Youth in the Middle Ages 1903153131, 9781903153130

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YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE AGES Edited by P.J.P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy

YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE AGES

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Ltd. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2001–2004): Prof. W. M. Ormrod (Chair; Dept of History) Dr P. P. A. Biller (Dept of History) Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English & Related Literature) Dr J. Hawkes (Art History) Dr M. O. Townend (Dept of English & Related Literature) All inquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Director, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York YO1 7EP (E-mail: [email protected]).

Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

YOUTH IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Edited by P. J. P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

© Editors and Contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2004

A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026 Rochester NY 14604–4126 USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York

ISBN 1 903153 13 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Youth in the Middle Ages / edited by P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1–903153–13–1 (alk. paper) 1. Children – Europe – History – To 1500. 2. Children – Europe – History – 16th century. 3. Youth – Europe – History – To 1500. 4. Youth – Europe – History – 16th century. 5. Europe – Social conditions – To 1492. 6. Europe – Social conditions – 16th century. 7. Social history – Medieval, 500–1500. I. Goldberg, P. J. P., 1958– II. Riddy, Felicity. III. Title. HQ792.E8Y68 2004 305.235’094’0904 – dc22 2003017822

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS List of Contributors

vi

Introduction: After Ariès P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler

1

Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages Edward James

11

Jewish Society under Pressure: The Concept of Childhood Simha Goldin

25

Desiring Virgins: Maidens, Martyrs and Femininity in Late Medieval England Kim M. Phillips

45

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Authority in Pearl and in Narratives of the Child King Richard Rosalynn Voaden

61

A Safe-Haven for Children? The Early Humiliati and Provision for Children Frances Andrews

73

Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England P. J. P Goldberg

85

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances Helen Cooper

101

‘Youth on the Prow’: Three Young Kings in the Late Viking Age Judith Jesch

123

Index

141

CONTRIBUTORS Frances Andrews is a lecturer in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews Helen Cooper is a professor of English at the University of Oxford P. J. P. Goldberg is a senior lecturer in History at the University of York Edward James is a professor of History at the University of Reading Judith Jesch is Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham Simha Goldin is a senior lecturer in Jewish History at the University of Tel Aviv Kim M. Phillips is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Auckland Felicity Riddy is a professor of English at the University of York Mike Tyler is a doctoral student in Medieval Studies at the University of York Rosalynn Voaden is an associate professor of English at the Arizona State University

vi

Introduction: After Ariès

Introduction: After Ariès P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler

I

Childhood as an object of study has been seen as the creation of Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a French agricultural development expert by profession and free-lance historian in his spare time.1 His L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, first published in 1960, was issued two years later in English, under the misleading title Centuries of Childhood – misleading because to English-speaking readers it appeared to be a study of childhood in isolation, rather than a study of the child in the family. Where other historians of the family have sought to identify the development of affectivity primarily by studying the relations between husband and wife, Ariès, unconstrained by the conventions of professional academic history, had the brilliant idea of tracing changes in family structures via the emotional relations between parents and children. The book was an attempt to answer the question whether the idea of the family has diminished in the face of the twin processes of modernization and industrialization as divorce, once unknown, proliferates and parental authority is eroded. Ariès’s answer is that as ‘a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotions’, the family only arrived in the early nineteenth century.2 Physical changes in domestic housing allowed the modern nuclear family, which Ariès sees as emerging at this period, to cut itself off from the world.3 Publicness, defined as sociability, is therefore held to characterize the Ancien Régime, while privacy, defined as the retreat into the home and into self-sufficient family relationships, is seen as a modern condition.

1

2 3

This has been claimed by, for example, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, in his introduction to the Pimlico edition of Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (London, 1996), p. [iv]. Quotations are from this edition. Ibid., pp. 397–8. Since 1960 a considerable body of scholarship has emerged that would challenge some of these assumptions. The earliest English work to impact significantly on scholarly perceptions was Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (London, 1965). This was followed by Household and Family in Past Time, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1972). Evidence for a nuclear household structure in parts of north-western Europe from the later Middle Ages is found, for example, in P. Desportes, ‘La Population de Reims au XVe siècle’, Le Moyen Age 72 (1966), 463–509.

1

P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler Privacy now is ideological: it gives priority to the particularistic relations between parents and children which are a hallmark of modernity. For Ariès, the pre-modern family is an institution for securing the continuation of the patrimony, for providing training in conduct and thereby inculcating respect for the good order of society. None of this requires the emotional bonds between its members that characterize the modern family, which understands itself as organized round its love for the children. Ariès generally acknowledges that parents loved their children in the pre-modern era, but argues that parental love was not thought of as a defining feature of family life. The modern idea of the family, then, produced the idea of the child. The sections of the book devoted to pre-modern childhood draw on an awesome and somewhat eclectic range of evidence, primarily literary and artistic, in which Ariès attempts to discern large patterns in support of this central thesis. The opening sentence of a chapter entitled ‘The Discovery of Childhood’ strides with typical, generalizing confidence through a minefield of problems about the relation between art and life, about what gets represented, by and for whom, and for what purposes – indeed, about what survives: ‘Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it. It is hard to believe that this neglect was due to incompetence or incapacity; it seems more probable that there was no place for childhood in the medieval world.’4 By ‘no place for childhood’ Ariès means that there was no place for it as a separate and privileged category; it was, he assumes, ‘a period of transition which passed quickly and which was just as quickly forgotten’.5 Summarizing his argument about the Middle Ages at the end of Part One of Centuries of Childhood, he begins thus: In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, the particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society, this awareness was lacking.6

Nevertheless, from the thirteenth century on, he argues, we can begin to see the development of the modern idea of childhood. Children start to appear in art: adolescent angels, the infant Jesus, the soul as a naked child. The iconography of Jesus extends to other holy children, and then to narrative genres in which children appear alongside adults, playing or helping or watching. From the fifteenth century two new genres appear: child portraits, including mortuary effigies, and putti, and these two merge in the seventeenth century 4

5 6

Ibid., p. 31. For a critique of Ariès’s use of visual evidence see A. Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès? Pictorial and material evidence for the history of childhood and family life’, Continuity and Change 4 (1989), 203–29. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 32. Ibid., p. 125.

2

Introduction: After Ariès in nude studies of children. And at the same time an old genre, the family portrait, begins to plan the group around the children, foreshadowing the modern centrality of the child in the privatized home. In Ariès’s thinking, then, childhood and privacy are interdependent concepts which are held to come into being together. In order to respond to this argument, therefore, it is not enough to show that there was affection between parents and children in the Middle Ages, which has often been done and which Ariès knew perfectly well already; we also need to prise childhood and privacy apart.7 We might begin to do this by looking at how Ariès understands privacy and publicness. In Centuries of Childhood, ‘private’ means ‘the isolated group of parents and children’ and ‘public’ means ‘society’: Ariès’s public sphere is not a political concept but a social one. Ariès’s association of childhood with privacy, and his understanding of publicness only as sociability, means that he may not have found ‘an awareness of the particular nature of childhood’ because he was looking in the wrong place.

