Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Education in medieval England

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England’s medieval era dragged on long enough for a lot of things to change, and I’m not going to give you dates because they vary depending on who you ask. I’m not even going to give you centuries. We’ll start with the Norman invasion, not because that marks the beginning of the medieval period but because I wrote about schooling in Anglo-Saxon England last week. If you want to read about that, follow the link.

So that’s our fairly arbitrary starting point. When does the medieval period end? 

Oh, you know, eventually. Like I said, it depends on who you ask. What matters for our purposes is this: life changed a lot and schooling changed with it. Every so often I’ll narrow down the time period, but to some extent, inevitably, I’ll be rolling all those years in together. Sorry. You want anything less generalized, go find a real historian. They’re wonderful, and unlike me, they actually know stuff. Some of them write beautifully, although that’s not a requirement, unfortunately.

Irrelevant photo (yes, we’re back to them): daffodils for sale outside the shop. I don’t know what the weather’s doing where you are, but here it’s spring.

Latin, French, and English

Medieval schooling was mostly in the hands of the church, and for a long time it concentrated on producing people who knew enough reading and Latin to oil the wheels of Christianity, because those wheels could only be oiled in the church’s very own, special language, Latin. To make Latin even more special, it wasn’t anyone’s native language anymore, so everyone involved had to learn it, word by rule by painful declension.

Do I sound like I have a little trouble taking this seriously? Sorry. You need a certain mindset to talk about it with a straight face. I don’t have it.

The Normans took over a country with a network of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries–and probably some convents. Nuns had originally been part of dual monasteries, where nuns and monks lived side by side. When those were closed down, I believe convents were founded but that’s a different topic and we’re not going down that rabbit hole today. Many of the cathedrals and monasteries ran schools, and so did some of the churches, and as the Normans took control of the church structure and positions, they also took control of, reorganized, and eventually expanded the network of schools.

That expansion wasn’t because the Normans valued education more than the Anglo-Saxons. It was because time passed and society changed, as society will when time passes. 

The Normans left the schools in the hands of the church–I doubt anyone could imagine anything else–and since they were still far more French than English, they imported books and teachers from France, and students stopped translating Latin into English and translated it into French, the language of the conquerors, which quickly became a language the people who did business with or served the conquerors learned. An article I’m leaning on heavily here defines that group as “the middle classes in towns, and the whole cultured and clerkly class.” 

Move outside those circles, though, and people spoke English. 

In the early years after the conquest, not many aristocrats wasted their time learning to read. They had people to do that for them. Their children learned the important stuff: how to fight, hunt, ride, fight, behave well at mealtimes, and look down on the classes below them. And a few other things as well, but we’ll leave all that offstage. We’re talking about schooling, not other forms of education. If we broaden the topic too much, I’ll drown.

The dominance of the French language held until–well, these things are gradual, but the Edwardship of Edward III (1327 -1377; you’re welcome) marked a turning point: the aristocracy had somehow noticed that its country spoke an entirely different language than it did and thought, Gee, maybe we outta try that out ourselves. 

Bit by bit, English replaced French in the classroom and in respectable circles and gained acceptance as a language for business, for literature, and for anything I’ve left out. By 1420, English had pretty well shoved the French language (although not the Norman aristocracy who’d imposed it) off the island.  

Latin was losing its grip, although it remained the language of the church. In 1731–long after the medieval period had packed its bags and gone home–it was finally dropped by the law courts. You could now be summarily convicted of a crime in a language you understood. 

Isn’t progress wonderful?

Not unconnected with Latin’s weakened grip, literacy grew and an increasing number of lay people got an education.

 

The schools themselves

These days, learning Latin sounds like a trick best left to academics, but in post-conquest England it was vocational, and so were the schools that taught it. 

  • Song schools trained church choristers, and for that they needed at least some Latin. 
  • Grammar schools provided the education you’d need to become a lawyer, clerk, statesman, civil servant, priest, or cleric, so more Latin. Grammar at the time didn’t mean just the structure of a language. It meant reading–especially aloud–along with comprehension and commentary. l

Different sources mention a few other kinds of school, but not necessarily the same ones, which makes me nervous, but Oxford Bibliographies sounds impressive, so let’s rely on that. It mentions:

  • Reading schools, which–no prize for guessing this one–taught basic reading, although in literate families kids were likely to learn this at home. That’s as far as most girls got. If you go any higher, you’ll find only boys. 
  • Specialized schools, often connected to cathedrals and monasteries, teaching logic, philosophy, canon law, and philosophy. Another group of specialized schools taught what a business person would need to know, including French.

So we’re still talking basically about vocational training, but for fairly elevated vocations.

 

The students

Before the 14th century, if you wanted to go to school you’d be well advised to have parents with enough money to pay your fees and keep you fed and housed and wearing the right clothes. Beyond the elementary level, you’d be well advised to be born male. So most students would’ve been the sons of freeholders, tradesmen, officials, or gentlemen. They were probably the sons of women as well–that’s the usual way of things but hey, who cared about that?

By the time we get to 1179, the church’s Third Lateran Council decreed that every cathedral should have a schoolmaster to teach ”the clerks of that church and poor scholars freely”–in other words, without charge. By the 14th century, we find some wealthy individuals and the occasional guild endowing schools, sometimes with the aim of teaching the poor, which made it possible for the sons of peasants to attend. But becoming a priest was one of the few legal ways for a person to escape serfdom, and until 1460 it was the only way a bondsman was allowed to send his son to school, so a peasant’s child didn’t have a wide spread of vocational choices. 

It wasn’t just school fees and serfdom that kept the poor outside the school doors. Their families had to manage without the wages the boy would otherwise have earned or the work he would have done. Kids had to pay their way through life from an early age.

Overall, literacy spread throughout the medieval period–not (I’d argue) because the country’s rulers became more enlightened or the rich more benevolent but because towns and commerce were growing, and with them the number of artisans and craftsmen, creating a class of people who needed to read, probably write, and certainly work with numbers. Their kids needed an education. There was benevolence involved in funding free schools, but it didn’t so much magic up a literate group of people as respond to a need society had recently developed. 

 

Two more points about students

1, Most boys started school at seven and those who went on to college might’ve started at fourteen, but it wasn’t unusual for adult students to be sprinkled in among the kids. As David Gillard says in Education in the UK (although the part I’m leaning on covers the period long before the UK existed), in an era before clocks or when clocks were still rare, “Age seems to have mattered little. This was characteristic of medieval society.” Time was still a liquid and age only semi-solid. 

2, It seems to have been a given that being a student involved being beaten. It was all part of the joy of learning. 

 

The schools

As education expanded, the chancellor of a cathedral could license someone to teach its school and grant him a monopoly on the teaching of grammar in that city. Or if the bishop waved the correct magic feather over the correct piece of parchment, the chancellor could also license other schoolmasters in the city. 

Did the chancellor or the cathedral make money from the arrangement? Believing it didn’t is beyond me. 

Schools also opened in an increasing number of towns, and assorted patrons claimed jurisdiction over them–some to organize and regulate them and (until the Third Lateran Council spoiled their fun) some to charge the schoolmaster for the right to teach. 

Do you see where things are headed here? Not only are more students, and more categories of students, being educated, but schools are inching away from the church. The articles I’ve read call them secular schools, although they’re secular only in churchly terms: they were out in the world, not enclosed in cathedrals or cloisters, but they were still religious to the core. The masters might now be priests instead of monks or friars, and they were open to any student the master accepted–assuming the family could pay or an endowment provided for them. In the 12th century, there were 30 secular schools in England.

With time, endowed schools became more common, and wealthy benefactors or guilds began to establish chantries, which had their own priests to celebrate masses for the repose of the benefactors’ souls–and, in an early version of two-for-the-price-of-one, often to conduct a school. 

And with all that out of the way, Gillard (remember  him? the last link I threw in?) quotes Never Mind Who to say that most teaching probably took place outside of organized institutions, making it casual, sporadic, and (I’d add) hard to count. Parish priests–if they were literate enough themselves; and not all were–were likely to do some local teaching. Parents who could afford to hire a tutor, or who had someone literate enough in the household, might educate their children at home.

From 14th or 15th century onwards, some endowed schools took both fee-paying students and “poor and needy scholars, of good character and well-conditioned, of gentlemanly habits, able for school, completely learned in reading, plain-song and old Donatus.” (Gillard quotes that. I’m stealing from him.) They drew students from across the country, not just the locality, and increasingly fee-paying kids edged out those annoying poor or relatively poor people students. Those schools developed into England’s network of public schools, which were no more public than I’m the prime minister. They’re private schools, perpetuating the country’s class structure.

Two of the earliest independent schools were Winchester and Eton. These days Eton costs £63,000 a year. The median annual income last year was £37,430. The annual income for a 40-hour-week on minimum wage was £23,795.20. But yeah, don’t let that slow you down.

 

The schoolmasters

Initially, teachers were mostly monks or priests, and teaching wasn’t a high-status job, so it was usually off-loaded onto junior clerks. In the 15th century, laymen began moving into the job, but priests still had a built-in advantage: endowed schools were often linked to churches. 

When schools looked for a teacher to hire, they generally advertised for a man–and it would’ve been a man–who knew grammar and had an honest reputation. Beyond that, nobody seemed to care. 

 

Higher education

Oxford University dates back to the 12th century and Cambridge to the 13th. They taught the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric led to the degree of bachelor; the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy led to the degree of master.

They were also vocational. You came out prepared to teach, preach, administer, or–damn, I can’t make verbs out of these next two: be an official or a lawyer. The pursuit of knowledge for its own silly sake was a luxury the society couldn’t afford–or else it didn’t want to or couldn’t imagine such a thing. Why should it? If you wanted to know the truth, all you had to do was look to the scriptures, the churchly fathers, and Aristotle. You read, you memorized, and you analyzed. You did not get too creative. 

Starting in the 13th century, the educated reaches of medieval society began assimilating Greek and Arabic science, medicine, and philosophy (that’s how Aristotle got on the list), and struggling to make them fit inside the framework of medieval Christianity. Cue lots of controversy. It wasn’t always an easy fit, but that’s a tale for another post.

Education in Anglo-Saxon England

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I’d planned to write about medieval education, starting in the year 1000, since as well all know nothing happened before that, but I made the mistake of taking a quick look at what didn’t happen and all that nothing got interesting, so let’s talk about education in Anglo-Saxon England instead. I’ll get to the stuff that happened later. 

Anglo-Saxon England ended with a crash in 1066, when the Normans invaded and we start talking about it as plain ol’ England. For a starting point we’ll take 597. You could argue reasonably enough that Anglo-Saxon England started in 410, when the Romans packed up their sandals and went home, but during that 410 to 597 stretch the Roman system of schooling seems to have collapsed and no one seems to have organized an alternative. Kids learned what their parents and their whoevers thought they needed to know, but it doesn’t seem to have involved the schoolroom.

