Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

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Epub ISBN: 9781409070450

Version 1.0

  

This book is published to accompany the television series
Terry Jones' Medieval Lives
produced by Oxford Film and Television for BBC Television and first broadcast on BBC2 in 2004.

First published in hardback 2004

This paperback edition published 2005

Reprinted 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007

Copyright © Fegg Features and Sunstone Films 2004

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

ISBN-13: 978 0 563 52275 1

Published by BBC Books, Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane, London W12 0TT

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Commissioning editor: Sally Potter

Project editors: Helena Caldon and Sarah Reece

Copy editor: Tessa Clarke

Designer: Martin Hendry

Picture researcher: Sarah Hopper

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PICTURE CREDITS

BBC Worldwide would like to thank the following for providing photographs and for permission to reproduce copyright material. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright holders, we would like to apologize should there have been any errors or omissions.

Plate Section 1

P1 top: Giraudon/Art Resource, NY; p1 below, p2 top, p5 top and p7 below: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis; p2 below: The Art Archive/Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana/Venice/Dagli Orti; p3 top: The Art Archive/British Library, London; p3 below: Fotoarchiv Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck; p4. The Masters and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; p5 below and p6: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; p7 top: British Library, London; p7 left: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis; p8 top: Topfoto/Woodmansterne; p8 below: The Art Archive/Museo di Capodimonte, Naples/Dagh Orti (A).

Plate Section 2

P1 top: Fortean Picture Library; p1 below: Hereford Cathedral/Bridgeman Art Library; p2 top: The Art Archive/Dagli Orti; p2 below, p3 below and p8 below: British Library, London; p3 top: Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Art Library; p4: Tate Picture Library, London; p5 top: Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library; p5 below: The Art Archive/Real Biblioteca de lo Escorial/Dagh Orti; p6: British Library/HIP; p7 top: With special authorization of the city of Bayeaux/Bridgeman Art Library; p7 below: Topham Picture-point; p8 top: National Gallery, London.

CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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T
ERRY'S DAD USED THE WORD ‘MEDIEVAL
' as a term of abuse: ‘That plumbing is positively medieval,' he'd say. It was one that people used about anything that didn't work very well or that was barbaric. Even today's newspapers talk about ‘cruelty that is truly medieval'.

In this book we're not trying to prove that there was no such thing as cruelty in the Middle Ages or that we've lost out on some beautiful experience by introducing flushing lavatories. But we would like to readjust the spectacles through which we view the medieval world. And the first thing you might notice, when you try on these new spectacles of ours, is that the ‘medieval world' itself starts to vanish – or at least becomes remarkably blurred. Not a very good start for a new pair of specs, you might think . . .

MIDDLE AGES? WHAT MIDDLE AGES?

‘Medieval' means belonging to the Middle Ages. Of course, nobody then thought of the period as the Middle Ages. For them – as for everyone who has ever lived – they were living in the modern world.

The idea that there was a ‘middle time' that separated that modern world from antiquity first appears in a letter from a Renaissance bishop in 1469. Giovanni Andrea, like many of his contemporaries, was so besotted with the splendours of ancient Greece and Rome that he thought the classical world was the only basis for civilization. He took pride in the fact that his own world was returning to its values, and was therefore at pains to distinguish it from the
media tempesta
(middle time) – that bleak interlude between then and ‘now' when the world was deep in dirt and ignorance.

Of course, we could tell him that he was himself living in the Middle Ages, poor deluded chap.

The phrase ‘middle ages' first turned up in English in the seventeenth century, and right from the start it carried with it a judgement – it was never just a chronological expression – and that judgement is the same today as it was in the seventeenth century: from the fourth century
AD
(or was it the fifth? or sixth?) until the Renaissance, Europe was sunk in feudal superstitious ignorance that needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Medieval people, we are invited to suppose, lived out their lives in a kind of fairy tale, unaware of science or real learning, under the tyrannical rule of feudal overlords.

