Danièle Cybulskie - Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction

Life in Medieval Europe:

Fact and Fiction

Life in Medieval Europe:

Fact and Fiction

Danile Cybulskie

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Pen and Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Danile Cybulskie, 2019

ISBN 9781526733450

eISBN: 9781526733467

Mobi ISBN: 9781526733474

The right of Danile Cybulskie to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Before this book ever became real enough to stare at me in the form of a blinking cursor, it was an idea Id had based on dozens of conversations with friends and strangers alike. Having been a medievalist for quite a few years now, Ive noticed that whenever people are drawn into a piece of historical fiction or a great story from history, itself we naturally tend to ask ourselves the same questions about the time period in which it takes place. These questions are all based around the human element: what was it like to be there and to experience that moment in time?

While we may learn about dates and kings and wars in history classes, it seems that too often we miss out on those little details that made up ordinary life. And yet those are the details that bring history into full colour, the details that connect us as human beings through time, and the details that stick with us long after weve closed a book or turned off a screen.

This book looks at medieval Europe in terms of those little itches of human curiosity that may not be scratched by a conventional look at history. Not everything that you might expect from a regular book about the Middle Ages is in here, but many things that you may not have thought to wonder about are. Youll find that much of what we explore pulls the Middle Ages back from the extremes for which it is known: extreme violence, extreme filth, extreme prejudice. Barbara Tuchman famously called the fourteenth century a distant mirror, but Ive found that the mirror is not as distant as it may seem.

For our purposes, well be looking at medieval Europe from around 500

CE

to around 1500

CE

. This roughly corresponds to the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Protestantism. Naturally, no one at the time thought of these markers as distinctions of a historical era called the medieval period, but theyre helpful markers, nonetheless. As Roman influence began to fall away, new power structures arose in the shape of what has been called (and argued and debated) feudalism, while at the other end of the period, Protestantism meant a break with the power of the Catholic church, and a different kind of independence for European kingdoms.

A lot can happen in a thousand years, and a lot did happen. Empires rose and fell, technology leapt forward, and half the population was wiped out in the course of a single year. We wont be able to cover it all in such a short book (or even a thousand short books), so there will be quite a lot of necessary generalising. My hope is that this book will whet your appetite enough that youll read on and investigate whatever tickles your fancy, from Vikings to Venetians.

While our focus will be on medieval Europe, its important to remember that this was just one small part of a wide world, and that there was a whole lot of fascinating stuff going on at the same time elsewhere. Europe was connected to a vast network of travel and trade that stretched from Greenland down the Nile and east to China. Goods, stories, and people made their way across thousands of miles slowly, with millions of tiny, human interactions along the way, making the medieval world culturally much richer and more diverse than people once believed. I ask you to imagine medieval Europe not as a place where everyone looked, dressed, and behaved the same way (they didnt), but as a place where peoples and cultures mixed and collided. I also invite you to read further, both geographically and historically, and learn more about what other amazing and wonderful things were going on around the world at this time.

So, what was life like in medieval Europe? Its often been described as nasty, brutish, and short ( la Thomas Hobbes), as the age of faith, and a time in which people would rather die than take a bath. As well see, there are some grains of truth to these notions, although theyve tended to be magnified through our need to believe weve come a long way in the time since. In reality, medieval people had much the same dreams, desires, and expectations that we do, and they reveal themselves to us through their daily habits, advice, and leisure pursuits.

History is fundamentally the story of human beings making their way through the world as best they can with curiosity, frustration, humour, and courage. Its my belief that getting to know the people of the past changes our thinking about human beings in general, and fosters understanding and compassion across boundaries. Beyond that, learning about a world that is so strange and yet so familiar is just an unbelievable amount of fun.

One of the most common myths about the Middle Ages is that no one cared about getting clean. Its just one of those facts that seems to get passed on without question, an accepted part of what we know about this era. Much is made of the filth of the period, but to be squeamish about medieval hygiene is to come from a place of enormous privilege. Not only do we know about bacteria and viruses today, but many of us have the resources to keep clean; namely, access to filtered water, heating systems, and cleaning products. Many people on Earth today dont have access to these things, and so they keep clean and healthy the best they can. The same was true for the majority of people in the Middle Ages.

The answer to this is a resounding yes and no. As the Romans slowly receded from most of Europe, they left behind the bathhouses they so enjoyed, many of them ornate and cleverly constructed to make use of natural hot springs. Both bathhouses and steam baths continued to be well-used features of towns and cities all over Europe throughout the medieval period, although perhaps not as often as we might prefer.

Bathhouses could be in the Roman style of pools in which everyone soaked together, or they could be rooms in which there were many bathtubs big enough to fit a few people at a time. Most medieval bathtubs, in both public bathhouses and private homes, generally looked like the bottom half of a wooden barrel and were made by coopers. Because its an unpleasant feeling to get a splinter while sitting down naked, bathers would often have a linen sheet draped into the bathtub as a layer between themselves and the wood. Theyd also make a linen tent above the bathtub to keep things steamy and cosy. For additional luxury, water could be sprinkled with flower petals to make the bather smell nice. Patrons had to pay a small fee to use the bathhouses, much as people today do when they visit a spa.