The "Everyday" Middle Ages
People - actual people - lived in medieval Europe
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
So, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews. Most of why I’m here is to be hard at work on our next book, Oathbreakers - and I promise I am!
Located in Fife in Scotland, St. Andrews is an old town that in the later European Middle Ages became an immensely important site for pilgrimage (you can still walk the Fife Pilgrim’s Way) and the home of the largest church constructed in Scotland. People came from across Europe to benefit from the healing power of the (supposed) relics of the Apostle Andrew. According to legend:
The remains of St Andrews were… taken to Patras in Greece. Legend then has it, that one of the monks there, St Regulus (also known as St Rule), was advised in a dream to hide some of the bones. The bones were moved from Patras to Constantinople on the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor Constanius II in or around 357 to sit in the Church of the Holy Apostles there.
St Regulus then had a second dream, where he was told by an angel to take some of the bones to ‘the ends of the earth’ to protect them and build a shrine there. He set off, taking a kneecap, an upper arm bone, three fingers and a tooth from St Andrew to find a safe place for them.
Then, somehow, he ended up off the coast of Fife in Scotland, where Regulus founded a small shrine dedicated to the apostle.
It does seem that there were some early medieval churches on the site but a larger stone church dedicated to St. Rule was built in the early 12th century (only a part of that church remains - the square tower in the pictures below). But as pilgrim traffic increased and so the stature of the bishop of St. Andrews, a new cathedral was planned and construction begun ca. 1160 CE. When it was consecrated in 1318 CE, with the king of Scotland (Robert the Bruce) in attendance, it was the largest church in Scotland and one of the larger ones in Europe.
It now lies in ruins (delightful to walk through), having been stormed by followers of John Knox in 1559 and formally abandoned in 1561. Supposedly the central tower collapsed before 1600 and brought down much of the structure, which was then reused for building materials elsewhere in the town.
In the midst of this, the university was founded in 1413.
But what I want to talk a bit about today is something a little different.
Just this past week, I was in Utrecht (Netherlands) to give a talk. The place was lovely and the people were better. It was a great stay, filled with great conversations with students and faculty alike.
But before I went home to Scotland, I took a train from Utrecht over to Leiden to see a new (temporary) exhibition on the Year 1000 in the Netherlands. It was magnificent.
Images (left to right, beginning in top row). All are 10th/ 11th century:
knitted cap
knitted mitten
leather shoes
wooden coffin with remains of a child
remains of wooden bedframe (it seems to have been in use for a couple hundred years)
reconstruction of that bed
silk purse with a peacock (originally from Persia)
silk covering with animals
astrolabe from Iberia
The exhibition relied heavily on archeological finds, assisted by the fact that the region is swampy and so can create “waterlogging” around the objects, keeping air away from them, and hence helping preserve them.
Textiles, for example, are often quite rarely discovered from medieval Europe because they’re composed of organic material and so decompose. But that doesn’t mean people didn’t have them, that they weren’t everywhere. Indeed, the items such as those above (hat, mitten, shoes) remind us that, contra some people, there are tons of sources for how we understand the medieval past and good reasons - fire, World War II, decomposition over time, etc. - why some of them aren’t with us anymore.
Just in what we have in the images above, we can envision - living simultaneously in the same region - a farmer trying to stay warm as he tends his animals on a crisp October day, parents grieving a beloved child, a family of merchants passing down an heirloom in a home they’ve owned for centuries, a noblewoman heading to market with silver coins jangling in her purse, an abbess delicately draping silk over their convent’s precious relics, and a group of scholars (perhaps of different religious traditions) charting the movements of the stars.
This is a world that is intimate and personal, that is local and global. It has people of all classes, all genders. And perhaps these medievals thought more of the people down the street than people thousands of miles away, both both were within their mental worlds and both were relentlessly present in their everyday lives.
We talked about many of these types of stories in The Bright Ages. And as we said there, none of these objects and their imaginative reconstructions erase the horrors that also accompanied medieval Europe, but they do humanize those people. They didn’t live in black and white. They weren’t caricatures created by modern imaginations. They were people and we, as scholars, can know and understand them. And indeed we should.
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