II

One such public use of the idea of the child (and here ‘public’ has the sense of ‘the state as a source of power’) is in the sermon delivered by the archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Arundel, to the assembly that was summoned in October 1399 to confirm Richard II’s enforced abdication and Henry IV’s accession to the throne. Latin and French summaries are preserved in the parliamentary rolls. The archbishop, an old adversary of Richard’s, took as his theme a text from the first book of Kings: ‘A man shall rule over the people.’ The parliamentary record reports that: The said archbishop has shown that this honourable kingdom of England, which is the most plentiful corner [angle] of wealth in the world, has for a long time been led, ruled and governed by children [enfantz], and the advice of widows . . . the kingdom would have fallen into utter desolation and grievous misfortune if it had not been that almighty God, through his great grace and mercy, has sent a wise and discreet Man for the governance of this kingdom who, through the aid of God, wishes to be governed and counselled by the sagacious elders of his kingdom [les Sages & Aunciens de son Roialme].8

The archbishop developed the contrast between the boy ruler of the previous reign and the man ruler of the new one: ‘for now it is not a boy who rules but a man’ . . . ‘For when a boy reigns wilfulness reigns [voluntas sola] and reason is 7

8

A pioneering attempt to demonstrate an affective bond between parent and child in the medieval era is B. A. Hanawalt, ‘Childrearing among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977), 1–22. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ut et Petitiones et Placita in Parliamento Tempore Ricardi R. II, 6 vols. (London, 1783), 3: 415.

3

P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler exiled . . . From this danger we are now set free, because a man shall have dominion.’ The archbishop uses Paul 1 Corinthians 13, ‘When I was a child I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child’, as a point of departure for a condemnation of Richard’s ‘childish’ inconstancy and falsehood, of which Arundel himself had been a victim. Biblical texts were a common source of the tropes of misrule, as we know from Langland’s Piers Plowman. In the B-text, written in the late 1370s around the time of Richard II’s accession, the boy-king was represented as the kitten in the fable of belling the cat. Langland quotes a familiar text from Ecclesiastes: ‘Woe to the land where a boy is king!’ For Langland, the dangers presented by the boy-king are slightly different from those described by Archbishop Arundel: ‘Ther the cat is a kitten the court is ful elenge.’ [unhappy] That witnesseth Holy Writ whoso wole it rede – Vae tibi ubi puer rex est, &c. [Woe unto you where a boy is king] For no renk ther reste have for ratons by nyghte. [men; rats] (194–7)9

It is the powerlessness of the boy kitten, his inability to control the over-mighty rat-lords, which are at issue here. The perspective of Langland’s lines is that of the under-mighty subject – the mice in the fable – who need the protection of a strong central authority and for whom the kitten is no help at all. Arundel’s 1399 sermon has of course two targets, not just one: the obvious one is Richard; the other – the unmentioned one – must have been the eight-year-old earl of March, who had as good a claim to the throne as Henry IV. The archbishop’s boy-man contrast is an attempt to foreclose the young earl’s unstated claim, so the contrast does have a literal force, insofar as it relates to the adult Henry and the boy earl. But of course in relation to Richard, its immediate and explicit target, it does not have literal force: youth is now detached from chronological age. The powerful contrast between the child and the man (parvulus and vir) cannot be mapped on to the actual ages of the two men because Richard was thirty-two when he was deposed and Henry Bolingbroke was only six months older. There is no medieval age-scheme in which Richard’s actual age could be defined as childish. In Arundel’s sermon youth and age are now attached to political ideologies: childishness is a style of government: capricious, inconstant, wilful, autocratic. The events of 1397–9, which include the appeals of Warwick, Arundel and Gloucester and the latter’s murder, Richard’s banishment of Bolingbroke and Mowbray and of that same archbishop of Canterbury who was to preach against him – all these are seen as an abuse of royal power which is represented as childish. This is how the archbishop developed the theme:

9

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: the B Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, 1978).

4

Introduction: After Ariès As for speech, truly, the child is inconstant in speaking, easily speaking the truth and easily speaking falsehood, easily giving his word, but then forgetting straight away what he has undertaken. . . . But we are freed from these defects when the kingdom is ruled by a man, for it is a characteristic of a man that he keeps guard over his tongue.10

One of the striking things about this set of contrasts, between inconstant and deceivable speech on the one hand and manly taciturnity on the other, is that it is also coded as feminine and masculine. Inconstancy and deceit are tropes of misogynistic discourse. In fact, in the archbishop’s sermon ‘boy’ and ‘woman’ are explicitly conflated and are together opposed to manliness: the accusation against the previous regime is that the kingdom was governed by children and counselled by widows. The widow here represents the ungoverned woman who should, by virtue of her sex, be ruled – like the child – by wise old men. Arundel’s representation of Richard II as disregarding the advice of the ‘sagacious elders of his kingdom’ is a version of a charge frequently laid against Richard during his reign and beyond. According to Richard the Redeles, for example: ‘The cheventeyns cheef that ye chesse ever / Weren al to yonge of yeris to yeme swyche a rewme’.11 Accusations of this kind, like Arundel’s boy–man contrast, seem to relate to the style of the court – what might be termed its ‘youth culture’ – as much as to the chronological ages of members of Richard’s household. Court style included extravagant spending on fashion and luxury items, as well as what looked to outsiders like outrageous sexual mores, including the divorce and remarriage of Robert de Vere, and John Holland’s seduction of John of Gaunt’s daughter.12 Aristocratic discourses, on the other hand, could use the hostile, androgynous conflation of ‘woman’ and ‘boy’ in order to redefine the meaning of youth and redeploy it as a position of power. It is possible, perhaps, to see this happening in the Wilton diptych, that exquisite small altarpiece that depicts Richard II on one panel as a beardless boy kneeling in front of John the Baptist and two earlier saintly English kings, Edward the Confessor and Edmund. On the other panel is the Virgin carrying the Christ child, surrounded by angels who wear Richard’s livery badge of the white hart. It is courtly but not frivolous; secular in its ostentatious display of elegance and luxury – even John the Baptist seems to be wearing designer furs – and yet devotional; immensely stylish in the aristocratic mode. The king and St Edmund wear the fashionable ‘sleves long and wyde’ which Chaucer’s Squire wears, and which were castigated by anti-court moralists, like the poet of the Richard the Redeles.13 The

10 Rotuli Parliamentorum, 3: 423. 11 Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Michigan,

2000), lines 88–9. 12 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 352–5. 13 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales’, line 93, The Riverside

Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988).

5

P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler livery badges are enamelled en rond bosse which was the latest technique in jewellery-making. The diptych has been plausibly dated between 1395, when Richard was twenty-eight, and 1399, when he was thirty-two, and is equally plausibly held to have been commissioned by the king himself. One of the enigmas of this altarpiece is why Richard should be represented as a boy, in a period so thoroughly attuned to age codes. Other portraits from the 1390s show him bearded; this one emphasizes the femininity of boyhood in a way that seems deliberately positioned against ideas of manliness: a contrast in this regard might be drawn with Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. In the representation of Richard, androgyny is an image of regality; to recall Archbishop Arundel’s sermon, it is authorized by the feminine court of heaven and its queen – a kingdom apparently governed by children and the counsel of widows. Youth is not represented as irrational or inconstant, as the voluntas sola that was held to be inimical to the traditional interests of the nobility, nor as voluptuous or powerless. The young king is meekly deferential before the sagacious elders, Edward the Confessor in the middle and St Edmund on the left, but is also their leader. The three kings, Edward the Confessor, Edmund and Richard, seem to allude to the Magi, appropriately because Richard was born on the Feast of the Epiphany.14 This iconography has often been noted; what has not been noted in this context, though, is that the Magi are frequently represented in manuscript illuminations as the three ages of man: the beardless boy, the lightly bearded mature man and the grizzled old man, as these three kings are.15 The Magi, like these three kings, approach the infant Christ in a reversal of the usual age hierarchy, because in fourteenth-century representations it is usually the oldest king who is depicted as kneeling to present the first gift, whereas here that role is taken by Richard, the youngest. By representing Richard as part of an Ages of Man sequence, in which the implication is that there is a natural progression from youth to maturity to age, the diptych counters the kind of hostile youth-age dichotomy which Arundel’s sermon was able to exploit. The regality of youth, moreover, is confirmed by the gesture of the other regal child who represents a fourth age – of infancy – and who holds out a banner emblazoned with a red cross, on the orb of which is depicted a tiny island. In a breathtakingly absolutist gesture, England is apparently exchanged between the infant and the boy. To medievalists it may seem hardly surprising that, in the reign of a king

14 See Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas and Caroline Elam (eds.), The Regal Image of Richard II

and the Wilton Diptych, introd. Caroline M. Barron (London, 1997). 15 See J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man (Oxford, 1966). Edmund, on the left, is depicted with a

small forked beard and gold hair that is beginning to show streaks of grey; next to him, Edward the Confessor has a full grey beard and hair.

