Towns

From: http://www.bl.uk

Medieval writers were unsure about towns. On the one hand, they saw them as vital hubs of economic, cultural, political, administrative and spiritual activity. But on the other, they saw their many dangerous temptations: their taverns and alehouses, gambling dens and brothels. Towns could also be dirty, expensive and riddled with disease. In the 1190s, Richard Devizes wrote of London: 'whatever evil or malicious thing that can be found in any part of the world, you will find it in that one city'. However, at about the same time, William FitzStephen praised it as a place of thrilling spectacles, admirable devotion, and exciting pastimes, including skating and football.

Enclosed space

Normally enclosed by protective walls, access to medieval towns was regulated through gates. The Luttrell Psalter includes an image of Constantinople that is based on an English town: surrounded with a curtain wall punctuated with towers and arrow slits, the city is crowded with buildings. At the centre is the tall spire of a church.

The glamour of the town is suggested by the dancers emerging from one of its gates, watched by admiring ladies. Successful towns were often sited on major roads or waterways, facilitating trade and transport.

Bridges were important points of access to towns, and were often themselves embellished with chapels and buildings.

The Largest City

Around 1300, the majority of people in Europe lived in the countryside. In England, between 10 and 20 percent of the population lived in towns. Around this time, London's population is estimated to have been 60-80,000. Although unimpressive by today's standards (medieval London was something like 1 percent of today's population), this made it the largest city in Britain. After the Black Death in 1348-50, which killed a third or more of the population, the pace of change quickened. Some towns shrank while others grew rapidly as many peasants relocated to urban centres.

People

Who lived in towns? At the top of the social scale were merchants, lawyers and property owners, who occupied responsible administrative positions. Below them were craftsmen and traders, and at the bottom of the pile were relatively unskilled workers. Then, as now, towns included a mixture of residential and commercial properties, though often these were one and the same: craftsmen's workshops were often on the ground floor, with the family residence upstairs. In many towns, medieval commercial activities have left their mark in streets with names like Shoe Lane, Pie Corner and Apothecary Street. Medieval commercial buildings are relatively rare, but images can sometimes offer a record of what they might have looked like, as seen in the illustration of an apothecary shop in a thirteenth century French manuscript.

Religious houses, parish churches and other religious foundations were an important feature of the townscape, and from the thirteenth century, mendicant friars - whose mission was to preach to the people rather than to live cloistered lives - became central to the spirituality practiced in towns.

Rural Life

From: http://www.bl.uk

In the Middle Ages, the majority of the population lived in the countryside, and some 85 percent of the population could be described as peasants. Peasants worked the land to yield food, fuel, wool and other resources. The countryside was divided into estates, run by a lord or an institution, such as a monastery or college. A social hierarchy divided the peasantry: at the bottom of the structure were the serfs, who were legally tied to the land they worked. They were obliged both to grow their own food and to labour for the landowner. They were in effect owned by the landowner. At the upper end were the freemen who were often enterprising smallholders, renting land from the lord, or even owning land in their own right, and able to make considerable amounts of money. Other workers carried out trades such as basket-weaving or bee keeping. A complex web of ties formalised by a sworn oath defined the relationships between kings, lords, vassals, serfs and so on.

Images from rural life

It is possible to catch glimpses of rural life painted on the pages of medieval manuscripts, though it must be remembered that such images were almost always made for the wealthy patrons who had commissioned the works and so reflect their perspective on country life rather than that of those lower down the social scale. An interesting example of this is an image from a fine thirteenth century manuscript made in Paris, which shows a lazy ploughman, asleep by a tree as his team sit doing nothing; the ploughman represents ‘idleness’. Below 'Labour' is symbolised by a sower scattering seed, who is visually likened to the powerful David in the act of hurling a stone at Goliath.

A wonderful visual record of life on a fourteenth century manorial estate in England is painted in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter, a deluxe illuminated manuscript made for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, a Lincolnshire lord, and his family. Uniquely, a cycle of images shows the agricultural cycle from the preparation of the ground and sowing wheat to its harvest and transport. The cycle includes absorbing details, such as a man using a slingshot to hurl rocks at crows to scare them away from a freshly ploughed field.

The conclusion of this cycle shows the lord of the manor, Geoffrey Luttrell, and his household being served supper. Interestingly, this scene takes place under the verses of Psalm 114:4: 'I met with trouble and sorrow: and I called upon the name of the Lord'.

This juxtaposition of 'the Lord' with Lord Luttrell seems to indicate the role of the manorial lord as a protector, in legal and practical terms, of his household and tenants.

