagging behind its prosperous and “progressive” English counterpart, a country lacking towns and even rejecting urban civility, a country struggling against the odds.

"This is not the picture drawn by early modern taxation records, particularly with regard to urban life. Port towns in north and south Wales reveal an enviable prosperity among its inhabitants that equalled and surpassed most urban centres in south-west England."

You can read Powell's article Welsh History Month: Tax records throw light on the story of Wales from Wales Online.

Other news bits:

Archaeologists in Estonia have discovered the skeletal remains of a man in Tartu Catherdral. Martin Malve, of the University of Tartu, says, “We can currently say that the skeleton originates from the 13-15th century, when tombs were actively used for burials. The skeleton belonged to a man aged 40-50. Initial examination shows that the teeth were relatively unworn; there were a few teeth missing from when he was alive, as well as plaque and dental cavities. The right elbow [...] had a healed bone fracture that could have resulted from trying to stop a fall,” Read more from Estonia Public Broadcasting

Archaeologist with the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust have discovered a Roman construction camp and early medieval cemetery in Wales. Check out this article from the BBC or read the full archaeological report.

In Ireland thieves stole an entire window from a medieval church.

Finally, did you know that Byzantine art from 1174 influenced this year's fashion trends? No...neither did I. So says The Guardian in this article 12 great years for fashion.

Scholar to research charity and guilt in medieval Champagne

Adam Davis is a historian whose research causes him to straddle centuries on a daily basis. Now, the associate professor has received a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to dig deeper into the 12th and 13th centuries in Champagne, France. Davis will study hospitals, wills, charitable practices of the day, and even medieval guilt.

 On the face of it, examining the source documents of medieval French hospitals doesn’t sound like uncovering King Solomon’s mines, but Davis begs to differ. He says he’s actually studying a previously unknown charitable revolution.

 In earlier times, monasteries provided care for the poor and sick. But during the 12th and 13th centuries, wealthy laypeople founded hundreds of hospitals to provide for Europe’s needy. In the Middle Ages, hospitals were multifunctional religious institutions—almost a hybrid between a shelter, nursing home, and inn—housing the sick, poor, and powerless, as well as travelers.

“By the 13th century, hospitals had become one of the most popular recipients of charitable bequests,” says Davis. “In a number of regions, well over half of testaments, left by people from all cross-sections of life included bequests for hospices, hospitals, and leprosaries (quarantined houses for patients suffering from leprosy).”

Click here to read this article from Denison University

Vikings were “first to begin criminal profiling”, historian says

The Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson tells the story of a tenth-century Viking warrior who took part in raids in Europe and often fought with his own neighbours in Iceland. When his life’s story was written in the thirteenth-century, was the author using him as an example of the type of man that society had to worry about?

 Tarrin Wills, a researcher from the University of Aberdeen, believes that Viking societies themselves were deeply concerned about these violent and unpredictable individuals – so much so that they took on the role of early criminal profilers – drafting descriptions of the most likely trouble-makers.

 Wills presented his research yesterday to the British Science Festival, one of Europe’s largest science festivals. It is being held this year in Aberdeen and is expecting to attract over 50,000 people for its talks, discussions and workshops.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

People of Medieval Scotland online database officially launched

A new interactive online database, which will make thousands of the oldest documents in Scotland’s history available to the public, has been officially launched today during an event at the University of Glasgow.

The People of Medieval Scotland (PoMS) project has catalogued over 21,000 individuals mentioned in 8,600 documents. The documents, written between 1093 and 1314, tell the story of Scotland’s transformation from a land of patchwork regions to an established kingdom with fixed borders and modern systems of government.

The records are now online and fully accessible to the public through the online database, allowing academic experts and enthusiastic amateurs alike to learn more about the period. The database will also include free software which has been specially developed for use in schools. Special interactive labs will offer history students creative ways to explore the wealth of information stored within the database.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Greed wasn’t good in the Middle Ages – historian looks at medieval business ethics

ith business and financial scandals common in today’s new headlines, the axiom ‘Greed is good’ often seems to be the working philosophy of many wealthy executives and businessmen. But greed hasn’t always been popular in Western societies.