I’m hiding behind the word seems a lot there. It’s amazing how much isn’t known about this stretch of time, and I won’t claim to know all of what is known. Let’s just move on.

That changed in 597, when a group of monks arrived from Rome, bringing with them both the Latin language and the Latin alphabet. 

 

Why Latin gets a mention

I’ll admit to a built-in bias toward the Latin alphabet–it’s the first one I learned and the only one I don’t have to sound out letter by letter–but it’s not like the Anglo-Saxons were illiterate before the monks stepped, seasick and salt-encrusted, onto English soil. They used a runic alphabet. It doesn’t mean much to me, and I doubt it does to you, but an alphabet it was. If you can read it, leave me your email address and I’ll send you a batch of homemade brownies compressed into an attachment. 

A runic alphabet. If I’m lucky, it’s the Anglo-Saxon one, but I can’t swear to that.

 

The thing about that runic alphabet is that most Anglo-Saxons couldn’t read it any better than you and I can. 

And after the monks brought the Latin alphabet? Same story: not many people could read the new alphabet, and things stayed that way for many a century. Reading was a specialized skill that a limited number of people needed, and the country got by just fine with the very small group who’d learned the trick. 

In spite of that, the Latin language and alphabet did make a difference. Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, and the religion had a baked-in need for people who could read it. In other words, the arrival of Christianity expanded the number of people who needed to know the secret handshake.

I’ll come back to that. Really I will. 

Latin was also Europe’s shared language. It allowed scholars, governments, and business people to understand each other, and that had a certain fairness to it, since nobody spoke it anymore so no one got to complain about favoritism. 

Should we backtrack here? 

Oh, go on, let’s: spoken Latin went out of use gradually, between 200 and 500 CE according to Global Language Services, which also says it became a dead language between 600 and 750 CE. Make of that what you can. My math’s terrible but I do recognize a difference between 500 and 600, and the difference between a dead language and one’s that’s no longer spoken is more than I can explain.

Maybe we should go with the Ancient Language Institute’s estimate, which is that (a) it’s complicated, (b) Latin didn’t so much die as morph into multiple separate languages, and (c) 476 CE is as good a date as any other.

We’ve gone off topic, haven’t we? I just love off-topic. But let’s go back to that handful of seasick monks landing in England. Their assignment was to convert the country–or countries, really, since what we call England was a bunch of kingdomlets–to the Roman brand of Christianity. 

Why did I say Roman? Because Cornwall and Wales had already converted to a Celtic form of Christianity, and we’ll leave that alone for now or we’ll never get to the next paragraph. 

In addition to a language and an alphabet, the monks brought the aforementioned churchly imperatives that demanded a literate clergy. And not just literate: literate in Latin. (See? I told you I’d get back to that.) If the church’s sacraments weren’t in Latin, everyone would be sent back five squares and stay there till they rolled a pair of sixes. On top of which absolutely no one would be allowed into heaven.

So one of the monks’ first tasks was to magic up a group of people native to this new country who could read, write, and mumble in Latin. In other words, they needed not just converts but priests to lead the converts, so they set up schools.

In The World of Anglo-Saxon Learning (it’s online but it’s a download, so no link; sorry), Patrizia Lendinara says in the earliest schools they set up “will have [had] the severely functional [aim] of teaching the future clergy how to read and understand the Bible and how to perform the liturgy. . . . Their principal concern was not with classical literature, nor with educating laymen: their sole work was God’s work, the opus Dei, that is, the performance of the Divine Office at regular intervals during each day; and in order to understand the Office, Latin was essential.” 

As the religion spread, more monasteries were founded; churches and cathedrals were built. And most monasteries and cathedrals ran schools, expanding the pool of literate specialists. 

Until late in the Anglo-Saxon period many monastic communities included both men and women, and some of them were led by women. The focus was still on educating boys–the church needed priests and women couldn’t be priests–but at least some of the schools also educated girls. I’d love to know how the numbers compared but I don’t think we’re going to find that. 

Among aristocratic Anglo-Saxon women, the literacy rate was high. For the era, of course.

 

What did the schools teach?

The evidence is sketchy. They taught reading and writing–and it wasn’t a given that a person who could read could also write. Writing–quill, remember, on parchment or vellum–was a difficult art, not something you mastered just so you could write yourself a quick note saying, “Pick up half a dozen eggs, you idiot.” Students learned to form perfect, beautiful letters. It was a more specialized skill than reading and nobles had scribes to do their writing for them. 

The schools also taught Latin, because that was the whole point of the exercise, along with heavy doses of religion. Bede–one of the few sources on the period–wrote that the school at Canterbury “gave their hearers instruction not only in the books of holy Scripture but also in the art of metre, astronomy and ecclesiastical computation.” Aldhelm, who’d been a student at Canterbury, adds that they also taught Roman law.

Classes would’ve involved a lot of memorization, and how could they not? No one could consult Lord Google, books were the wildest of luxury items. Public libraries were a thousand or more years in the future. If you hoped to use a piece of information at some point, you needed to store it safely in your head.

Latin was taught, in part, using a book called a colloquy, which gave students scenarios to play out in Latin, pushing them to use the language. Two seem to have survived, one dutifully embracing the monastic lifestyle and one, ahem, somewhat less dutifully showing what History Today calls “aspects of daily life in the classroom . . . monks throwing alcohol-fuelled parties, negotiating kisses from women, riding into town to get more beer and going to the privy with younger pupils, unaccompanied. . . . One colloquy . . . sets out a dialogue between master and pupil in which they exchange a vast array of scatological insults, including the memorable ‘May a beshitting follow you ever.’ . . . In one scene, . . . an older student barters and gains a commission to copy a manuscript for a fee of 12 silver coins.” 

 

Education in English

In a country that spoke English, even if it wasn’t a version of English we’d understand today, the spread of monastic education created a layer of educated people who read and wrote only Latin, which you may be aware is an entirely different language from English. That matched the situation in Europe, but Alfred the Great (Anglo-Saxon king, 871 to 899, known at the time as plain ol’ King Alfred) saw it as a problem and had a number of books translated into English. He pushed the country in the direction of using the spoken language for government documents, leaving a legacy of administrative documents written not in Latin but in–gasp!–-his country’s own language. 

He also founded a school that taught children to read and write English, and if that wasn’t unusual enough, according to that contradiction in terms History Today it taught all kids.

I’d take that with a grain of salt, though. The Britannica says the school was inclusive in that it taught the sons not only of aristocrats but also of freemen “of adequate means.” That leaves out the sons of slaves and of freemen of inadequate means. It also leaves out girls.  

Yeah, I know. It’s all about the context, though, right? For the times, that was inclusive. 

Whatever the school’s limits, Al the G’s drive to use the spoken language in written documents helped create a body of Anglo-Saxon literature.

 

But back to Latin . . .

Teaching Latin had a built-in problem, which is that the early Romans–gasp–weren’t Christians, and they wrote in (you got it!) Latin. And once you opened that linguistic door, you couldn’t entirely control what readers would drag through it. They were likely to read stuff the pope didn’t approve of. So Pope Gregory (590 – 604) wrote to a bishop (in Gaul, not England), “The same lips cannot sing the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ. Consider yourself how serious and shocking it is that a bishop should pursue an activity unsuitable even for a pious layman.”

I expect that danger hovered over the teaching of Latin for a long, pious and semi-pious time.

Eventually, English church schools were educating enough people to send missionaries out of the country, primarily to what’s now Germany, and to place scholars in impressive spots in Europe, reflecting impressiveness back on their increasingly impressive schools. Be impressed, please.

By the tenth century, things seem to have taken a nosedive. Viking raids and  settlement and all their associated wars would’ve had a lot to do with that. The century before,  Al the Great himself had written about how few scholars were able to read and write in either Latin or English, and he set out to remedy it. By the tenth-century, though, the criticism was tied up with a monastic reform movement led by the Benedictines that drove secular clergy*, many of them married, out of the monasteries, replacing them with celibate monks. As is wise when reading the commentaries left by any political or religious wrestling match, we might want to be a touch skeptical about the claims of scholarly decline, or at least about its cause. They might be accurate but they might also be overstated. Or just plain false. 

Aren’t we lucky stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore?

Whatever the situation was, the Benedictines are given the credit for a revival of Latin learning in the tenth century.

Since I bad-mouthed the Vikings a couple of paragraphs ago, I should give them their due: by the time we get to King Canute (1016 – 1035; you’re welcome; and yes, he was a Viking–or as I think we’re calling them by this point, a Norse king), we find him paying for the education not only of the sons of freemen “but also of the poor.” And by the 10th and 11th centuries, when churches, staffed by a single priest, were being built in small parishes, the priests at least had the potential to act as teachers.

The potential, you’ll notice. So did they act as teachers or didn’t they? I’m not sure. Let’s say “possibly” and sneak out before anyone notices us. We’re almost at the end of the post anyway.    

In 1066 the Normans invaded, busting up the furniture and recreating the bar fight scene from any western you ever watched on TV, before they settled down to run the place. 

And yes, I’ll admit I’m exaggerating the level of destruction–except for in the north, where I’m understating it–but let it stand. It’s shorthand. I’ll talk about education in Norman England next week.

* And you thought history today was a contradiction in terms.

Black British history: the parts that get left out

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Black people have been part of British society at least since the Tudor era. I could as easily say, “since the Roman era,” but we’re trying to keep this short so let’s skip over that. 

Who’s the we in that last paragraph? That’d be me. I’m trying to make you feel included. Don’t you just love how subtle I am?

 

The Tudor era

The work of writing Black people back into English (or British–take your pick) history is relatively new and seems to be at the stage where historians are still popping up saying, “Found one!” and “Found another!” Information is scattered and finding it depends on digging through archives full of information that’s no help at all. Starting in the time of Henry VIII, the Church of England kept records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, so that’s one place to look, but sometimes they record people’s ethnicity and sometimes they don’t. Nothing was standardized. Even so, they’re a rich source of information.

At this point, we have enough information to know that Black people were present as musicians, as sailors, as ambassadors, as weavers, as servants, as seamstresses, as traders. A few were the sons of African kings. One was described as an independent single woman. She lived in a village in Gloucestershire and owned a cow–a valuable possession. Just enough is known about her to be thoroughly frustrating. What is known is that all of them were free.

Black people were present at the Tudor courts and could be found on all levels of Tudor society. According to one source, “skin colour was less important than religion, class or talent.” Some married into the overwhelmingly white population and within a few generations their descendants’ connection to Africa was likely to have been lost.

How many of us can trace our family history any further back than our grandparents or great-grandparents?