Through the year

The calendars of medieval prayer books reveal that time was measured out by the movement of the heavens; by religious saints' days and feast days; and also according to the seasons and agricultural cycle. Images of the Labours of the Months in calendars often show labourers pruning vines (March), reaping wheat (July), or knocking acorns from oak trees for pigs (October) which are later slaughtered (November); in other months, we see the gentry enjoying the benefits of this labour, for example feasting (January), or indulging in leisure activities. In April, gentlemen are sometimes shown hawking, and in May, elegantly dressed lovers are shown strolling in a meadow.

 

 

The margins of a law book illuminated in London c.1340 include images of ale houses, usually marked with a broom jutting out from the peak of the roof, communal bakers to which villagers could bring their risen loaves for baking, and mills to which grain could be brought for grinding. These images are not without a sense of irony: in one pair of images, for example, a woman brings a sack of wheat to a miller for grinding; in the next image, she is shown setting the mill alight, presumably as rather extreme revenge against an unscrupulous miller.

Church

The Church was the single most dominant institution in medieval life, its influence pervading almost every aspect of people's lives. Its religious observances gave shape to the calendar; its sacramental rituals marked important moments in an individual's life (including baptism, confirmation, marriage, the eucharist, penance, holy orders and the last rites); and its teachings underpinned mainstream beliefs about ethics, the meaning of life and the afterlife.

The Pope

The headquarters of the western Church was Rome. For most of the medieval period, this was the chief residence of the Pope, who was regarded as the successor of St Peter. Christ had appointed Peter the chief apostle, and gave him the 'keys to the kingdom of heaven (Gospel of St Matthew 16:19) which, according to tradition, were inherited by his successors. The western church maintained the status and powers of St Peter devolved to his papal successors; however, the primacy of the Pope was rejected by the Eastern Church, which had a distinct hierarchy, theology and liturgy. In medieval art, the Church was symbolised by a woman, Ecclesia, who was sometimes shown overpowering her blindfolded persecutor Synagoga (or Synagogue, the Jewish house of prayer).

The Church system

The success of the Church as a dominant force can be attributed in no small measure to its highly developed organisation, which over the course of the Middle Ages developed a sophisticated system of governance, law and economy.

The institutional Church can be divided into two unequal parts: the larger of the two was the secular church, and the other was the regular church, so called because its members followed a monastic rule (regula, in Latin). The secular church, attended by the general population, was carved into regions governed by Archbishops, and their territory was in turn divided into areas known as diocese, which were administered by bishops. The parish church was the basic unit of the Christian community, providing the sacraments required by the lay community. For most medieval Christians, religious experience was focused on a parish church which they attended, at least in theory, on Sundays and religious festivals.

The regular church, by contrast, consisted of men and women who had sworn vows of obedience, celibacy and poverty. Most of these people lived in communities governed by a 'rule', a book of instructions. The most influential and widespread rule was the Rule of St Benedict (c.620-630), which set out a detailed routine consisting of manual labour, prayer and study.

Religious orders

Numerous other religious orders, some stricter and others more lenient, proliferated in the Middle Ages: these can be categorised as monastic orders, mendicant orders, and military orders. Monks and nuns tried to remove themselves as much as possible from the secular world, ideally living in communities with minimal contact with the outside world.

Derived from the Latin word 'to beg' (mendicare), the mendicants were orders who engaged with ordinary people by preaching to them and hearing confession.

The military orders were made up of knights who participated in the crusades which sought to capture the Holy Land and convert Muslims to Christianity.

Pilgrimages

Pilgrimages to holy places enabled the faithful to atone from their sins, seek miraculous cures and extend their experience of the world. Bodily remains of saints, and also objects associated with them (such as the Virgin's mantle, the holiest relic at Chartres Cathedral), were the star attractions for pilgrims. Pilgrims might travel relatively short distnaces to see and touch the shrines of local saints, or undertake more ambitious (and dangerous) journeys. The most popular destinations were Rome, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Holy Land, and Canterbury. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, famously set on a journey from London to Thomas a Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral, presents a sometimes sharply ironic view of the pilgrims and their motives.

Dissent

The Church aggressively struggled against dissenters within and without: Christians who disagreed with the Church's teachings were considered heretics, and could be physically punished or even killed. Those of other faiths were also treated harshly. Jews who lived within Christian territories were, at best, tolerated, though episodes of extreme anti-Semitism are numerous; even after Jews were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290, they remained a focus for popular hatred and vilification. The series of Crusades against non-Christians and heretics began in 1095, with an armed mission to the Middle East.

In the past, the Middle Ages was often characterised as the 'Age of Faith', but now it is recognised that this moniker conceals the complexity of the medieval religious culture. Christianity was the dominant religion, but not everyone followed the faith with the same intensity: judging from legislation and sermons encouraging lay people to attend church and observe its teachings, many people were lukewarm in the faith, while others were openly or covertly sceptical.

 

 
Make a Free Website with Yola.