6

Introduction: After Ariès who came young to the throne, there should be a continued political contest over what it means to be a child, and Rosalynn Voaden’s article in this volume explores this more fully. This contest suggests that, far from there being no medieval awareness of the distinctiveness of childhood, it was in fact understood in subtle, complex and contradictory ways.

III

In writing about childhood and youth in the medieval past, scholars have to confront the inevitable obstacles created both by the comparative paucity of sources and the inherent tendency of the evidence to reflect ideology rather than social practice or to privilege elites over common people and males over females. The essays that follow both reflect and engage with these underlying problems.16 Thus Edward James explores the idea of childhood as reflected in the writing of Gregory of Tours. He considers the continuities and discontinuities of terminology and approach in the descriptions and narrations of childhood incidents which he finds present throughout the works of Gregory. His analysis indicates that there are grounds to challenge the assumption that the classical tripartite division of childhood into the categories of infans, puer and adolescens was recognized and specifically understood in the early Middle Ages. Instead, he sees evidence to conclude that although childhood itself was a developmental category which was recognized and which occasioned thought, debate and a degree of idealism, the classical categories of adolescence and youth, and ‘youth’ in our modern sense, were not recognized as specific stages in life. For James, the works of Gregory suggest that with the onset of puberty came adulthood and probably marriage – a model which he offers for further critical analysis against regional and chronological variation. Simha Goldin is similarly concerned to tease out evidence for an ideology of childhood within Northern European Jewish society of the high medieval era. Using for a benchmark the model put forward by Ariès, Goldin examines Jewish communities that confronted the threat of persecution and forced conversion at the hands of their Christian neighbours in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These societies looked towards their young as a means of preserving the Jewish faith. Tracing this response through contemporary chronicles and exegetical texts contextualizing Talmudic tradition, the image of a society with a particular understanding of the parent-child relationship is highlighted. The resulting picture, which tends to focus on the male rather

16 The essays published here were, in all but one instance, first given as papers in the York

Medieval Seminar series and a related day conference on the theme of ‘Youth’ during the calendar year 1995. Simha Goldin’s chapter was subsequently added by invitation. A number of other scholars contributed to the original series, namely Caroline Barron, Sally Crawford, Guy Halsall, Sophie Oosterwijk, Richard Smith, Jenny Swanson and Jackie Tasioulas. The editors wish to thank all the contributors to the original series.

7

P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler than the female child, is of a culture within which a strong concept of the nature of childhood existed, both within the family and in the wider community. Evidence of the ways in which the child was integrated into an emotional framework within the family, and into the ritual framework of the wider community is used to illustrate that children were regarded in an affectionate and sympathetic way. In particular, their inclusion in these rituals of worship both within the home and in the synagogue, not simply as ‘little adults’ but as individuals following a specific path of personal development on their journey to full maturity challenges the Ariès model. Ideology is again the focus of essays by Kim Phillips and Rosalynn Voaden, who take us to the English later Middle Ages, but whose studies engage with the influence of literary patrons and contemporary politics respectively. Phillips explores the response of an audience comprising young, affluent females to the conflicting messages of homiletic literature and the iconography of the virgin martyrs in the later Middle Ages. Taking as a starting point the apparent contradictions between oft repeated warnings regarding the dangers of personal vanity contrasted with the conventional images of beauty portrayed in the representations of the virgin martyrs, she examines the possible interpretative frameworks within which these conflicting messages regarding physical beauty may have been processed. Identifying the concept of parasexuality as a characteristic inherent in the visual and textual persona of the virgin martyr, Phillips takes as his focus a series of saints’ lives written for a circle of female patrons by monastic authors working in East Anglia during the first half of the fifteenth century. The text is seen to serve as an ideological bridge between writer and reader and to foster a reciprocal relationship between audience and writer. By means of this relationship, the worldly interests of the audience, particularly young female readers, are simultaneously nurtured and encouraged, whilst being channelled into ‘safe’ or repressed ideological settings. The literary construction of a child as a figure of authority and the tensions inherent in this process are the concerns of Rosalynn Voaden. Looking at three fourteenth-century texts, Pearl, the Anonimalle Chronicle (1333–81) and the Westminster Chronicle (1381–94), she discusses ways in which the writers respond to the challenge presented by the need to establish the authority of the child, on the one hand the Pearl maiden, on the other, the boy King Richard II. In this apparent suspension of hierarchies vested in age and parental status, she traces a process by which these traditional signifiers of authority are displaced by an alternative system of ordering deriving from the perceived attributes of the child: innocence, purity and marginal position in the social structure. Voaden examines the process by which the physical body of the child is infused with an external authority through association with another sacred body, that of the Queen of Heaven, or the sacred body of the king on earth. Considering these texts against the backdrop of the complex and unstable politics of late fourteenth-century England and the events surrounding the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Voaden places the debate 8

Introduction: After Ariès surrounding such challenges to the customary hierarchy in a broader and more tragic context. The exploration of the lived lives of historical children and young people is always more difficult since children especially are all too often invisible in the historical record. Frances Andrews has found a rare window on to the experience of children within records of the northern Italian communities of devout laity known as the Humiliati. Her focus is ‘the relationship between parental responsibility and religious vocation’. Entry to the order can be seen as a possible solution to the difficulties of reconciling a desire to live an ordered religious life with the need to fulfil parental or familial responsibilities towards children. Examining the cases of six adults and seventeen children who were admitted into what appear to be communities of Humiliati, the motives of both the adults and of the order itself are considered. Whilst it is apparent that for the parents or other relatives involved, the Humiliati are seen as offering a safe haven in uncertain circumstances for the children, the motives of the order itself in accepting children are less clear. Although there is in many of the cases examined the accompaniment of a significant financial or material donation to the order, a purely financial framework for the relationship between order, parent and child is not considered entirely satisfactory. In contrast, it is suggested that the response of the order marks a real attempt to extend the option of participation in the full religious life to families, including children, whilst still preserving the rights of the young to exercise free choice to stay or leave on reaching maturity. The needs of younger children were, it would appear, commonly understood to be best met within the context of the natal family. Even in cultures where well-born infants were routinely dispatched to wet nurses, the infant would be returned once weaned. At some point, however, most children were expected to leave home. It is a theme that recurs through several of the essays here. P. J. P. Goldberg asks some factual questions for later medieval England relating to the age at which youngsters flew the nest, how far they travelled and where they went. He observes from deposition evidence and similar sources that it was adolescents and the young adult who constituted the most mobile group. Mobility, indeed, he suggests was a ‘facet of youth’. Although the distances travelled were often comparatively small, it may be that most people moved away from their natal communities, usually at some point before marrying and so realizing the stability implicit in marriage. Numbers of both men and women, identified as servants and labourers in the contemporary records, seem, however, to have remained relatively mobile and to have abstained from marriage. In some ways such individuals never achieved social adulthood. They were also identified as problematic and potential troublemakers by a magisterial elite. The process of leaving home also represents a moment charged with emotional tension. It is a rite of passage whereby the child escapes the shelter of paternal and maternal care and makes his or her own way in the world. In short the child becomes youth. The certainties of childhood are exchanged for 9