I’m going to go ahead an repeat that Black residents in Tudor England were free, and the reason I’m honking on about it because when we think of Black people living outside of Africa at this stage of history, we tend to assume they were slaves–and you see how neatly I’ve convinced you that your mind works the same way mine does. So let’s repeat that once more, in four-part harmony: They were free.

Thank you. That was gorgeous.

England wasn’t heavily involved in the slave trade yet and although English law didn’t forbid slavery it also didn’t allow for it.  

 

Slavery puts down roots

Once England did get involved in the transatlantic slave trade, it made, to use academic terminology, a shitload of money–not just from the slave trade itself but from slavery in its Caribbean colonies. (Let’s keep life simple by ignoring its colonies in North America.) But even then,, England itself muddled on in that strange in-between state where slavery wasn’t banned within its borders but also had no legal foundation. At some point, though–and I haven’t found a source that says when–enslaved people were brought to England, stayed, and continued to be slaves. 

For the most part, they were the servants of returning planters, ships’ captains, government officials, and army and navy officers. This wasn’t a flood of people, but it was a significant trickle, and English society shaped itself to this change. Having a black servant became quite the fashion among the aristocracy and the well-to-do. 

Most of the newly arrived slaves continued to work as servants. In other words, slavery didn’t become central to the economy, but they were still treated as commodities. Some were sold; some were given as gifts. And some said the era-appropriate equivalent of “screw this” and took off, which was a lot easier to do in England than in, say, Jamaica.

This part of the story is relatively easy to document: newspapers ran notices calling for the return of runaway slaves.

June 1743: a woman called Sabinah was “deluded away [from a ship bound for Jamaica] by some other Black about Whitechapel.”

February 1748: “RUN away last Thursday Morning from Mr. Gifford’s, in Brunswick-Row, Queen-Square, Great Ormond-Street, an indentur’d Negro Woman Servant, of a yellowish Cast, nam’d Christmas Bennett; she had on a dark-grey Poplin, lin’d with a grey water’d Silk … and suppos’d to be conceal’d somewhere about Whitechapel.

“Whoever harbours her after this Publication shall be severely prosecuted; and a Reward of a Guinea will be given to any Person who will give Information of her, so that she may be had again.”

Why does it say indentured? Slavery and indentured servitude weren’t identical they did overlap. Much later, it was later used as a way to abolish slavery in the colonies without abolishing slavery in the colonies. You can find that in an older post.  

A University of Glasgow project has catalogued 800 runaway slave notices.  Slavery had become an accepted part of British life. Anti-slavery activists chipped away at it through the courts and through Parliament, until even before slavery was abolished it became illegal to take a slave out of Britain without his or her agreement. That didn’t make it illegal to hold someone in slavery within the country, mind you, but it was a milestone.

 

Free Black people

Having said all that, let’s not lose sight of the free Black community, because it was still out there and it’s important to any discussion of Black British history, and of the abolition slavery in the country. 

Most Black people–free or enslaved–worked in domestic service, but I’m not sure if that’s a comment on the work available to Black people. A lot of white people worked in domestic service. I tried to find out what proportion of the population worked as domestic servants and the best I could come up with was “considerable.” So let’s say a considerable proportion of the population worked as servants and some proportion of them were Black, then we’ll duck out the door before anyone notices that those aren’t numbers. (I got the “considerable” estimate from a reputable source in case that helps.)  

What other jobs did Black people do? There’s no centralized set of records to consult, so we’re back to the historians saying, “I found one!” Some were agricultural workers, craftsmen, laborers, seamen. Single mentions include a fencing master, an actor, a fire-eater, a minister, a hairdresser, and a contortionist. The range of jobs open to women, Black or white, was narrower than the range open to men, and Black women enter the record as laundry maids, seamstresses, children’s nurses, prostitutes, and one actress with a particularly fine singing voice.

In 1731, London barred Black people from becoming apprentices. Since apprenticeship was the only way to learn and then practice a trade, this kept them out of skilled work, at least within London. 

Did you just hear a bell ring? That was the Racism Alert Bell, marking a change in the culture. Black people could no longer integrate into the larger population as easily as they used to, and skin color was no longer less important than skill or religion or money.

If you were a legally free Black person and work was hard to find, it was that much harder if you were an escaped slave. Any time you spent in public put you at risk of being recaptured. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the historical record starts to mention Black beggars. 

As a side note, my point of reference is the United States, since that’s where I spent most of my life. Compared to American racism, the British brew was mild. I don’t want to get into a my-racism-can-beat-your-racism argument, but to give a single example, Black-white marriage was unremarkable in Britain at a time when it would’ve been damn near suicidal in the US. That doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s just a reminder that no good comes of uprooting assumptions grown in one country and importing them into another. 

 

Community

By the end of the 18th century, some 15,000 Black people were living in England, most of them in port cities–London, Bristol, Liverpool–but also in towns and villages around the country. 

Or possibly it was more than that. Or less. It’s all guesswork–educated guesswork but still guesswork. So forget the numbers. We won’t get them right anyway. What matters is that a Black community was forming. Assorted white writers left us a record of Black people gathering for serious discussions as well as to drink and dance and to celebrate weddings and baptisms. It’s shallow evidence but it does tell us that people were coming together and a community was defining itself. 

Listen, you take your historical records where you can find them. Black sources exist but they’re scarce. 

The Black community played a crucial part in the movement to abolish slavery. When I asked Lord Google for the names of British abolitionists, he gave me twelve; nine of them were white. But a host of people whose names we don’t know were busy helping slaves to freedom, and somewhere between many and most of them were Black. As Peter Fryer put it somewhere in Staying Power (I’m damned if I’ll reread the whole book to find you the exact quote),  for the most part the slaves within Britain freed themselves. 

London’s East End–an integrated, working class neighborhood and a center of Black community–had safe havens, including the White Raven pub, where “Black patrons formed a frontline against bounty hunters, and the church of St. George-in-the-East, which in the mid-18th century committed itself to baptising escaped slaves.” 

Why did baptism matter? An early legal ruling opened the possibility that holding a “heathen” as a slave was okay, but not a Christian. That escape route was closed off relatively early, but the belief lingered that becoming a Christian would free a person.

In 1773, two Black men were jailed for begging and they were “visited by upwards of 300 of their countrymen” and the community “contributed largely towards their support during their confinement.”

Sir John Fielding–brother of the novelist Henry Fielding–wrote scathingly that Black people entered “into Societies and make it their Business to corrupt and dissatisfy the Mind of every fresh black Servant that comes to England.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, they made it hazardous to recapture a runaway, because they got “the Mob on their side.” Blacks brought to England grew “restless” and conceived and executed “the blackest Conspiracies against Governors and Masters.”

And don’t we just want details of that? Sorry, we’ll have to settle for a detail or two about that mob. A few years earlier, Fielding listed among its members “an infinite number of Chairmen [those weren’t people who chaired meetings, they carried people in sedan chairs], Porters, Labourers, and drunken Mechanics.”

Drawing on the participants in the Gordon riots, Fryer (remember him? Staying Power?) lists more occupations: coal heavers, shopkeepers, sailors, apprentices, journeymen, weavers–the list goes on for another line or so but let’s stop there. What’s interesting is that he’s not talking only about Black workers. They were both white and Black and saw slavery as part of a system that degraded everyone: free and enslaved, Black and white. 

This was the community into which runaway slaves disappeared. If you know the history of the Underground Railroad in the United States,  you can think of the East End as an English version: a network of places and people who would take in fugitives. Predictably, that also made the East End a magnet for the people who hunted escaped slaves. 

 

The Communities of Liberation Project

We’re coming to the end of the post and it brings us to the news item that got me started on the topic: a new project is researching the Black presence in London’s East End in roughly the period I’ve covered, and it’s inviting non-historians to get involved. They’re looking for people who live in or have a strong connection to the Tower Hamlets neighborhood–or borough if we’re being all British about this–and who have an African or African-Caribbean background. They particularly welcome “people with no specific qualifications or experience,” which wins my heart. They’ll train them in archival research.

(This is as good a place as any to answer a question that’s been annoying me for a while: why’s the place called Tower Hamlets? Because it’s near the Tower of London. And because it used to be a bunch of hamlets. But that was a long time ago. It’s now part of London’s East End.) 

The project’s hoping to “identify the places, spaces and networks in which African people lived, worked or socialised during the period of the operation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by unearthing the”names, stories and experiences of everyday life of working Londoners” as well as “the buildings or spaces, the taverns and churches, where ‘working class’ African Londoners would gather, meet and coalesce as a community.”

 

Rewriting history

If you keep your ear to the ground, you’ll have noticed two things recently: one, you have dirt in your ear, and two, a lot of self-appointed defenders of the culture are complaining about wild-eyed lefties rewriting history. What particularly sets them off is people writing about aspects of history that go beyond what they learned from their grade-school textbooks.

As your official Wild-eyed Lefty Representative (see my photo at the top of the page; look at those eyes; they’d worry anyone), I’d like to remind you that every generation rewrites history. It’s commonly known as reinterpreting it, or correcting the biases of earlier generations, or incorporating new material. Otherwise we’d still be working with 1913 textbooks, when no Black history was taught because, basically, who cared? It wasn’t important.

So am I helping to rewrite history here? You bet your ass I am. That doesn’t mean I’m inventing it. It means I look for sources who’ve done the hard work of filling in the blanks. Long may they dig through the archives.

 

A few notes

  • If you want to fill in a few blanks I’ve left, I have two earlier posts about the history of British slavery. One focuses on the legal aspects of abolition but also works as a rough outline of British slavery and slave trading. Another focuses on abolition and the substitution of indentured servitude for slavery. (Isn’t progress wonderful?)  After you chase those down, I expect you’ll be sick of me and we can all ignore each other for another week.
  • I don’t have a topic up my sleeve to write about next. England has plenty of history left but I feel like I’m running out of ideas. If you have any suggestions, questions, or areas you’re particularly interested in I’d love to hear about them. I can’t promise to write about them all, but if something grabs my imagination and if I can find enough material to work with (neither of those is guaranteed), I’ll do it. 
  • In the meantime, thanks for reading. And if you leave comments, thanks for that. If they make me laugh or think or do both, even more thanks. 

Did the Roman Empire stick its nose into Cornwall?

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When I first moved to Cornwall–the southwestern tip of Britain–friends told us, “The Romans never got this far. They stopped in Exeter.” They sounded so certain that I never thought to cross-check that with reality–or with the internet, which isn’t quite the same thing but on a good day might be in conversation with it. If I had, I’d have learned that a small Roman fort in Nanstallon–yes, that’s in Cornwall–was excavated between 1965 and 1969. I moved here in 2006 and–c’mon, my math is bad but even I can figure out which came first. 