 Stanford historian Laura Stokes is uncovering how attitudes toward “acceptable greed” have done a turnaround in the past 500 years. Self-serving behavior deemed necessary on Wall Street today might have been despised in medieval Europe. One might even have been murdered for using wealth as a justification for circumventing societal norms.

 Capitalism, Stokes has found, managed to flourish in the intensely community-conscious culture of medieval times. Men of business successfully built financial empires based on trade and credit, even though unbridled greed was universally condemned.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Erectile dysfunction in the Middle Ages – historian examines medieval impotence cases

Like today, the problem of male impotence in the Middle Ages was often serious, and had important consequences for marriages and families. A recent article deals with the issue, explaining how it showed up in court cases in 14th century York.

 ‘Privates on Parade: Impotence Cases as Evidence for Medieval Gender’, by Frederick Pederson, a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, analyses two cases where wives attempted to annul their marriages because they claimed their husbands were impotent. They are among six cases from the city’s records that deal with impotence that survive from the Middle Ages.

 These cases were adjudicated in ecclesiastical courts, also known as consistory courts, where decisions were based on canon law. Church officials were responsible for issues relating to marriages and could pronounce an annulment in cases of impotence.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

A deathbed will from medieval Cairo

In April 1143, a well off Egyptian woman made some out-of-the-ordinary requests from her deathbed.

Anyone who elects to leave instructions in a will obviously has something to bequeath that is worth recording. After S.D. Goitein discovered numerous testaments in the Cairo Geniza, he published the texts of a number of wills in the Sefunot annual in their original Judaeo-Arabic with his Hebrew translation, and some appear in English in his five-volume work, A Mediterranean Society (i.e. see vol. 5:153-155 for the case below).

The wife of Abu Nasr, a highly successful merchant from Aleppo, made a deathbed statement in April, 1143. Her family, namely her parents and brother, all resided in the three-story house that she owned.

Two years earlier, this building had been given to her as a gift by her father, Abu ’l-Muna, who had been careful about legalizing the transfer and documented the transaction with the Muslim authorities. This gift included the clear condition that as long as he, his wife and son lived, they could never be evicted from the apartment on the third floor. He made certain to have his son-in-law present when this stipulation was made, so that it could not be changed or challenged at a later date. If the two men were to have a falling out, it would not be farfetched to imagine that Abu Nasr might attempt to be rid of his in-law’s presence.

Click here to read this article from The Jerusalem Post


See also Bodleian Libraries Cairo Genizah collection now available online

Interview with Sylvia Federico on Women in the Peasants' Revolt

The CBC Radio show As it Happens interviewed Professor Sylvia Federico of Bates College about her research on Women in the 1381 Peasant's Revolt. You can download the podcast here. The seven minute segment appears at about the 25 minute mark of the podcast.

Click here to visit the As it Happens website

Click here to read Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms

Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms

Until now the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 is largely believed to have been led by a mob of rebel men, but new research shows women played an important role in orchestrating violence against the government.

Today people are used to the idea of women being in the military. Some are already pressing for the right to fight on the front line. And women fighting as insurgents has been a fact of conflicts from Vietnam to Sri Lanka. But there's a growing feeling historians have overlooked their role in medieval rebellions like 1381's Peasants Revolt.

 On 14 June 1381, rebels dragged Lord Chancellor Simon of Sudbury from the Tower of London and brutally beheaded him. Outraged by his hated poll tax, the insurgents had stormed into London looking for him, plundering and burning buildings as they went.

 It was the leader of the group who arrested Sudbury and dragged him to the chopping block, ordering that he be beheaded.

 Her name was Johanna Ferrour.

Click here to read this article from the BBC


Click here to read A Hotbed for Dissidence: Southeast England in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

What Happened to Aged Priests in the Late Middle Ages?

While it might seem that disease and war made it unlikely that someone would survive to old age in ancient and medieval times, many men and women did live on into their 60s, 70s and even older. A recently published book, On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, explores some aspects of being elderly hundreds of years ago.

 Among the sixteen essays in this volume is “What Happened to Aged Priests in the Late Middle Ages?” by Kirsi Salonen. Salonen, a Research Fellow at the University of Tampere, uses Canon Law and ecclesiastical records to examine what happened with bishops, priests and clerics as they got older. She notes that while Canon Law made it in theory difficult for religious officials to retire, there were hundreds of cases appearing in Papal records where various solutions were worked out.