Nowadays we tend to divide this epoch into the ‘Dark Ages', which in England apparently ended in 1066, and the ‘Middle Ages', which lasted until the crown landed on the head of a Henry Tudor in 1485. But even though this is today enshrined in school and university syllabuses, we should beware of thinking of it as a ‘fact'. It isn't a fact at all. It's simply a convenient division – an invention of historians.

Of course, historical ‘periods' can be useful. Historians argue about the significance and reality of decisive moments, turning points in history, but it seems absurd to deny that there are real instances of change, when nothing will be the same again, and which force us to think of the past in ‘periods'. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 was such a moment in the history of England.

There is an entire academic industry devoted to demonstrating that feudalism existed in England before 1066, that William I changed few of the laws of England, that warfare was not so very different before and after the invasion, that in fact England was little changed by the Norman Conquest. But we all know in our bones that something fundamental did change when Harold fell.

At least half, and perhaps three-quarters, of the male aristocracy of England perished between 1066 and 1070. Their families were dispossessed, and many of their widows and daughters fled to nunneries to avoid being forced into marriage with William's followers. London burned, and many other towns were partly demolished. The agricultural economy was laid waste over huge areas, and in the North repression left nothing but famine, reducing people to cannibalism.

This was a moment of irrevocable change; the Conquest would not be undone. England was permanently removed from the Scandinavian orbit and bound to France. There were some who tried to reverse this. Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, was executed in 1076 for supporting Danish plots to drive William out. He failed; the clock would not be turned back.

Waltheof's skald (bard), Thorkill, wrote a lament in Old Norse:

The end of our ‘period' is more debatable. There is no comparable moment of change 400 or 500 years later. The defeat of Richard III and the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth on 22 August 1485 certainly put an end to the long struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England, and established a new dynasty which was able to rule with reinforced authority. But it hardly compares with 1066, when the entire land suffered wholesale subjection to new men with new ways and a different language.

However, there was one moment when everything changed irreversibly. It came in 1536, with Henry VIII's suppression of the religious houses – the monasteries. In 1066, William I had given over a quarter of the land in England to the Church. His conquest bound the country not only to France but also to Rome.

By the time of the Dissolution there were about 550 religious houses in England, and the monks in them were referred to as ‘the pope's army'.

The whole of Europe was changing rapidly, and the breakup of the one universal Church was the most powerful symbol of that change. In England, the Dissolution of the Monasteries was its visible and dramatic product. The whole religious infrastructure was transformed; the Church of England that emerged would produce a very different society from that produced by the Church of Rome.

Western Europe was already well on the way to developing distinct national states, and the break with Rome confirmed that process in England. On a political level, in a country that had been conquered by William under a papal banner, Rome was now stripped of any authority. In terms of language, in a country where Latin had been the language of learning and French the language of power, the vernacular had taken over. The divergence of English law and custom from that of the Continent, which had been developing steadily over centuries, was now finalized by the elimination of the Pope's jurisdiction from canon law. For a few years, England retained a tiny foothold on the continent of Europe at Calais, but the English Channel had become a much broader sea than in the past, and ‘abroad' a far more foreign place than it had been before.

A long era had truly come to an end.

WHO WERE MEDIEVAL PEOPLE?

Having established, for the sake of convenience, that our ‘Middle Ages' (which never existed as an entity) was the period from 1066 to 1536, we have to recognize that we are talking about 470 years.

This is about as long as the time between the end of the Middle Ages and the present day.

Obviously, in such a long period things change. People in the mid-eleventh century inhabited a very different world from that of the early sixteenth, and did not live out lives that were always the same against an unchanging backdrop. So the very idea of telling stories of ‘medieval lives' needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

But, given the right amount of salt, we should find that we can strip away the mythology of medievalism and enter a world in which people's lives seem remarkably familiar – a world where decisions were made about social and political issues that still impact profoundly on us today. Stripping away the mythology will also allow us to glimpse how much we have lost by dumping centuries of art, argument, thought, literature and discovery into that catch-all ‘medieval' dustbin. Some wonderful things have been truly lost, and we would be better off recovering them.