In other words, some Roman presence has been documented since the 1960s. I mention that not to make my friends sound silly–anyone who puts up with me can’t be all bad–but to establish the common belief that Cornwall escaped Roman occupation.

More recently, three additional Roman forts have been found in Cornwall, as well as one possible Roman-influenced villa and a few random finds that indicate trade, influence, presence, or whatever you like along those lines. They change the picture, although we can argue about how if you like.

Irrelevant photo: Snowdrops–one of the very early spring flowers. Or depending on how you count these things, winter flowers.

 

What do we know about the Romans in Cornwall? 

Not much, even with four forts and one possible Roman-influenced etc. Cornwall didn’t make it into Rome’s written accounts–at least not the ones that survived–so we have to rely on archeology, which in turn relies on interpretation. However well educated that interpretation may be, it leaves gaps.

Archeology also relies on digging in the right place and a lot of Cornwall is still un-archeologized.

With all those hesitations in place, the Roman presence looks like this: they came, they saw, they left–right after they broke some pottery, lost some coins, and built some forts and one possible Roman-influenced etc. Or most of them left anyway. The exception to that is one fort and an associated civilian town, which were occupied into the third or fourth centuries, not just for a small handful of decades.

The other forts might have been abandoned because the soldiers were needed in other places more urgently–to deal with uprisings, invasions on the far borders of the empire, efforts to conquer more territory, anything of that sort.

 

What was Rome doing in Britain anyway?

Britain had minerals, and Rome wanted them. It also had good hunting dogs (yes, seriously) and people, who could be enslaved. Yeah, the good old days. Don’t you just long for them? On top of that, Rome’s emperor, Claudius, wanted a nice little conquest to puff up his CV: it would keep the Legions on his side. 

The Legions? They were the core of his army. If they weren’t happy, they’d make sure that he wasn’t either.

So in 43 CE Rome invaded, but they landed a long way to the east of Cornwall, and a number of hostile tribes and heavy fighting stood between them. We won’t slog through all of that, just say that the nearest major military base (and later Roman civilian settlement) really did end up being in Exeter, which is 45 miles from Cornwall’s border, only they didn’t have cars back then, and the highway hadn’t been built, so those 45 miles were longer than they are now. And part of the route went over moors, which would’ve been hard traveling, so stretch those miles out a little more, please. 

 

And in Cornwall?

The forts Rome did build in Cornwall weren’t just near the mouths of rivers, they were also close to some of those nifty minerals I mentioned. Cornwall’s best known for tin and copper but has a few other minerals as well. One article mentions silver. Another talks about iron. As I researched this, AI popped up to add slate to the list, and I’ll tell you just the tiniest bit smugly that slate is not now and never has been a mineral. * 

For the record: this blog is written by a human. Every so often I wonder what an AI program would come back with if I asked it to write something in my style, but I haven’t asked. I’m not sure I want to know.

Enough of that. Tin was particularly important in both the Bronze Age (no tin, no bronze) and later, when it was needed to make pewter. Add lead to tin and you can make lovely tableware, jewelry, and statuettes, all of which the Romans liked. While you’re at it, you can give any number of people lead poisoning.

The forts were also close to the mouths of rivers, where they could control (or protect) shipping. I’m going to quote Mike Baskott, an archeologist who gave a fascinating talk to the Rame History Group (Rame’s a Cornish village), “The Romans in Cornwall.”  The talk is online and the speaker’s name isn’t on it, but someone from the group was kind enough to supply it. I’ve drawn heavily from Baskott’s talk. What he said about the forts’ location near rivers is this:

“To me this indicates a strong interest in the protection and policing of maritime trade and indeed in other areas of Britain it can be shown that the Roman navy were responsible for the transport of minerals. Since time immemorial, carriage by water has always been more economical than transport by land.” 

He speculates that part of Cornwall might have been a Roman military zone “under Imperial control.”

The soldiers who occupied the Cornish forts probably weren’t legionaries but auxiliaries–soldiers from other parts of the empire, recruited from tribes Rome had already conquered. Talk about recycling, right? You conquer one people and get them to conquer (or at least help conquer) the next one. 

Why would anyone want to be part of that? Because an auxiliary got paid. And whatever was left of him after 25 years of auxiliaring got a plot of land to farm, along with Roman citizenship for himself and his family.  **

 

The Cornish experience of the Romans

We know even less about the Cornish experience of the Romans than we do about the Roman presence in Cornwall, but we can piece together a few things. The Roman pattern was to integrate the upper echelons of conquered peoples into Roman civilian and military structures, so we can assume that in Cornwall they’d have combed through those upper echelons for anyone willing to do business. 

An archeologist for the National Trust who gives her name only as Nancy (what is it with these self-effacing archeologists?) argues that the Romans ran into serious resistance in the southwest, an area that includes Cornwall. Look at Devon, the county you have to pass through to reach Cornwall unless you swim. Or sail. Compare the number of forts with the number of undefended villas. Lots more forts than villas. Hmmm. She talks about Devon as the Romans’ version of Afghanistan–a place where the army bogged down. 

Would the same have been true in Cornwall? I’ll give you a definite maybe on that. So far, we can count four forts and only one possible Roman-influenced villa, but we shouldn’t stretch that evidence too far as we reach for a conclusion.

The Cornish had traded with mainland Europe long before the Roman invasion, so this was hardly their first exposure to outsiders, although the sheer number who came with the army would’ve been a shock, as would, Baskott says, ”the Roman army’s use of prefabricated building materials up to 4 to 6 metres in height. . . . The sheer logistical power of the Army, with cartloads of timber, metalwork weaponry and provisions moving backwards and forwards from barges moored at the new dock on the river would have been amazing.” 

But let’s set Roman ruins aside and look at the Cornish ones. What they show about ordinary life doesn’t indicate big changes in the period we’re talking about. Before the Romans showed up, people lived in round communal houses set in enclosed hamlets that were probably occupied by extended family groups. They farmed and their economy was based on barter, not currency. They built massive defensive ditches and ramparts around hill forts. 

Who were they defending against? Dunno. Baskott talks about “other communities who might raid for cattle and slaves.” They also say social standing would’ve been measured in cattle or sheep.

Is this something they’ve determined from what they’ve found or are they importing the social structures of other cultures at a similar level of complexity? I don’t know, but I thought I’d toss a pinch of doubt into the recipe. 

What changed after the Romans came? Not much. Most people continued to live in the old way, although in some places their houses took on a less communal pattern. Some of Cornwall’s hill forts were abandoned during this period. Others weren’t. And some that were abandoned were re-occupied, still during the Roman occupation. 

What does any of that mean? Fuck if I know. 

Baskott adds his own dash of doubt: “When making . . .  comments about settlement patterns I am somewhat cautious, so little excavation work has gone on in the County [that means Cornwall] that where sites have been thoroughly examined . . . these are likely to set the pattern for the whole and therefore the picture can be canted or warped.” 

So let’s not pretend to know more than is actually known.

 

Fine then. What do we know? 

Less than we’d like. More than we did. The Romans did have a presence, and soldiers, in Cornwall and they were after its minerals. For the most part they didn’t stay long, and even where they did they don’t seem to have had much impact on Cornish life. That makes Cornwall very different from England, where the inhabitants became Romano-British. Cornwall’s residents continued to be Cornish, as did their language.

——————

* I don’t use artificial intelligence to research or write these posts, or for anything else, but since I’m being snooty about AI’s mistakes I should, in the interests of fairness, admit that I once edited a kids’ book whose author tried to slide corned beef in as a grain product. Since this was long before AI existed, I feel safe in assuming that the author was human. And a fool.

** A warning to anyone here who reads English as a second language and wonders why I sometimes use words that can’t be found in the dictionary. I mess around with language. It keeps me from hanging out on the street corner and getting into trouble. Auxiliaring isn’t a word, or not one any dictionary recognizes. It’s me turning the noun auxiliary into a verb to hint at the dreariness of spending 25 years in the Roman army in the hope of still being able to farm by the time you get your plot of land.

Archeology in Britain: a roundup

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Sink a shovel into the soil anywhere in Britain and–

No, I’m about to exaggerate. You won’t necessarily find an ancient artifact, you’ll probably find good old fashioned dirt, but if you scan the papers for archeological news it’s easy to believe you’ll find treasure. Let’s review a few finds:

 

The Galloway Hoard

This was found by a metal detectorist in 2014, in a plowed field in Scotland. It’s one of the richest collections of Viking-age treasure found in Britain so far. The finder was paid something in the neighborhood of £2 million, which ain’t bad for a day’s work. Even if you count all those other days, when he found nothing except the tabs from soda cans, it still ain’t bad.  

The reason finds like this are known instead of being quietly sold to rich collectors is that British laws require detectorists to report their finds to a government body, which works out the cash value and the museum that should receive it if they can raise the money. So the finder benefits. Under English law, the landowner also benefits. Scottish law leaves the landowner out. I’m not sure about Northern Ireland. Either way, though, blank spots in the nation’s history get filled in.

A hand-crafted nail. No idea how old it is, but I didn’t have to stick a shovel in the ground to find it. There’s been quite a bit of construction in the neighborhood and I’d guess someone else dug it up. All I did was walk past and kick it. It has an odd bend (I’ve bent a lot of nails in my time but never that way), and one person who looked at it figured it had been in a fire. All theories–even knowledgeable ones–will be gratefully entertained.

Experts have been working their way through the Galloway Hoard since it was found and in 2024 reported that the metal from a silver cup–okay, a silver vessel–was mined in what’s now Iran and that the vessel itself was probably made for royalty of the Sasanian empire–the last Persian empire before the Muslim conquest. They were Zoroastrian. So it traveled halfway around the known world to get buried in a Scottish field in 900 CE.

Follow the link for damn some good photos of the hoard.

Why did anyone bury it, though, and who did it belong to? An answer to the second question comes from an inscription on a decorated arm ring. (Follow this link as well for photos.)

But before I get to the inscription, let me tell you a few other things: The stash included four arm rings with runic writing. Three had what are described as elements of Old English names, presumably the original owners of the rings. But the experts all stubbed their toes on the fourth arm ring. It didn’t match any known language from early medieval Britain or Ireland. 

Then someone had an inspiration and I’d explain it to you in detail but halfway through the explanation I sank, and I’m here to protect you from that fate, so let’s just say that they made an educated mental leap and realized they might be looking at a shortened or phonetic spelling. That led them to a translation: “This is the community’s wealth,” using a word that specifically meant a religious community.

Which takes us back to the other question: Why did a religious community bury all this wealth? Possibly to keep it safe from Viking raids. Christian monastic communities were full of expensive bling and the Vikings were wise to them. They were an easy target and a rewarding one.

Why didn’t the community dig it up? That’s the problem with history. It’s so full of things we’ll never know. 