P. J. P. Goldberg, Felicity Riddy and Mike Tyler the uncertainties of adolescence. This moment of profound cultural anxiety is reflected in the proliferation of romance narratives centred around the departure of the hero or heroine from the natal hearth. These form the basis of Helen Cooper’s study. Such narratives ostensibly proffer advice to the young, but in fact offer such obvious truisms that this can hardly be the primary purpose. The means of transmission, expression and context are, moreover, often confusing and complex. The result is not so much a process by which the hero or heroine, or by implication the reader, is equipped with useful and practical information and principles of use in their subsequent careers. Rather the moment at which the action of the narrative is halted for the confidential conversation between parent and child, age and youth, is a point of memorial marking a moment of transition, a recognition of the inevitability of moving from a certain to an uncertain world. The need for the youth to make his or her way in the world, having flown the nest, finds particular expression in the warrior culture of the Viking era. Judith Jesch considers contemporary or near-contemporary skaldic verse narratives of three Scandinavian kings of the early eleventh century. Each of these three, Olafr Haraldsson, Knutr Sveinsson and Magnus the Good, were celebrated for achieving their status at notably young ages, and, for two of these individuals, through prowess in arms. Jesch examines in detail the representation of their careers as youthful and vigorous leaders. She finds a tension inherent in the competing requirements for a Viking king to be vigorous and strong, whilst also possessing wisdom and experience. In combination, these three narratives are offered as an illustration of the debate about the nature of kingship in Scandinavia which was to bring about a shift from a ‘Viking’ model based on conflict and achievement in arms to a more ‘medieval’ model. In her analysis, Jesch illustrates this as a system within which it was necessary to reconcile dynastic, ecclesiastical and national concerns with the traditional warrior values of courage, leadership and prowess in arms.

10

Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages

Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages Edward James

This article was originally entitled ‘Writing the History of Youth in the Early Middle Ages’. My concern was to think about the potentiality of the documentary source material for the study of youth: narrative historical sources, hagiography, the legal material and so on. I found it in practice impossible to write about youth without writing about childhood, and in the end I found myself concentrating on the writings of Gregory of Tours: a proper title for this article is thus either ‘Childhood and Youth in Merovingian Gaul’ or, more honestly, ‘Childhood and Youth in Gregory of Tours’. I concentrate on Gregory not just because I am working on a monograph on this author, but also because, in the 880 printed pages in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition, he presents us with a very large body of material, covering both the historical and hagiographical genres, which also includes probably more autobiographical material than we have extant from anyone else in the early Middle Ages – not expressed with the sophistication of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, perhaps, but rich and interesting despite that, or because of that.1 The advantage of having such a body of material from one person is that, although it might only be one man’s view of the subject, it may at least provide some consistency of terminology and approach. Understanding one man’s view of childhood and youth would, after all, be a start, given the startling lack of research into this topic by early medieval historians, and given its inherent problems.2 The first question to ask, of course, is what questions ought we to be asking? What are the issues that we should like to resolve about childhood and youth in the early Middle Ages? We should naturally like to know if our own concept of ‘youth’ – which is itself highly subjective, extremely fluid at the edges and not very stable at the middle – had any corresponding concept in the period, or whether people in the early Middle Ages used quite different categories. We should like to know how adults treated young people, and vice versa. We should like to know about adult understanding of child and youth 1

2

The works of Gregory of Tours were edited in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merowingicarum I, ed. W. Arndt and B. Krusch (Hanover, 1885), henceforth MGH SSRM I. In the encyclopedic work by Margarethe Weidemann, Kulturgeschichte der Merowingerzeit nach den Werken Gregors von Tours, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1982), there is a section on children in the law (I, 316–17), but otherwise there is no section on childhood or youth.

11

Edward James behaviour, and the extent of adult tolerance of it. We would like to know about early medieval ‘youth culture’: to what extent did young people have their own culture of play and music, and to what extent were they incorporated into adult activities, and if so, from what age? We would like to know about the rituals of childhood and youth, including those imposed from above: the ‘rites de passage’. Our chances of knowing much about any of these things are actually fairly remote; even if we are able to supply answers to some of them, on the basis of a particular source, we shall find it very difficult indeed to generalize beyond the period and locality of the source we are using. Did Gregory of Tours have a particular set of agenda on this issue, or does he fairly represent a common point of view in sixth-century Gaul? Do monastic rule-makers, who have to legislate for the younger monks, share attitudes towards the young that are to be found outside the monastery? Legislative material presents especial problems, which historians are much more aware of now than a generation ago. We are no longer able to write the social history of Merovingian Gaul, for instance, from a reading of the Salic law-code of the Franks. We can note, from Pactus Legis Salicae 24, that boys under twelve are protected by a wergild three times that of the adult Frank, and that cutting the hair of a long-haired boy (puer crinitus), or cutting the hair of a free girl, is punishable by a heavy fine.3 The wergild of a girl under child-bearing age, however, is only that of a normal freeman; the trebling of the wergild is stipulated for women of child-bearing age.4 We can only speculate as to what this might signify in the sphere of gender relations. The killing of a long-haired boy (that is, it is usually assumed, a free-born boy) is mentioned separately from the killing of a boy under twelve (also certainly free-born), though the punishment is the same, and we cannot understand the distinction that is being made between the two. And we know that not only did the Salic law-code only capture a moment in the ever-changing social development of the Franks, but that it may have expressed the aspirations of lawyers just as much as social realities, that it was probably only rarely publicized or used in law-courts, and that, most important of all, it was only intended to apply to a small proportion of the subjects of the Merovingian kings. Most people in Merovingian Gaul, and most people in Western Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries, were descended from Roman citizens and used some form of Roman law. However, using Roman law to try to understand any aspect of their society is also virtually impossible: provincial Roman law, unlike imperial rescripts, was not written down in a form that has reached us. Enough fragments remain in post-Roman Wales, for instance, to suggest that the Welsh continued to use elements of Roman law, but did anything of the Roman laws relating to young people survive in Wales? It is impossible to say. 3 4

Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. K. A. Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges Nationum Germanicarum IV.1 (Hanover, 1962), pp. 89–92. Ibid., title 41, p. 161.