 For example, Salonen notes there are “numerous entries in the papal register series concerning old priests who resigned their benefices in favour of someone who agreed to pay them a yearly pension.” For example, in 1477 Johannes de Meynringha, the priest in a parish church near Metz, France, resigned from his position because “he was over eighty years old and had health problems, and thus was no longer capable to carrying out his priestly functions.” In a papal letter signed off by Pope Sixtus IV, Johannes was assigned a yearly pension of 8 tournois, which would be paid by the new parish priest, Theodericus Raynoldi.'

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Immigration in the Viking era

Knut Kjeldstadli of the University of Oslo has led a group a researchers who have studied Norway’s immigration history from the Viking Age up to the present. He says the tracks left by immigrants and visitors traverse the entire period.

“Irish slaves came in the Viking Age. And around the year 1000 another import came that was to have a huge impact on Norwegian culture: Christianity," says the history professor.

The kings brought along specialists in Christianising people. These were priests and monks from Germany and England. Even the Anglo-Saxon bishop and advisor – who canonised Olaf Haraldsson, was a Brit.

Kjeldstadli points out that multiple groups immigrated to Norway in the Middle Ages.

At the bottom of the social ladder were the Irish slaves, or thralls. They might not have had too much of an impact on the culture. Around 1250 the first refugees came from Russia. They had been pressed westward by Mongolian tribes.

But a number of career immigrants − specialists in various professions − probably had the biggest influence. Some followed in the wake of the new religion.

“The men of the church in this context were not just the priests and monks, but also stonemasons and other craftsmen,” says Kjeldstadli.

Click here to read this article from ScienceNordic

Civil partnership, medieval style: In the days when same-sex marriage was a Christian rite

Same-sex unions in Christian churches were held as long ago as the Middle Ages, research shows.

Historians say the ceremonies included many of the acts involved in heterosexual marriages, with the whole community gathering in a church, the blessing of the couple before an altar and an exchange of holy vows. A priest officiated in the taking of the Eucharist and there was a wedding feast for guests afterwards.


All of these elements are depicted in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 AD) and his companion John, an article published on the I Heart Chaos blog this week says.

And Prof John Boswell, the late chairman of Yale University’s history department, found there were ceremonies called the Office of Same-Sex Union and the Order for Uniting Two Men in the 10th to 12th centuries.

The medievalist published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century in 1980.

Click here to read this article from the Daily Mail

Click here to see Same-Sex Relations in the Middle Ages from Medievalists.net

Valentine's Day kisses continue odd human tradition

A kiss may be just a kiss, but when sweethearts pucker up on Valentine's Day, they will be participating in one of the most bizarre and unlikely of human activities.

Experts say kissing evolved from sniffing, which people did centuries ago as a way of learning about each other.

"At some point, they slipped and ended up on the lips, and they thought that was a lot better," said Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University and an authority on the evolution of human kissing. "You got a lot more bang for your buck."

For most of early human history, smell was more important than any other sense for human relationships, said Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of "The Science of Kissing." People would use smell to determine a person's mood, their health and their social status, she said.

"There were a lot of sniff greetings," said Kirshenbaum, director of the Project on Energy Communication at the University of Texas. "They would brush the nose across the face, because there are scent glands on our faces, and over time the brush of the face became a brush of the lips, and the social greeting was born that way."

Click here to read this article from the Montreal Gazette

New project to examine immigration to medieval England

Scholars at the University of York are to launch a major research project focusing on the impact and extent of immigration into England in the Middle Ages.

The study, backed by a £784,545 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will create a huge database of around 80,000 immigrants who lived in England between 1330 and 1550. Once the database is completed, in 2015, it will be freely accessible to all online and will offer much material that has never been available before outside academia for family and local historians.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Pastons: Revealing the amazing tale of one of Norwich’s most famous families

And now, Dragon Hall on King Street, Norwich, will celebrate their legacy of medieval life left behind in a series of letters.