 

The Chew Valley Hoard

In 2019, seven detectorists in Somerset set out to mess around with someone’s new metal detector. They’d do a little detecting, get rained on, give the dog some exercise, have a few beers– You know. 

They ended up unearthing 2,584 silver pennies that date back to the time of the Norman Conquest. (1066; you’re welcome.) The best guess is that they were buried for safekeeping during an early rebellion against Norman rule. 

According to Lisa Grace, one of the finders and an expert in cataloguing antiquities, “The hoard may have been the result of looting or maybe the result of somebody hiding their money away because of the revolt.”

The coins have been valued at £4.3 million. Half goes to the landowner and the group will split the rest. I don’t know what the dog gets. 

 

Stone circles

The southwest is full of ancient monuments, and most of them are just sitting out in fields, where you can walk in, lean against them, and feel blown away by their age and mystery, all without paying a fee or worrying about opening and closing hours. You do sometimes have to share them with sheep, cattle, and the occasional wild pony (as well as their droppings), but if you don’t mind, they don’t either. 

A couple of Neolithic stone circles have recently been found on Dartmoor, and at least one of them adds weight to the finder’s theory that there was a circle of stone circles on the moor, which he calls a sacred arc. So far, he’s locate about half of the presumed circle.

One of the newly found circles had a ditch around it, as Stonehenge does, and they were built in roughly the same period.

If the theory’s correct, the other half of the arc is still out there, waiting to be found.

 

Dead bodies

Sorry to get gruesome on you, but when you’ve been dead long enough you stop being the much-missed Aunt Sadie or Uncle Marv and turn into archeology. In other words, your body isn’t gruesome anymore, it’s a clue to history.

People who try to piece together the details of what used to be called the dark ages and is now more respectably called the early medieval period lean heavily on clues from archeology because written records are sparse. Some were destroyed and others–um, yeah, they were never written, which makes them hard to read. 

What’s more, where written records do exist it makes sense to ask how reliable they are. Historians of the time didn’t play by the rules of our era.

With that tucked under our belts, let’s go to Norway, which I admit isn’t in Britain but does have an interesting story to tell: an Icelandic saga from 1197 tells of the siege of Sverresborg Castle. The besiegers broke into the castle and “burned every single house that was there. . . . They took a dead man, and cast him headfirst into the well. Then they piled stones into it until it was full.”

Fast forward a few centuries until 1938, when archeologists found a skeleton in a well, buried by a layer of stones. Aha! Significant! But World War II intervened, the Nazis occupied the area, and suddenly everyone had other things on their minds. The body stayed where it was. It wasn’t until 2014 that anyone got it out and identified it as belonging to a man who was somewhere between 30 and 40 years old. He’d been hit over the head before he died and was injured in assorted other ways as well. Radiocarbon dating put his death in roughly the right period for the siege, and a DNA comparison to modern Norwegians hints that he might have come from southern Norway–the home of the besiegers, not the defenders. Which says they may have thrown their own guy in the well. 

 

So much for history. Do we know anything about the recent past?

Here we’re going to abandon archeology. We can learn about our culture from the papers: in 1977, garden gnomes began disappearing from a town in England. 

You know garden gnomes: those painted plaster statues so beloved of British homeowners that even the people who hate them love to hate them. In place of the missing gnomes, the bereft homeowners found ransom notes. By way of example, one read, “Listen, your gnome has seven hours to live unless you wrap 25 pence and leave it at the car park at Safeways near the bowling green. This is no hoax.”

Time passed. No dead gnomes were spotted, and a few days later, 8 gnomes appeared, as alive as they’d ever been, at a roundabout, draining all the tension out of the story.

A roundabout? That’s an ingenious way of handling traffic without using traffic lights. It either works like a charm or backs traffic up for months, depending on time, place, and circumstance. And luck.

The 8 gnomes were accompanied by three frogs, two squirrels, two toadstools, one peacock, one rabbit, and a Snow White. The statues’ owners reclaimed them, made them a nice cup of tea, and set them back in their gardens without checking them for PTSD because the diagnosis wasn’t widely known yet. 

The perpetrator became known as the Phantom Gnome Snatcher of Formby.

And now, damn near 50 years later, the Phantom has identified himself. Sort of. His name’s Arthur, he’s 62, and he was 15 when he gnome-snatched, with the help of his 5-year-old brother. The two of them scoped out the neighborhood gnomes one night and went back the next night to collect them and leave ransom notes. They did check the locations they’d given in the notes–a phone box; a park bench–and found nothing. 

Yeah, Formby was filled with hard-hearted cheapskates who were willing to let their gnomes die terrible deaths.

“So three nights later we put them all back and thought absolutely nothing of it,” Arthur said.

Arthur was outed–sort of–by a cousin, who didn’t give his name but said on radio, “I know the culprit. . . . He tells that story most Boxing Days and each time he gets a little bit wearier, you can see the weight of his conscience on his shoulders.” 

That led Arthur to call Radio 2 and out himself–minus his last name. 

“It’s been on my conscience that I did this terrible thing,” he said. “I would like to beg forgiveness from all the families that I have caused grief to.”

If that was the worst thing any of us had done–

 

And that brings us to the present day 

Lupa Pizza in Norwich has bowed to pressure and is offering a pizza with a pineapple topping, but there’s a snag: It’ll cost you £100. (If you work in US dollars, that’s $123, give or take a bit, but you’ll have to get there, which ain’t cheap.) 

I know that says something deep and meaningful about the culture, which means it connects perfectly to the archeology theme we’re following here, but I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the connection is.

 

A few Irrelevancies

On a totally irrelevant (to this post, but not to the real world) topic, 200,000 Danes have signed a petition to buy California from the US. It reads, in part:

“Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.’ Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality. . . . We’ll bring hygge to Hollywood, bike lanes to Beverly Hills and organic smørrebrød to every street corner. Rule of law, universal healthcare and fact-based politics might apply.”

The petition’s website includes a call to “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain.”

*

Okay, this has nothing to do with archeology either. A breeding program trying to keep the northern spotted owl from going extinct had a pre-Valentine’s Day offer: for 5 Canadian dollars, you could name a dead rat after an ex–any ex–and get a photo of the rat. And the owl. The deal ended on February 13, but I’m sure they’re still accepting donations. And you could probably talk them into extending the offer just for you. And your ex. 

*

In my last post, I wrote about the problem of telling native from non-native plants. 

“Actually,” I said, to quote my own silly self, “what does native mean? How far back do you want to go? Think about it long enough and your mind will melt.”

To keep my mind from melting, my friend Helen sent me a link to a Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland website, which explains how far back to go.  

Basically, if something was introduced by humans, either deliberately or by accident, and became naturalized between the beginning of the Neolithic period and 1500 CE, then it’s an archeophyte–a fancy way of saying an old plant.

Most of them arrived in the late Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Roman and Medieval periods. Some were hitchhikers that snuck in with crops, others started out in gardens, where they were grown for food or medicine but liked the conditions and jumped the garden to go wild. 

You can break the category down into denizens, colonists, and cultivated crops if you like, but let’s leave that to the experts. Amateurs get hurt messing around with these things. 

After 1500, when Europe and the Americas were in contact–eagerly on one side, reluctantly on the other–all sorts of new plants were introduced: for food, for medicine, for forestry, or because they were pretty. Farming, demographics, trade, and industry changed. All that makes 1500 a handy place to draw a line: Anything introduced after that date is a modern introduction: a neophyte. 

A native plant is one that showed up without human assistance after the last ice age ended or got here before it and somehow survived. It sounds as if the date doesn’t matter, only whether it got here on its own. 

Orkney: a bit of history

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Orkney isn’t the first place that comes to mind if you’re looking for the center of Britain. It’s small, it’s an island, and it’s way the hell up north in a country whose political and cultural center is way the hell down south. What’s more, it’s sitting in the middle of a lot of water, which is what islands like to do, and the currents around it are fierce. But in Neolithic times, it was a center–maybe the center. It originated a type of pottery called grooved ware that spread across Britain and was the must-have thing of the late stone age. It built the first henges–those stone rings with ditches around them that dot the British landscape–and they also spread south. And yes, they did that before Stonehenge.

 

The Neolithic

Who were the people behind all that? They arrived, who knows why, from mainland Scotland, bringing their domesticated animals, their grain, and their knowledge of how to farm. Like any early farmers, they would’ve supplemented their diet with whatever they could gather, hunt, or fish. They replaced (or possibly absorbed; I don’t know) a small population of hunter-gatherers who’d reached the Orkneys first, and they set up a society successful enough to last through 60 or 70 generations and to build monuments that are still impressive today. 

Deceptive photo: This isn’t from Orkney. It’s from Cornwall–the opposite end of the country. Sorry. I’d rather cheat than steal other people’s photos.

Their lives wouldn’t have been easy. Most people who survived childhood died in their 30s and few lived to be 50, but somehow or other this relatively small group of people found time to build massive henges and tombs as well as make that elegant pottery. 

Initially they lived in isolated farmsteads but grew into a tribal society, possibly with an elite ruling class, but that implies the possibility that they might’ve lived without one. Until we hear something definite, it’s your choice. Personally, I’ve had it with ruling elites and I’m going for an egalitarian structure. 

We know a lot of this because for the past 20 years archeologists have been excavating the Ness of Brodgar, an Orkney site that was used by those 60 to 70 generations of late Stone Age residents that I mentioned a paragraph or three back. Or if it makes them sound more modern, Neolithic residents. Now the archeologists are about to rebury everything they dug up so painstakingly, and eventually I’ll get around to explaining that, but first, how long does it take to get through 60 or 70 generations? 

About as long as it took to get from the Norman Invasion of England to last Monday afternoon. So offhand I’d say they were more reliable than we are today.

 

The Ness

The Ness of Brodgar–that bit that’s been explored–covers six acres and only the top level has been excavated. It may be 5 meters deep in places, with newer structures on top of older ones. Tempting as it must be to find out what’s underneath, the only way to do it would be to destroy the top layer and the archeologists have held back. By covering it up, they’ll leave it to later generations of archeologists who, with luck, will have the tools to explore it without wrecking what’s on top. 

There’s another reason to cover it up: the kind of stone it was built with erodes with long exposure to air. 

In the layer they have excavated they’ve found dozens of buildings, including  temples, outbuildings, and kitchens, all linked by paved paths and surrounded by a wall. It’s built on a narrow bridge of land, so you wouldn’t have been able to go around it. You either went in or you turned back.   

Some of the stones, although not whole walls, were painted.

Did I mention that it rubs elbows with two impressive stone circles, the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness? Impressive as they are, though, archeologists talk about them as peripheral. The temple complex–the Ness itself–was the most important piece of work. Or as one archeologist put it, “By comparison, everything else in the area looks like a shanty town.”