12

Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages We might hope that in the future some answers will be provided from archaeology. As yet there has been very little work done on child graves from the early medieval period, which are the most obvious type of archaeological evidence to analyse. It is clear that there are not enough of them: in particular, the graves of infants are frequently not to be found. But some conclusions can nevertheless be drawn, and a turning point in this study is Sally Crawford’s book on childhood in Anglo-Saxon England.5 Very interesting conclusions also appear in the study Guy Halsall has made of the Merovingian cemeteries of Austrasia, eastern France, and more specifically those of the civitas of Metz.6 He noted that a high proportion of children’s graves, which are very difficult to sort out into male or female by skeletal analysis, had necklaces and finger rings, and concluded that in childhood males and females were perhaps dressed and treated alike. From puberty, women were buried wearing the normal dress and accoutrements of mature women; males, on the other hand, were not buried with any of the gender-specific accoutrements of men – specifically, of course, weapons – until around the age of twenty. Whatever conclusion one draws from this, one might suggest that the history of young women is different from the history of young men. And almost inevitably, because of the bias of the sources, most of what we know is about young men. One of the main problems is that of establishing our categories, or, perhaps, of reconciling our own categories with those of the early Middle Ages. In modern usage, youth may be understood as the period between childhood and maturity, which we may term adolescence and early adulthood. But it is also understood as signifying immaturity or inexperience, qualities associated with being young, which constitutes a much broader definition. At one end, ‘youth’ is one stage in several, perhaps seven, stages of man/woman; at the other we have a much simpler categorization of people into adult and pre-adult, or adult and young. Sociologists make a distinction between adolescence, which is defined in biological terms from puberty to full physical adulthood – a brief period of five or six years – and youth, a socioeconomic category. To quote Robert Havighurst, from a 1975 American educationalists’ report entitled Youth: ‘We have chosen the ten-year period from age fifteen through twenty-four as the time-span for the period of youth, although we recognize that some young people require several years beyond twenty-five for the establishment of their psychological and vocational identity.’7 Is it possible in our early medieval sources for any similar distinction to be observed? As is well known, ancient – and medieval writers following them – normally divided up the life of the young of the human species into three

5 6 7

S. Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999). This work was published after the text of this chapter was completed. G. Halsall, Settlement and Social Organization: The Merovingian Region of Metz (Cambridge, 1995). Youth, ed. R. J. Havighurst and P. H. Dreyer, Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 74, part 1 (Chicago, 1975), p. ix.

13

Edward James categories: the infans up to age seven, the puer (or puella) up to the age of puberty, at the ages of twelve or fourteen, and the adolescens after that. In her standard book, translated as Childhood in the Middle Ages (which should more honestly be retitled, as so many books of this kind should, Childhood in the Last Third of the Middle Ages, between 1150 and 1500, Mostly in France), Shulamith Shahar deals with young people from conception until puberty. She devotes a brief discussion to the transition from pueritia to adolescentia, however, and notes that a study of the third stage would be an interesting topic for another book.8 Adolescentia is a state which continues until twenty-five, or even thirty-five . . . ‘some young people require several years beyond twenty-five for the establishment of their psychological and vocational identity’.9 After adolescentia, for some classical writers and those who follow them, came juventus, still not a state of full maturity and literally translatable, I presume, as ‘youth’. For Dante, adolescenzia ended at twenty-five, and was succeeded by gioventute, also to be translated as ‘youth’, which applied until the age of forty-five.10 This categorization was by no means universal in classical and medieval Latin writers. In the late fourth century Ausonius wrote to a grandson on his fifteenth birthday and congratulated him on reaching iuventus.11 At twenty-five Roman law freed a man from the state of legal guardianship; in Dante’s day a man could participate fully in Italian town life from the same age. Not until full maturity, however, would a man achieve positions of importance within his society. I say ‘man’ advisedly: as Shahar says, the divisions of life into adolescentia and juventus are not applied to women, who may well be wives and mothers by their teens, and thus, after puberty, in quite different social, legal and political categories. One thinks of the epitaph Ausonius wrote for Anicia: She had enjoyed everything that can be wished for in a long lifespan. [She was sixteen when she died.] As a child she gave suck to her baby, as a girl she was already an adult. She married, conceived a child, gave birth, and died.12

It makes little sense, I would argue, for the scholar of today interested in ‘youth’ to look at the state of the juvenes, the male population between twenty-five and thirty-five. Indeed, it would make more sense to translate not juventus but adolescentia as ‘youth’ rather than as ‘adolescence’. Adolescentia corresponds to a much longer time-span than the relatively short period recognized as biological adolescence by modern writers. Should I, in this chapter, then, be dealing with the life of young people – and maybe specifically young males – between, let us say, fourteen and twenty-five? Obviously 8 9 10 11 12

S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), p. 30. Youth, ed. Havighurst and Drewer, p. ix. Shahar, Childhood, p. 28. Ausonius, IX: Decimi Magni Ausonii Opera, ed. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1999), p. 28. Ausonius, XIII, 2: ibid., p. 77.

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Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages there would be potentially a lot of material. A number of successful early medieval kings, for instance, managed to pack most of their careers into the years before they were twenty-five. Most early medieval warriors did as well. It was indeed, according to Felix, in St Guthlac’s adolescentia that he ‘remembered the deeds of the heroes of old, and as though waking from sleep he changed his disposition [he had been a saintly little child] and gathering bands of followers he took up arms’.13 (He displayed his incipient saintliness by returning to his victims a third of everything he stole and plundered from them.) It is probably no coincidence that, according to Bede, Benedict Biscop was twenty-five years old when he retired from his warrior career and settled down and founded a monastery, and it is notable in this context that twenty-five was recognized as the age at which, canonically, a man could be ordained as a priest.14 When I came to look this question, however, I realized that there was a major problem. The tripartite division of childhood into infans, puer and adolescens, which could be found in classical writers, is indeed repeated by writers in the early medieval period. It can be found in Gregory the Great, Fructuosus of Braga, and Isidore of Seville (though for numerological reasons – a love of the number seven and its multiples – Isidore has replaced twenty-five with twenty-eight as the end of adolescentia).15 But moving from purely theoretical texts like Isidore’s Etymologies to narrative texts like the History of Gregory of Tours, or other texts such as hagiographies or letters, we find that a specific category of ‘young men’ (or ‘young women’) is simply not there. The word adolescens is indeed used, but rarely, and quite at random. Alcuin refers to himself as having gone on a trip as an adolescens when at the age of thirty-six;16 Gregory of Tours refers to himself as ‘in my adolescence’ when he had not yet reached his eighth birthday;17 a sixth-century inscription from Gaul records the death of a four-year-old adolescens, while another uses the word infantia of a teenager, an adolescent in our terms.18 Here I move into areas of generalization which are decidedly dangerous, because I have not yet investigated word-usage much outside the works of Gregory of Tours. Someone like Alcuin of York, who quite frequently refers to the younger members of monastic communities, would be a good subject for

13 Felix, Life of St Guthlac, 16–17: Felix’s Life of Guthlac, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956),

14 15 16 17 18

pp. 80–1. According to chapter 12 (pp. 78–9), Guthlac had ended his infantia before beginning to speak. Bede, Historia Abbatum 1: Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1895), pp. 364–5. Isidore, XI.ii.4: Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiam sive Originum, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1912) (no page number). Alcuin, Epist. 172: MGH Epistolae IV, p. 285. Cited by P. Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West (Columbia SC, 1976), p. 448. Gregory of Tours, Vitae Patrum VIII.2: MGH SSRM I, p. 692. E. Le Blant, Nouveau Recueil des Inscriptions de la Gaule Chrétienne (Paris, 1893), no. 106, cited by Riché, Education and Culture, p. 448.