The affluent Paston family of the 15th and 16th centuries, who elevated from landholding peasantry to influential, English gentry, left behind a wealth of private and business correspondences that still survive today and provide a fascinating insight into medieval life and the often turbulent political landscape of the 15th and 16th centuries.

The family moved through the ranks of post-plague English society as a result of the increase in trade and an unstable King troubled by turbulent nobles. Clement Paston is the earliest known, a peasant who owned 40 hectares of land in the village of Paston, 19 miles North East of Norwich, and made sure his son William – born in 1378 – received a good education. William became a sought after expert in law, and married a nobleman’s daughter.

Click here to read this article from the Norwich Evening News

When pregnancy gets you out of a bad relationship – female slaves in medieval Spain

Recent research has uncovered that female slaves in the Spanish city of Valencia were using a novel way to escape their enslavement – they got pregnant with their master’s child. In the article “As if she were his wife”: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late Medieval Spain, Debra Blumenthal examines 33 cases found in the archives of the Spanish city between 1425 and 1520 where female slaves sued to get their freedom on the basis that they bore the children of their male masters.

One such case was a Russian woman named Rosa, who was purchased by Arnau Castello while he worked in the city of Naples. At the time, she was according to the archival records, “a pretty, young, white slave woman between eighteen and twenty years of age.” During their stay in Naples, and after they returned to Valencia, Rosa and Arnau were lovers, even after Arnau married. She bore him two children – Lucrecia and Julia, both of whom died in infancy. Later, in 1476, Rosa went to Valencia’s city courts to demand she be released from slavery, invoking local laws which stated, “Any Christian man who lies with his female slave and has a son or daughter by her, that son or daughter should immediately be baptized and both the mother and the son (or daughter) shall be free.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

More sex please, we’re Greek: exposing the myth of Platonic love

Plato lent his name to Platonic love but a new book reveals that the ancient Greek philosopher never advocated love without sex.

University of Manchester science historian Dr Jay Kennedy, who hit the headlines last year after revealing he had cracked the code in the great thinker’s writings, has now published a decoder’s manual that lays bare the secret content of Plato’s ancient works.

“Plato – the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age – was long thought to favour love without sex, or ‘Platonic love’, but this new research reveals Plato was far from being a prude,” says Dr Kennedy, who is based in Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Faculty of Life Sciences.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

13th Century 'Facebook'

Professor Dauvit Broun, the Glasgow expert in medieval Scottish history was the principal investigator of the Paradox of Medieval Scotland project, or PoMS for short, which took three years to complete and also involved researchers from Edinburgh and King's College London.

The project, to develop the most comprehensive database ever compiled of any European kingdom's inhabitants in the central middle ages, has been published online and is open to anyone with an interest in Scottish history to study the people of a medieval kingdom in unprecedented detail.

The multi-faceted database contains information on everyone mentioned in more than 6000 documents from Scotland between 1093 and 1286. It shows not only who they were, but gives an insight into how they related to each other as individuals, as different parts of society, and as Gaels and non-Gaels.

Click here to read this article from the University of Glasgow

See also our our article Medieval Scotland database launched

First Valentine: Lasting legacy of 500-year-old love

Love it or hate it, even the most hardened anti-Romeo will be hard pressed to avoid Valentine's Day this year. But as an exhibit at the British Library currently on show is testament to, there is a first for everything - even on Valentine's Day.

It is a letter, written from a young woman to her love, and is the first mention of the word Valentine in the English language. And, for the first time, the descendants of Margery Brews and her betrothed John Paston have been traced.

In 1477 Margery wrote a letter to her John pleading with him not to give her up, despite her parents' refusal to increase her dowry.

Addressing her "ryght welebeloued Voluntyne" (right well-beloved Valentine), she promised to be a good wife, adding: "Yf that ye loffe me as Itryste verely that ye do ye will not leffe me" (If you love me, I trust.. you will not leave me)

Click here to read this article from the BBC

Study examines the same-sex relationships of Medieval Arab Women

A recent article suggests that lesbian activities of women in the medieval Arab world were far more common and open than is commonly believed, or would be considered acceptable in today’s Middle East. In the article, “Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women,” Sahar Amer describes the large amount of material related to this topic, as well as the difficulty in accessing some of these records.

Click here to read this news article from Medievalists.net