Archeologist Colin Richards describes it this way: “The walls were dead straight. Little slivers of stones had even been slipped between the main slabs to keep the facing perfect. This quality of workmanship would not be seen again on Orkney for thousands of years.”

Fans of the Ness say it rivals Hadrian’s Wall and Sutton Hoo for for both size and sophistication. Archaeologist Nick Card warns us never to “underestimate our Neolithic ancestors and what they were capable of.”

The Ness doesn’t seem to have been a settlement. It was a gathering place–a ceremonial center–for people from across the Orkneys.

How come Orkney just turned into a plural? It’s made up of some 70 islands. About 20 of them are inhabited these days. So we’re talking about a group of scattered people who would have come to the Ness to exchange ideas and objects, to hold rituals and ceremonies (no one has a clue what their belief system was), and to celebrate. Or as one article put it, to party.

 

And what happened next?

A lot of stuff, but since this is prehistory we don’t know most of  it. Around 2,300 BCE, some thousand years after building began, the place was abandoned, apparently after a big feast–more than 600 cattle were slaughtered–and the Ness hung out a Closed sign. 

Did a new religion take the old one’s place? Did power shift, drawing everyone’s attention to some other location? Can I think of a third possibility to round out the rhythm of the paragraph? Dunno, dunno, and no.

By the late Iron Age, the Orkneys had become part of the Pictish kingdom, and by the close of the Pictish era Celtic Christian missionaries began to show up. Then the Vikings came and, as WikiWhosia has it, “The nature of this transition is controversial, and theories range from peaceful integration to enslavement and genocide.” Which is one hell of a range.  

Whatever happened, Norwegians–or Vikings if that’s a more familiar way to think of them–settled in the Orkneys and farmed and pretty much took over. Christianity packed its bags and left. Harald Hårfagre–Harald Fairhair–annexed both the Orkneys and Shetland, making them an earldom. We’re going to dance through this lightly and get out fast, but we can probably learn a lot about the culture from the names of a couple of rulers: Thorfinn Skull-splitter; Eric Bloodaxe.

See why we’re leaving?

According to the Orkneyinga Saga, the islands became Christian in 995, when Olaf Tryggvasson summoned the earl, Sigurd the Stout, and said, “I order you and all your subjects to be baptised. If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot and I swear I will ravage every island with fire and steel.”  

So Sigurd said, “Yeah, what the hell, I always wanted a bit of water sloshed on my head. What do we eat when we’re Christians?” and that was that. Or to tell the story a different way, details about the islands’ conversion to Christianity are elusive. 

Fast forward to the fifteenth century, when the king of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden (we’ll call him King I) used Orkney as a guarantee that he’d pay his daughter’s dowry when she married the king of Scotland (that’s King II). So far, so good, but despite being the king of three countries and a whole raft of islands, King I was broke and he didn’t pay, so presto change-o, King II got the Orkneys, which became Scottish. 

That’s feudalism for you. The rich play chess, using the land and its people as game pieces.

You see what I mean about ruling elites?

The shift brought an influx of Scottish settlers and the islands are Scottish to this day, but have retained a lot of Scandinavian influence.

Evolution of the British diet

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Let’s start in the Neolithic Period–the New Stone Age, around 4,000 BCE–because that’s when my alarm clock woke me up this morning. By the time I got myself and the cats fed, it was 3,000 BCE and time to feed the dog. More to the point, though, Britons had started building Stonehenge and we’re going to draw heavily on the archeology of the place. 

Why Stonehenge? Because at nearby Durrington Walls archeologists have found a settlement from the same period where people gathered and feasted and left all sorts of clues to what they were eating. 

A very rare relevant photo: This, my friends, is food, although not Neolithic. The leeks (at the back) are grown in Cornwall. I can’t vouch for the others but there’s a good chance the cauliflower was as well. The red cabbage? Possibly. The plastic box? Not edible.

The Mesolithic and Neolithic eras

In the Mesolithic Era–the Middle Stone Age–people were hunting and fishing and gathering, as they continued to do in the Neolithic. So they ate meat, fishy-type things, roots, leaves, mushrooms, fruit, and whatever was available and not poisonous. 

Even then they knew that poisonous was bad. The probably knew it better than we do.

But once they got to the shiny New Stone Age, not the boring old middle one, people had domestic animals (they were brought to Britain from Europe–or what would later be called Europe). So Britons were raising sheep, cattle, and pigs, and they were growing wheat and barley. They could add all that to whatever they hunted, fished, and foraged.

The official date for the beginning of farming in Britain is 4,000 BCE, and it marks the beginning of the Neolithic, although some enterprising soul found evidence of wheat being in Britain a couple of thousand years earlier. The current best guess is that it was brought by traders and not farmed locally. What’s now the English Channel was still land, so Britain was attached to Europe and people wouldn’t have had to get their feet wet to drop by the neighbors’ place with a sack or two of wheat.

Okay, we don’t know what happened. All we know is that some has been found. Have fun making up your own story. The rest of us can go back–forward, actually–to the Neolithic. 

At Durrington Walls, archeologists have found some 38,000 discarded bones, which came from at least 1,000 animals. Some 90% are pig bones, most of the rest are cattle. By analyzing the bones and teeth they’ve put together a picture of what happened there, and they don’t indicated year-round eating. Many of the pigs were slaughtered when they were around 9 months old, and since they would’ve been born in the spring that indicates midwinter eating. This fits with Stonehenge’s alignment with the midwinter (and midsummer) sun. Ditto with the alignment of timber monuments at Durrington Walls itself. 

Meat was left on many of the bones, indicating an abundance of food. This was feasting, not everyday eating. 

The animals weren’t raised locally. Some came from Wales, some from Scotland, some from northern England. I’m not sure that’s the full list. 

What else would they have eaten? These were people who raised grain but not on a large scale. They’d have also gathered wild plants and hunted. Milk products would’ve been part of their diet–about a quarter of the pottery fragments show evidence of dairy products–although they would mostly have been processed ones, not milk itself, since the people were lactose intolerant: they couldn’t digest unprocessed milk. They’d have made the milk into cheese, yogurt, and butter, and there’s some evidence of milk in one of the timber circles, so it may have been an offering to the god of milk digestion, which is why we can now buy lactose-free milk in the supermarkets. 

Don’t put too much weight on the last part of that sentence, okay? I made it up and I’ve learned not to take anything for granted.

It’s easier to find evidence of the meat people ate than the fruit and veg, which don’t leave bones behind. That may be why the myth of a meat-heavy paleo diet caught on. It’s also why that part of the discussion is sketchy.

Moving on

By the time we get to the Bronze Age (that’s 2200 to 800 BCE, give or take a few hundred years on either side), people were growing a wider range of crops. We can add peas, beans, and spelt (a form of wheat) to both their fields and their menus. People were crystalizing salt from seawater. And at least those who could afford to would’ve had metal cooking pots. 

Once we move into the Iron Age, which runs from the end of the Bronze Age until the Romans invade in 43 CE, we–or, more accurately, those clever archeologists–find the first chicken bones in Britain. 

For most people, though, grain–wheat and barley–would probably have made up the bulk of their diet, so figure bread, porridge, beer. Add to that–and this is my addition; I can’t quote a source for it–whatever they could pull out of the water or off the land: fruits, nuts, leaves, flowers, tubers, fish, and game. But don’t forget the beer. This is England we’re talking about. The earliest evidence of beer is from 400 BCE. 

The general assumption is that the Roman invasion brought wine and grape vines to Britain, but amphorae–those Roman jars with pointy bases–have been found at some late Iron Age sites, suggesting that wine and olive oil were imported earlier than that. More than one British tribe traded with the Romans.

The Roman invasion

The Romans brought rabbits, pheasants, brown hare, dates, cabbages, leeks, onions, turnips, grapes, walnuts, garlic, pepper,basil, thyme, and other goodies to Britain.

Wait, though. Thyme grows wild here, and if you ask Lord Google if it’s native he’ll say yes. Ask if it was imported by the Romans and he’ll say yes again. Ask if he’s contradicting himself and he’ll stop speaking to you. My best guess is that yes it was imported and then yes, it went wild. That makes it sort of native. 

Actually, what does native mean? How far back do you want to go? Think about it long enough and your mind will melt. Leeks are native enough that they’re a national plant of Wales. The story is that King Cadwallader had his soldiers tuck a leek in their helmets so they could identify each other when they fought the Saxons. Since the average modern leek weighs a third of a pound (that’s 150 grams; Lord Google knows stuff like that and if he’s still speaking to you is happy to share), it’s a safe bet that the leeks of the time were smaller, lighter, and less absurd when worn in a helmet. 

(In the version I found when tracing leeks via Wales instead of via England, Phoenician traders introduced them. The Romans don’t get a mention. It’s all a little hazy if you go back far enough.)

You won’t get the full list of foods the Romans introduced here–there were more than 50 and I can’t count that high–but others include Alexanders (a forerunner of celery which has also gone wild), figs, apples, pears, cherries, cucumbers, lentils, dill, and fennel. And edible dormice, which they, um, ate. (The hazel dormouse is native to Britain–whatever native means.)

Some of these foods would have made their way to Britain with traders before the invasion, but the pace would have picked up once you had Roman soldiers and administrators on the island, along with whatever other Romans came in their wake and the Britons who adopted Roman ways.

The Middle Ages

The next big bump in food diversity comes in the Middle Ages, when the Crusades brought Europe smashing into the Middle East. The new foods included sugar, dates, raisins, figs, pepper,cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, cardamom, coriander, cumin, garlic, turmeric, mace, anise, caraway, and mustard. Some of those had come over with the Romans and, presumably, dropped out of use when the Romans packed up and left. 

Spices and sugar were the wildest of luxuries and not for the likes of us. Most or all the novelties stayed on the tables of the elite. Grain was the mainstay of peasants’ diet. Look around the internet and you’ll get the usual raft of contradictory information, but leeks and cabbage get a mention. Meat was probably rare. Hunting was restricted to the aristocracy, and often fishing as well. They would probably have still been able to forage wild berries and leaves–and possibly nuts. It would’ve all been regulated by local feudal arrangements.

And after that

Domesticated (as opposed to wild) carrots wandered into England in the Tudor era. Wild carrots are edible but woody. The seeds and flower heads are also edible but the plant’s easy to mistake for poisonous things like hemlock, so don’t try this at home, kids.

The Tudor era (1485 – 1603; you’re welcome) also brought turkeys, or at least the first record of them being raised here. It also brought potatoes, cauliflower, tomatoes, and rice. The tomato was treated with suspicion for a couple of hundred years–it was poisonous; it wasn’t poisonous but was best eaten in hot climates; it would kill aristocrats. 