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Edward James further investigation. But in Gregory, at least, there appears to be no normal division of the population into age-groups once they have ceased to be pueri or puellae, at least until they reach the status, or weakness, of old age. Gregory may in theory distinguish a class of adolescentia between thirteen and twenty-five, if he has read the right classical authors, but this does not actually affect the way in which he thinks of real people in historical or social situations. In practice he has a looseness of vocabulary which is quite noticeable (and not that different from our own haphazard way with ‘child’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’ and ‘youth’). Indeed, there is at least one case of Gregory of Tours doing precisely what in this age of self-awareness we can no longer hear without wincing: one story is headed ‘the blind girl [puella] from Lisieux’: but in the story itself Paula is described as ‘iam adulta from Lisieux’.19 It makes one suspect that not all Gregory’s puellae are especially youthful.20 Looseness of vocabulary is, however, much more of a problem with Gregory’s pueri. This is not Gregory’s fault, so much as a flaw in the Latin language, and noted as such in a contemporary text, Justinian’s legal compilation, the Digest, where we find: A reference to puer can have three meanings. (a) We can call all slaves pueri [equivalent to the Alabaman or Mississippian ‘boy’] (b) We may mean boys as opposed to girls; and (c) when we refer to children [that is, children of both sexes].21

Christian writers in the early Christian period can add another meaning: a male of any age who is baptized can be referred to as a puer: he has been reborn again as a child. For Gregory, in fact, the word pueri is often, perhaps normally, used as a shorthand for pueri regales: the king’s boys, the king’s lads – presumably those adolescentes between fourteen and twenty-five who serve in the royal presence as warriors/body-guards/servants. The word may be used precisely to recall ‘slave’, in reference to their status as obedient servants. Occasionally the context shows us that the puer referred to is probably in the classical age of pueritia, that is between the ages of seven and fourteen; but often context suggests to us that the pueri are much older than that. The word puer without qualification or clear context in Gregory could be a royal retainer; it could be a boy; it could be a slave; and it could, of course, be a royal retainer or a slave who was a boy . . . In a sense Gregory and his contemporaries knew this problem, and used a whole variety of other words to refer to pueri proper – males between the ages of seven and fourteen: infans, infantulus, juventus, ephebus, parvulus, perparvulus 19 In Gregory, De Virtutibus Sancti Martini II.54: MGH SSRM I, pp. 608 (chapter heading) and

627 (text). 20 Though most scholars reject the idea, it is possible that the chapter-headings in Gregory

were supplied by a later scribe. 21 Quoted in T. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London, 1989), p. 154.

Comments in parenthesis are my own.

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Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages as well as our old friend adolescens. But this, of course, is to assume that we can tell the age of the child being referred to in our sources. Gregory himself only rarely specifies age. Interestingly, when he does so it is almost invariably either the age of people at their death or the age of children below the age of puberty. Because of that last habit, we can see that Gregory does reveal an understanding of different stages of childhood, together with the type of behaviour that one might expect at various stages, and we can reconstruct something of his attitude to the young. Some of his comments seem slightly odd. For instance, he tells how he had recently heard of a little boy (puerulus) about three years old, who was still being suckled by his mother. The boy had a fever, and could not eat. While being carried to the tomb of St Maximus of Riez, ‘on the hands of those who loved him’, he died. His parents ‘wept and shouted’, and threw the boy in front of the tomb, and left it there, lifeless, when the doors of the church closed for the night.22 Next morning the doors were unlocked, and they saw that the infant boy had raised himself and was pulling himself along the railing of the tomb, ‘for he was not yet old enough that he could walk properly’. (At the age of three?) The boy recovered, and Gregory heard the story from him when a grown man.23 The same stage of beginning to walk at the age of three occurs in another story. Three years after his birth, a puerulus from Limoges was beginning to walk, his voice was becoming louder, and he was forming words with his lips. ‘He lovingly teased his mother, offered kisses, and embraced her neck.’ But a demon blew dust in his eyes in a great whirlwind. ‘Because his mother was an ignorant unbeliever and did not think of protecting herself and her son with the sign of salvation, this treachery was successful’ – that is, the boy became blind. ‘When he was older he was given to beggers, so that he might wander around with them and receive some alms, for his parents were very poor.’ Twelve years later he came to Tours, on Christmas Eve 582; he lay in front of Martin’s tomb, and blood poured from his eyes, and he could see.24 Another story, again relating to a small child, is informative, in that it suggests that belief in the importance of infant baptism was current at least in some lay circles in fifth- and sixth-century Gaul. A very little boy (puer parvulus), specified as being ten months old, was gravely ill. His mother wept ‘not so much for the death of the child as for the fact that he had not yet been anointed with the sacrament of baptism’. The child was almost dead, and was laid on the saint’s tomb. ‘The child, who had been stretched out unconscious, awoke and shows by a laugh the joy of his heart; he opened his mouth and calls his mother, saying “Come here!” ’ The mother was amazed, as she had

22 Those who think that in an age of high infant mortality parents did not feel for their dying

offspring need only read some of Gregory’s heart-rending stories. 23 De Gloria Confessorum 82: MGH SSRM I, p. 801; translation from R. Van Dam, Gregory of

Tours: Glory of the Confessors (Liverpool, 1988), pp. 88–9. 24 Gregory, De Virtutibus Sancti Martini III.16: MGH RSSRM I, p. 636; translation from R. Van

Dam, Saints and their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton, 1993), p. 266.

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Edward James never before heard her son’s voice. He asked her to bring him water; after she had done so he ‘returned to the first wailings of infancy, and never spoke again until he reached that age at which children are accustomed to loosen their tongues in speech’.25 Two boys – pueroli – were sleeping in a single bed in a house near Poitiers. They heard a bell ringing in the night, and went out and found a crowd of women: but they realized that they had stumbled on a gathering of demons. ‘As is characteristic of their tender age, they did not protect themselves with the sign of salvation; so one was deprived of his sight and the other of his sight and mobility.’ Both were eventually cured at St Martin’s shrine.26 Again there is the statement about norms of development, and in the latter case a hint that children could hardly be expected to remember to conduct themselves as prudent adults would. Our main problem with using Gregory as a source for understanding childhood and youth in Merovingian Gaul, as the above stories might suggest, is the context in which most of them appear: young people as the recipients of cures at the tombs of saints and, in the case of embryonic saints themselves, as recipients of divine grace. Gregory is certainly aware of what unregenerate and unChristian children are capable of. He repeats the story he found in Prudentius’s poem, Peristephanon, of the martyr Cassianus of Imola, a distinguished teacher, whom the pagan persecutors handed over to his own class of young boys for punishment. ‘In their thirst for the blood of their teacher the boys struck his head with their wax tablets, lacerated him with the blades of their pens, and tattooed the skin of their teacher with tiny pricks; they made him a martyr worthy of God.’27 But young people normally appear as, if not saintly, then at least as worthy recipients of divine assistance. Little Gregory was no exception. He tells of when he was a young boy – in infantia – and his father was suffering from gout exacerbated by fever. He had a vision of someone who asked him if he had read the Book of Joshua. Gregory replied that he had only learnt the letters of the alphabet and had not even heard of the book. (This was almost certainly before Gregory was eight, for at that age he went to Lyon to study in the house of his great-uncle, Bishop Nicetius.)28 The person in his vision asked him to write a name on a chip of wood and put it under his father’s pillow: his father recovered. A year later, the same afflictions returned, and the same person told Gregory to do what was in the Book of Tobit (which Gregory had also not read): to catch a fish and to burn its heart and liver under his father’s eyes. Gregory did not do this himself, of course: he

25 Gregory, Vitae Patrum I I. 4: MGH SSRM I, p. 671; translation from Gregory of Tours: Life of

the Fathers, trans. E. James, 2nd edn (Liverpool, 1991), pp. 15–16. 26 Gregory, De Virtutibus Sancti Martini II.45: MGH SSRM I, p. 625; translation from Van

Dam, Saints and their Miracles, p. 252. 27 De Gloria Martyrum 42: MGH SSRM I, p. 516; translation from Van Dam, Saints and their

Miracles, p. 65. 28 Gregory, Vitae Patrum 8.2: MGH SSRM I, p. 692; translation from Gregory of Tours, trans.