That belief about tomatoes killing aristocrats didn’t arise because tomatoes are the stereotype of the wild-eyed anarchist. It came from the action of a tomato on a pewter plate: the acid in the fruit will leach out the lead, giving the eater lead poisoning. When I read that, I was prepared to argue that the aristocracy used silver plates and it was only lower down the scale that you found pewter, but (annoyingly) I seem to have been wrong.

The first description of red cabbage in England dates to 1570. A couple of sites I find credit the Romans for introducing it to Europe in (are you sitting down?) the 14th century. I’ve found white cabbage being credited to both the Romans and the Celts. I’m sure there’s someone out there who credits interplanetary explorers with its spread across the galaxy.

The internet’s a strange old place. Let’s move on.

Pineapples were introduced in 1600 but weren’t cultivated in Britain until 1700. (They’re not a great fit for the climate.) They were very much a prestige item for the upper class. Coffee and tea were introduced in the 1600s, giving insomniacs something to blame in the middle of the night. Instant coffee was invented in Britain, by the way, in 1771. It has been improved and reformulated in multiple countries and decades and still tastes terrible.

Broccoli joined the party in 1700, chocolate bars in 1847, and canned baked beans in 1886. Or 1869. Who cares? They were hyped as a luxury and sold by Fortnum & Mason for £2 a can–the equivalent of £170 in 2019 pounds. If you need that in US dollars, it’s a lot of money. By 1924, the price had settled down to 12 shillings–the equivalent of £25. Yeah, I know. Baked beans. The hype may explain the central place they still hold in British hearts and stomachs.

Something has to. 

I don’t usually post more than one photo, but I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me about baked beans. Look at that label: “not a want but a need.”

Food was rationed during World War II, and rationing lasted until 1954. That may or may not be where Britain got its reputation for bland, repetitive, snoozeworthy food, but it certainly helped. On the other hand, people’s diets were healthier than they are today, if a lot less fun, and the poor ate better than they had before rationing. 

When rationing was lifted, burger bars opened around the country, selling hamburgers and milkshakes. Chinese restaurants opened, followed by Indian ones. (Keep complaining about immigration, people. It’s brought the wonders of the world to your doorstep.) 

You’ll notice that we’ve shifted from what’s grown and what’s cooked at home to food cooked outside the home. The 1950s mark the beginning of eating out being fairly common.

Spaghetti landed in Britain in the 19th century and was ignored until the 1960s, when it became the height of sophistication. It was rare enough that the BBC got away with an April Fool’s Day spoof documentary on the spaghetti harvest, showing a family cutting strands of spaghetti from bushes and laying them in the sun to dry. Not a few people got in touch to ask where they could buy spaghetti a bush.

Which seems like a good place to leave you. Be respectful of your spaghetti, please. A lot of work went into picking it. 

Was Iron Age Britain matriarchal?

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No one can give us a solid answer, but we do have some hints. A group of geneticists and archeologists have analyzed a cluster of burials in Dorset and report that they show a matrilocal society. In other words, the women stayed in the village and the men moved out when they married, being replaced by men from outside, who married in. 

The tribe–the Romans called them the Durotriges; we don’t know what they called themselves–didn’t cremate their dead, which was unusual for the time and place. From around 100 BCE–more or less 150 years before the Romans invaded–they buried them in the hills around their farmsteads, leaving an important resource for archeologists.

Who cares? Pretty much everyone who was involved in the arrangement, and I can’t think why we shouldn’t as well, because it tells us a lot about the roles of the men and women. Or–hell, let’s throw out a patriarchal habit that’s so deeply ingrained it’s damn near invisible and say “the roles of the women and men.”  

Semi-relevant photo: This is Fast Eddie, who’s relevant only because we’ve been told (sort of) that women with power become childless cat ladies.
Okay, I’m stretching it, but hey, he’s a great cat and I needed a photo to drop in here.

Does it matter who stays and who goes? Yup, it does. The partner who stays in place has the unbroken support of an extended family. The one who comes in comes as an outsider and an individual, without that built-in support. They may acquire it over time, but they may not. And if the tribe considered land as something a person could own–they were farmers, so let’s guess that they did–then land ownership is likely to have been held by the person who stayed in place. It’s awkward, taking land with you. So it would presumably have been passed down through the female line.  

Matrilocality also means–or at least hints–that women would have the primary shapers of the group’s identity. 

It’s kind of mind-boggling, isn’t it? 

 

How do they know any of this?

DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mother to daughter, making matrilocality relatively easy to trace. The Y chromosome is passed from father to son. Everything else is a grab-bag.

Geneticist Dr. Lara Cassidy, said, “This was the cemetery of a large kin group. We reconstructed a family tree with many different branches and found most members traced their maternal lineage back to a single woman, who would have lived centuries before. In contrast, relationships through the father’s line were almost absent.

“This tells us that husbands moved to join their wives’ communities upon marriage, with land potentially passed down through the female line. This is the first time this type of system has been documented in European prehistory and it predicts female social and political empowerment.”

The find casts a new light on smaller samples from other cemeteries, where the same pattern shows up: most of the individuals trace back to a small set of female ancestors. Dan Bradley, a professor of population genetics, called it “a widespread phenomenon with deep roots on the island.” 

 

This changes the way earlier information is interpreted

The first thing it changes is the earlier discoveries of Celtic women buried with what archeologists call rich grave goods–what we might call stuff–mirrors, combs, the occasional chariot. The standard interpretation is that these were the burials of high status women. Fair enough, but that tells us nothing about why they had high status and I’d bet a chocolate cake that most people reading it will think, Right: wives of important men, just like most people would write men and women, as I started to in the second paragraph, instead of women and men. Old, nearly invisible thought patterns, underlining the importance of men, the peripheral status of women. But if the village’s continuity was in the hands of its women, it’s not unlikely that much of the power was as well. Or–let’s go out on a limb and see if we fall off–possibly all the power. 

It’s a safe limb to go out on, because we can’t know. So don’t take the possibility as fact but don’t dismiss it either. We do have some facts that make it look likely. The Durotriges men were buried with a joint of meat and maybe a pot with something to drink on their way to the  afterlife. Many of the women were buried with mirrors, combs, jewelry, and the occaisonal sword. 

All this comes with a reminder that being buried with expensive stuff may or may not indicate that the person was a leader. To make that leap, we need to go back to those Greek and Roman texts, which takes us neatly to the next paragraph:

The second thing the new findings change is how we read what Greek and Roman writers said about pre-Roman (or Iron Age if you prefer) Britain. The Britons, inconsiderately, didn’t develop a system of writing, so yeah, they didn’t leave written records. We have to depend on what outsiders wrote.

The written sources tell us the Romans were shocked to find women in positions of power. They inherited wealth, led battles, and practiced polyandry–the flip side of polygamy, with the woman having more than one husband. Going both further back and to Celts outside of Britain, ancient Greek writers said women’s and men’s tasks “have been exchanged” and Celtic women acted as “political judiciary.” (That last quote is from an article in The Conversation, not an ancient Greek source. I’m leaving you to figure out what political judiciary means.) 

For a long time that was widely dismissed on the theory that the Romans overstated British women’s freedom and power to make the country sound barbaric. Because surely we can’t take that literally? It upends too many of our assumptions. But this latest find makes it look like they were reporting accurately. It undermines the idea that pre-Roman Britain was a land where men were hairy-chested warriors and women stayed home and did what a much later culture expected them to do. You know, look in their mirrors, comb their hair, and stay the hell off those chariots.

Were all early societies matrilocal or matriarchal, then?

Nope. Early Bronze Age Orkney was patrilocal: the men stayed put and the women moved to other communities. And early iron age Hallstatt graves in Austria showed men and women equally achieving high status. Middle Iron Age British burials show men and women having equal status. Age seems to have been more important than gender in giving them status.  

A rampage back through 150 British and European genome studies in light of the Dorset findings shows the diversity in mitochondrial DNA declining over a period that spans the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. To translate that, increasing numbers of women stayed in place as time went very slowly on. 

None of this gives us a simple picture, or even a decisive one, but it does mean that patriarchy hasn’t been in place since forever and isn’t built into our DNA.

Bathing in the middle ages

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You how everybody says people in the middle ages didn’t bathe? Well, ahem, they did, and I seem to have contributed my small bit to our collective misbelief. Apologies. I fell for an urban myth.

 

So they did wash?

They did. They understood that water was wet, that dirt was dirty, and that if they brought the two together in the right way they could walk away clean.  

There were problems, however. They didn’t have hot water waiting around for them. Water in its natural state–in other words, as it comes from the well, the lake, the river, or the ocean–has this habit of being cold. And since the first recorded stove in Europe (or possibly anywhere else–please don’t complicate this) was built in 1490 in Alsace, we can pretty safely say that they were stuck heating water over an open fire if they wanted it in anything other than its natural state.

But we’re not done yet. Water has another habit: It’s heavy, and if you can’t convince it to come to the place you want it, you have to carry it. In other words, a lot of work was involved in getting clean.

Medieval illustration of people bathing. With thanks to  Going Medieval, which I’ve borrowed this from. I don’t usually do that, but medieval illustrations are out of copyright. Great website. You’ll find a link elsewhere.

The simplest way around the problem was to bring yourself to the water. The human body may be something like 60% water, but it has legs and people used those legs to carry themselves to whatever user-friendly body of water was nearby. Then they tossed themselves in. That would’ve been more appealing, though, in the summer than the winter. England isn’t the Arctic but it does get cold enough to make even a quick dip off-putting. So people also washed at home, even if it did mean carrying the water.

For most people, washing at home meant pouring water (cold or warm) into a basin and taking a cat bath–water, cloth, rub till clean, done. It’s still a good bit of work but it limits the amount of water you need. Some might’ve had wooden tubs they could set by the fire for the occasional bath.

People also washed their hands and faces before meals. 

The rich could afford full, luxurious baths, involving wooden tubs, servants carrying warm water, a large cloth tented over the top of the tub, and scented herbs to enhance the, ahem, bathing experience–thyme, sage, things like that. Breathe out, relax, let the hard work of oppressing the peasants fall from your shoulders.

Ahhhh.

King John (1199 – 1216; you’re welcome) liked a bath well enough that he traveled with a his own personal bathtub–and the attendant who was in charge of it. (Making sure all that water was heated and carried at the right time would’ve taken some choreography, so I don’t expect that would’ve been a simple job.)

As for wealthy monasteries (they weren’t all wealthy, although some were fabulously so), they often had piped-in water–a signal of how much it mattered.

 

Soap

Medieval Europe had soap, something the Romans, for all their bathhouses and their reputation for cleanliness, did not. The Romans oiled their skin then scraped away the oil and the dirt with it. 

Luxury soap came to medieval Europe from the Middle East, brought by Crusaders and traders. The Crusades created an earthquake in the Middle East and we’re still feeling the aftershocks, but they brought Europe a lot of nice stuff and some startlingly wonderful ideas, including Arabic numbers, which first made it to Europe in the 10th century and swept away the clunky Roman system. 

But we were talking about soap: France, Italy, and Spain began manufacturing the stuff, and eventually England did too. Most people, though, made it at home.

 

Bathhouses

So much for washing at home. Your average medieval town or city would’ve also had a bathhouse, and these were social places as much as get-yourself-clean places. Many were built next to bakeries to take advantage of the heat from the ovens. In medieval illustrations, you can find people sitting in large wooden tubs, eating from boards placed across them to form tables. So yes, social spaces.

Southwark (that’s in London, although at the time it wasn’t) had 18 bathhouses. 

But wait. While many bathhouses were just bathhouses, some were brothels. Yes, you could take a bath and all that, but you could do a lot of other things as well. You know how it is: in a culture where people are expected to go around wearing clothes, once they take them off they start getting all sorts of ideas. All those lovely bathhouses in Southwark? They were concentrated there exactly because it wasn’t part of London, with its laws and regulations. They were called the stews, and they were brothels. Most of them were owned by the Bishop of Winchester. 

C’mon, an honest cleric has to make money somehow, doesn’t he?

I can’t swear that all the Southwark baths were brothels, but most of them were.

But again, most bathhouses were places to take a bath. The sources I’ve looked at don’t agree on how often people would have visited or how likely they were to heat their wash water at home. They’re drawing on very partial information and putting it together in the best way they can. I’m happy to stay on the sidelines and let them slug it out. 

 

So why have we believed medieval people didn’t wash?

You notice how neatly I swept you up into the mistaken belief system I just abandoned? Of course you believed what I did. I know I’m not the only damn fool around here.

I can come up with several reasons we fell for that.

One, sanitation genuinely was an issue. In the later middle ages, in the interest of cleaning things up, a lot of towns built public latrines, but let’s not get carried away with how much of an improvement that made. What were the most convenient places to build them? Why, on bridges so the water could take the waste downstream. Problem solved, right? All that nasty stuff goes away, and the system works as long as no one upstream had the same plan and the people downstream can’t find  you. 

When this becomes a national strategy, you won’t want to use the river for your drinking and bathing water and you might want to worry about your water table.

Two, the sources that have come down to us are both partial and contradictory, but some writers warned against excessive bathing. In her Going Medieval post, the historian Eleanor Janega argues that this was less about bathing that “hanging out naked in bathhouses with the opposite sex.” Which was sinful. 

You can leave your money at the door and the bishop will collect it, thanks.

(Janega’s website is both informative and good reading.) 

On the other hand, at Medievalists.net, I read that medieval English writers considered the Vikings “overly concerned with cleanliness since they took a bath once a week.” But the site also acknowledges sources that show bathing as “part of daily activity” and that health manuals “explained that it was important to keep the entire body clean.”

At least for medical writers, bathing was something to approach with caution. It could relieve indigestion and stop diarrhea, but if you did it wrong it could lead to weakness of the heart, nausea, or fainting. Excessive bathing could lead to fatness and feebleness. One writer advocated bathing in the spring and winter but not, if possible, in the summer.

Autumn? Sorry, all these centuries later the jury’s still out on that.

Three, we have documents making it clear that assorted saints and extreme religious sorts didn’t bathe, or didn’t do it often, but Janega (yes, her again; she’s handy) argues that this was about denying themselves a worldly pleasure in the quest for salvation: get dirty for god. So instead of canceling out the sources that say people bathed regularly, this reinforces them.

Or it may.

Westminster Abbey required its monks to take a bath four times a year, which, um, may not sound excessive to us. What does it mean, though? Hard to say. It might’ve been a minimum, addressed to the dirty-for-god types. It might’ve been the general expectation, which some people exceeded. But they did pay a bath attendant two loaves of bread a day plus £1 a year, which makes it sound like he worked year round.

Four, from around 1500 to 1700 (public health warning here: this paragraph is thinly researched), Europeans came to believe that water spread disease– especially warm water, which opened the pores and let all those nasties in. Given the state of the rivers, they may have been onto something. That bit of information made its way down to modern ear and we treated it like butter on warm bread and spread it back a few extra centuries.

*

I’m indebted to 63mago for challenging my lazy assumptions on medieval cleanliness and sending me down what turned out to be an interesting rabbit hole. 

A quick history of the English longbow

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England’s not-at-all-secret weapon against the French during the Hundred Years War was the longbow, and if you believe whatever gunk artificial intelligence scrapes off the internet floor, it’s a symbol of English pride. Which makes this a good place to mention that it came to England by way of Wales.

A very rare, nearly relevant graphic: An archer and some dead guy., both in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings, which in turn is mentioned below. Courtesy of a free app that lets you design your own Bayeux-style Tapestry. No skills in needlework required. Are you worried that you might use your time too usefully? I heartily recommend this app. You can get lost in it for hours while accomplishing next to nothing.

A bit of background

Longbows have been around since neolithic times. Or paleolithic. Or–well, choose your source. A long time. That’s close enough for our purposes. So if England can’t claim to have originated it, neither can Wales. But it was the Welsh who brought it to the attention of the English by shooting them with it when they invaded, starting in the eleventh century and continuing into the thirteenth.  

Once it had Wales under its control, England conscripted Welsh archers into its armies to help invade Scotland, and it adopted the weapon itself, encouraging the English to train with it.

Did I say “encouraged”? I lied. Starting in 1252, all English men between 15 and 60 were required to train with the longbow once a week. Since the average lifespan of a man in the Middle Ages was 49, that meant he was required to train for 11 years after he died. Life wasn’t easy back then, and it doesn’t look like death was either. 

Why all that training? You can’t just pick up a longbow and expect to be any good with it. You train. And you train some more. And you keep in shape by doing some more training. The effect on the muscles and bones is powerful enough that archeologists can spot archers by looking at their skeletons, assuming they’re well preserved. 

Archers were so important to England’s armies that when Edward I (1272 – 1307; you’re welcome) banned all sport on Sundays, he made an exception for archery. All that emphasis on training explains why so many places in England are incorporate the word butts into their names: butts were the fields where men practiced archery. 

The longbow vs the crossbow

A longbow stood around six feet tall, making it taller than most men of the period, and a skilled archer could shoot a dozen or more arrows a minute. A crossbow might get off two or three shots in that time. (Those numbers will change depending on what source you consult; I’m going with conservative estimates.) 

At distances, the longbow wouldn’t have been as accurate as the crossbow, but if a mass of longbowmen were shooting at a mass of advancing horsemen or foot soldiers, they wouldn’t need whites-of-their-eyes accuracy. They’d shoot off a mass of arrows that fell close together on a tightly packed enemy.  

The longbow was cheaper to make than the crossbow, and its arrows flew almost as fast, which translates to hitting almost as hard. They could penetrate medieval armor. And they didn’t need the support team that helped a crossbowman cock the weapon and maintain it.

Crossbowmen were paid well, which if you happened to be counting up your pennies to see if you could fund an invasion of France would weigh heavily in favor of the longbow. 

Weighing against the longbow was the muscle power involved in drawing it. Factor in the archer’s exhaustion after marching and fighting and “only 10% of medieval archers would be effective at a range of 200 yards after just a week of campaigning,” according to an article from the John Moore Museum.  

Although the crossbow looks high-tech compared to the longbow, it dates back to 650 BC China. It spread from there to Europe, although it seems to have dropped out of use between the 5th and 10th centuries, when the French began using it again in sieges and at the Battle of Hastings, where the Normans conquered England, although if there’s a picture of one in the Bayeux Tapestry I haven’t spotted it. It continued to be the preferred military weapon in Europe for a good 500 years. Only England committed itself to the longbow. 

The Hundred Years War

With all that out of the way, what happened when the longbow went up against the crossbow? The Hundred Years War is our test site.

The Hundred Years War,  you should understand, lasted from 1337 to 1453, which is not a hundred years. The extra years came from one of those supermarket sales–116 for the price of 100. Who could resist, even if the extra 16 did go moldy in the refrigerator? The conflict was about land–how much of France France got to control and how much England could claim–and whether the English king could claim the French throne.

Yeah, I should do a post about it one of these days.

At the Battle of Crecy (1346), the English (longbow) defeated a much larger French force (crossbow, wielded by Genoese mercenaries). Popular belief holds that the crossbow shots fell short because the archers’ bowstrings were wet. 

Wasn’t it raining on the English too? Well, yes. Weather doesn’t play favorites and wet bowstrings lose some of their elasticity regardless of the bow they’re strung on. I’ve met people who say the English kept their bowstrings dry under their hats. I’m doubtful, since as soon as they came out they’d start picking up moisture, but feel free to choose the story you like and stand by it. It was a long time ago and no one’s likely to prove you wrong. Before you choose, though, I should toss in an alternative theory: the crossbowmen misjudged their distance because they were facing the sun. 

The sun does play favorites.

We do have an established fact, though: the French cavalry charged through their own bowmen, which didn’t improve their effectiveness or their health. According to one account, French knights hacked down the crossbowmen when they got in the way. Because bowmen were commoners and knights were aristocrats, or at the very least gentry, so what the hell, no one was going to hold them to account. 

The English held off 16 cavalry charges, spilled a lot of blood, and won a blue ribbon and history’s congratulations to the victor.

But let’s not slog through all 116 years battle by battle. I’m easily bored. We’ll jump to the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415. Again, smaller English army, larger French (and German, but never mind that) one. Longbow vs. crossbow. Rain, although nobody seems to talk about its effect on the bowstrings here. French knights getting killed mid-charge by a hail of arrows. English victory. 

More to the point of this post, longbow victory.

And after that?

The role of the crossbows shifted primarily to defensive warfare. If you wanted to defend a castle (or anything vaguely castle-like–a city wall might work) against a siege, the crossbow’s longer range would be useful.

But both gave way to the musket and the gun. The longbow was last used in warfare in 1644 during the English Civil War–in Scotland.

What was the English Civil War doing in Scotland? It’s complicated. And it’s a whole ‘nother story. Let’s settle for saying that it was a war that broke a lot of rules. 

Before it lost out to gunpowder, though, the longbow played a role not just in warfare but in fucking with feudalism. Nobles and all their friends and relations had been the bedrock of the military, with their horses, their armor, and their swords. They were the knights–the essence of power. Then along came these commoners with their relatively cheap-ass bows and guess who was more powerful.

That wasn’t enough to put an end to feudalism, but then a social and economic system doesn’t end from one lone change. It was a teaspoonful of sand poured onto the scales, where it joined an assortment of others. And I’m sure it put many a knightly nose out of joint.