James, p. 51.

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Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages told his mother, who in turn told servants to catch the fish. Again the cure worked.29 It is also perhaps worth noting, in view of the tone in which these stories of children cured are related, firstly, that cures are vouchsafed by God through His saints to those individuals who are worthy – sufficiently pious, sufficiently innocent or sufficiently penitent – and that after a child had been cured from a life-threatening illness it was not at all unusual for that child to be dedicated to that saint for life. Gregory himself was dedicated to clerical life after a cure, and he relates a considerable number of other such cases. Sick people were often cured at the tomb of Abbot Maximus of Chinon, he tells us in the Glory of the Confessors. One young boy who was a member of the household of the cathedral at Tours was cured; a girl was restored to health on the same day. ‘Once information about these cures reached me, I had the boy tonsured and admitted to the monastery, and I ordered that the girl adopt a habit and be admitted to a community of nuns to serve God.’30 Sometimes, however, it is precisely in the descriptions of young saints that we see how other children were expected to behave. Felix says that his hero Guthlac, when a boy, did not listen to ‘the impudence of the children, nor the nonsensical chatter of the matrons, nor the empty tales of the common people, nor the foolish shouts of the rustics, nor the lying triflings of flatterers, nor the different cries of the various kinds of birds, as children of that age are wont to do’.31 Saint Cuthbert abstained from the rough games of the other children. Saints were expected to be precocious, mature before their time, to have cast off childhood before they had reached the proper age. Gregory’s own uncle Gallus of Clermont, as a boy (ab adolescentia) was devoted to God, refused to marry and had his head shaved; his father gave in, and the abbot made him a cleric. ‘He was perfectly chaste, and when he grew older he never had any wicked thoughts; he abstained from youthful games; his voice was always marvellously sweet and agreeable in song; he always applied continually to his studies, delighting in fasting, and would often abstain from food.’32 Gregory’s contemporary Venantius Fortunatus, who ended his career as bishop of the neighbouring see of Poitiers and dedicated his collection of poems to Gregory, wrote about the former Queen Radegund, turned nun: she was taught letters and other things suitable to her sex and she would often converse with the other children there about her desire to be a martyr if the chance came in her time . . . While but a small child she herself brought

29 De Gloria Confessorum 39: MGH SSRM I, p. 772; translation from Van Dam, Saints and their

Miracles, p. 51. 30 De Gloria Confessorum 22: MGH SSRM I, p. 762; translation from Van Dam, Saints and their

Miracles, p. 38. 31 Life of Guthlac, 12; translated in Felix’s Life, ed. Colgrave, p. 79. 32 Vitae Patrum 6.1: MGH SSRM I, p. 680; translation from Gregory of Tours, trans. James,

p. 33.

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Edward James the scraps left at table to the gathered children, washing the head of each one, seating them on little chairs and offering water for their hands.33

And, most clearly of all, a Carolingian life of St Anstrudis records that she was carefully nurtured by her parents and brought to the Christian religion with much diligence, learning her letters in the days of her tender childhood. The newborn virgin went from strength to strength, beyond the capacities of her girlish age. As soon as she ceased being rocked in her cradle, she learned to sing the praises of the Virgin’s Son. Through divine clemency she exercised her capacious memory for reading and listening, training herself in the mastery of learning . . . Above all, she was so full of grace that the ways of her maturity could be discerned in her first years.34

All this is the reappearance in Christian guise of the classical topos of the puer senex – the child old man. We must not assume that such children were necessarily regarded as acting contrary to nature: that is, contrary to the usual wicked tendencies of the young. There was in fact debate throughout late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages about the innocence or otherwise of baptized children. The words of Christ in Matthew (18: 36) were of course a powerful influence in favour of the child: ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven.’ Isidore expressed it etymologically, of course: puer, he said, came from puritas, and puella from pupilla, because boys and girls are as pure as the pupil of the eye.35 Children who could preserve such innocence despite the wickedness of the world in which they lived were worthy of being blessed by God; adults who could preserve the innocence of their childhood were well on the way to sainthood. It is in that light, perhaps, that we should note the otherwise worrying story related by Gregory of his uncle Nicetius of Lyons – worrying, that is, to a world that has been hearing the Catholic Church in America apologize for its child-abusing priests: I remember in my youth – in adolescentia – when I was beginning to learn how to read, and was in my eighth year, that he ordered my unworthy self to come to his bed, where he took me in my arms with the sweetness of paternal affection; holding his fingers on the edges of his garment he covered himself with it so well that my body was never touched by his blessed limbs. Consider, I beg you, and note well the precaution of this man of God, who abstained thus from touching a child’s body, in which he could not have had the least glimmer of concupiscence nor the least incitement to

33 Venantius Fortunatus, Life of the Holy Radegund, 2; translation from J. A. McNamara and

J. E. Halborg, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham NC, 1992), p. 71. 34 The Life of Anstrudis, 1; translation from McNamara and Halborg, Sainted Women, p. 291. 35 Isidore, XI.ii.12: Etymologiam, ed. Lindsay (no page numbers).

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Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages impurity. And when they might be a real suspicion of impurity, how much more did he avoid any temptation!36

Gregory’s double-thinking here is intriguing: his uncle could not have desired this young boy’s body, and yet even so he made sure that no suspicion of it might arise. We must not imagine that bishops like Nicetius, or writers like Gregory, were actually, as churchmen and churchwomen, far removed from the life of young people. Gregory himself, from the age of eight, was brought up in an episcopal household, and most episcopal establishments and monasteries would have had a proportion, and perhaps a high proportion, of children attached to them. Bede entered his community at seven. Interestingly, there is evidence, scattered widely from Ireland to Italy, of small boys living in nunneries too. In the monasteries founded by Fructuosus, parents who wanted to be monks could bring their children with them into their respective communities, and although they had to be separated from each other the youngest children were still allowed to see their parents when they wanted.37 There were certainly worries among monastic legislators about children younger than that being allowed into the monastery. Caesarius of Arles said that ‘if it were possible’ children should only be accepted when they were six or seven years old, because only at that age could they learn to read and obey.38 Monastic legislators seem to have had a fairly humane attitude towards the young. In the chapter of his Rule entitled ‘That no one presume to strike another’, Benedict of Nursia writes: The care of disciplining, and the custody of children up to fifteen years of age, however, shall belong to all. But this also with all moderation and reason. For he who presumes in any way against one of riper age, without precept of the abbot; or who, even against children, becomes violent without discretion, shall be subject to the discipline of the Rule; for it is written: Do not unto another what thou wilt not that one do unto thee.39

Paul the Deacon’s late eighth-century commentary on Benedict went even further. He noted that beatings did more harm than good, and that the brutal master ought to be punished and he also suggested an hour of recreation, and a reward of sweets at dinner from the abbot to the best-behaved boys.40 I have strayed a long way from the topic of ‘youth’. I have, however, 36 Vitae Patrum 8.2: MGH SSRM I, p. 692; translation from Gregory of Tours, trans. James,

p. 51. 37 Riché, Education and Culture, p. 451. 38 Caesarius of Arles, Statuta Sanctarum Virginum 6; quoted in Riché, Education and Culture,

p. 451. 39 The Rule of St Benedict, 70; translation from Monks, Bishops and Pagans: Christian Culture in

Gaul and Italy, 500–700, ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 55. 40 Cited in Riché, Education and Culture, p. 452.

21

Edward James demonstrated a number of things, or at least suggested a number of hypotheses. That there is a good deal of evidence that childhood was a topic that occasioned thought and debate in the early Middle Ages. That childhood was a category that was recognized, and to a certain extent even idealized. But that adolescence and youth, in the classical sense (adolescentia and juventus), and ‘youth’ in our sense, were not recognized in practical terms as specific stages in life, with their own problems and their own status. A child came to adulthood at puberty, in legal terms, even if the law was uncertain where to put the dividing line; for the Salian Franks, judging by their lawcode, it was twelve, but for the Ripuarian Franks, judging by their lawcode (a century later than the Pactus Legis Salicae) it was fifteen. Childebert II, who came to his throne in 580 at the age of five, receives a spear from the hands of his uncle Guntram at the age of fifteen, in 590, to signify that he had reached adulthood and the full and total control of his kingdom. (His fifteenth and sixteenth years were spent ruthlessly eliminating those self-serving advisers who had governed his kingdom during his minority.) Before that age, judging from saints’ lives, young people’s parents would already have betrothed, or married off, their offspring. A third-century Roman jurist said that betrothal could happen after seven: ‘both sides must understand what is happening, that is, they must be seven years old’.41 Saints, of course, had mostly managed to escape that fate, either by guile or total stubborn disobedience. Many saints’ lives tell of the young saint defying his or her parents and fleeing the parental home. Not many were as courageous as St Pappula, if we are to believe Gregory: she was determined to leave her parents’ house, despite their lack of approval ‘because she was not able to serve God in the house of her parents, where she was distracted by the concerns of this world’. She cut her hair, dressed as a man, and enrolled in a monastery in the diocese of Tours. She worked many miracles; the monks elected her abbot, which she refused. She lived there for thirty years, and only revealed her secret three days before her death, presumably, implies Gregory, that she should be washed and buried by women rather than men.42 Before puberty, too, many children seemed to have embarked upon their future careers: either by having joined the clergy, or having gone to school to learn their letters, or having gone to the household of the king or an aristocrat to train as a warrior, or simply having begun to work on their parents’ farm. Gregory gives us the story of St Patroclus, an inhabitant of Berry, and the son of a certain Aetherius. When he was ten years old he was set to watch over the sheep, while his brother was sent off to school to study letters. ‘They were in truth not of the highest nobility,’ says Gregory, ‘but nevertheless they were free.’ One day they returned at midday for lunch at their father’s house, one from the fields and one from school, and had a row. This was started by the 41 Wiedemann, Adults and Children, p. 149. 42 De Gloria Confessorum 16: MGH SSRM I, pp. 756–7; translation from Van Dam, Saints and

their Miracles, p. 31.

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Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages one who was at school, who derided Patroclus for his low status, calling him a rusticus. Patroclus left the sheep, went to school and showed himself a much better pupil than his brother. He was recommended for employment to Nunnio, one of King Childebert I’s officials. ‘He brought him up with all the care of a great affection, and Patroclus showed himself to be so modest and obedient to all that all loved him with the greatest kindness as if he were a kinsman.’ He refused to marry, of course, and joined the clergy.43 Adolescence, in the modern sense, the short period during which modern youth comes to terms with his or her body, parents and society (not necessarily in that order), and in which parents occasionally come to terms with their offspring, can sometimes be recognized in our sources, as in the struggles of the would-be saint for independence. But it does not seem to exist as a named category. The writings of Gregory, at least, imply throughout that with puberty came adulthood, and probably marriage. If there is a recognized rite of passage in the life of the young it is at seven or eight, when the child seriously sets about training to be an adult. In that sense pueritia corresponds to our idea of ‘youth’, even if the actual age range is different. The ancient world had this break at the age of seven or eight too. Seven is when school starts; when betrothal may take place; when, according to Galen, hobby-horses may be replaced by real horses. Martial said that it was when you ‘laid aside your nuts’: giving up simple games and turning to the more complex role-playing games that prepared one for adult life. A Byzantine poem in the Greek Anthology dedicates those toys to God: ‘Today, dear God, I am seven years old, and must play no more. / Here is my top, my hoop, and my ball: keep them all, my Lord.’44 It is the age, too, when, in the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus began to help Joseph in the carpenter’s shop – the age at which apprenticeship began. Pueritia is that preparatory, dare I say liminal, stage, during which a child learns to become an adult. These conclusions are drawn mainly from the writings of one man. More work clearly needs to be done to see precisely what the chronological or regional variations might be. Gregory the Great would repay work, as would Alcuin. This is an area that has hardly been touched by early medieval historians; it is an ideal area for future research.

43 Vitae Patrum 9. 1: MGH SSRM I, pp. 702–3; translation from Gregory of Tours, trans. James,

pp. 65–6. 44 From the Greek Anthology, translated in Wiedemann, Adults and Children, p. 153.

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Jewish Society under Pressure

Jewish Society under Pressure: The Concept of Childhood Simha Goldin

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Social attitudes towards children are an important means towards understanding the past. It is through the procreation of children that a society seeks to perpetuate itself. Securing this continuity is thus one of the most important goals of any society. By examining attitudes towards children and childhood we are presented with a tool which allows us to expose the social values and aspirations, the weight of a society’s fears and pressures and its basic rules and norms. The question of attitudes towards children and childhood was raised by Philippe Ariès’s book Centuries of Childhood, first published in French in 1960.1 Ariès argued that throughout the Middle Ages, and up until the seventeenth century, the concepts of childhood and family were very differently understood from those which developed subsequently. In his opinion, prior to the seventeenth century children were not recognized as entities separate from adults and were in fact perceived to be merely ‘small adults’.2 A variety of reactions, both positive and negative, followed the publication of Ariès’s theory. These served to place the topics of children and childhood at the forefront of historical research, just as they are in the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.3 This paper will examine the place of children in Jewish society of northern France and Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the light of the debate about Ariès’s thesis.4 During the Middle Ages the Jewish group in Christian countries perceived itself to be threatened by the Christian society that surrounded it. The threat 1 2 3 4

P. Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1960). See the introduction to this collection for a discussion of Ariès’s arguments. For a summary see S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1983), pp. 1–9, 259–60; B. A. Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and the Study of Childhood’, Speculum 77 (2002), 440–50. See E. Kanarfogel, ‘Attitudes towards Children and Childhood in Medieval Jewish Society’, Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 2 (1985), 1–34; S. Goldin, ‘Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie im Mittelälter zu Kind und Kindheit’, Jahrbuch der Kindheit 6 (1989), 211–33 and 251–6; I. Ta-Shma, ‘Children of Medieval German Jewry: A Perspective on Ariès from Jewish Sources’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 12 (1991), 263–80. E. Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages (Detroit, 1992), pp. 33–41.

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Simha Goldin was multi-faceted and stemmed among other things from the knowledge that Christians could and did convert Jews to Christianity by force, by inducement, or by persuasion. In the long era of persecution and forced expulsion following the first Crusade of 1096, Jews as a community concluded that Christians intended to focus their missionary efforts particularly on Jewish children. This concern of the Jews was predicated on active attempts by both ecclesiastical and lay authorities to take control of Jewish children. For example, in 1497 in Portugal all Jewish children were forcibly baptized, undoubtably as a preliminary to baptizing their parents.5 Jewish chronicles written subsequent to the first Crusade emphasize this fear of Christians seizing Jewish children. This perceived threat helps account for the norm of martyrdom, of dying for the sanctification of God’s name. Rachel, a woman who put her own children to death, declared that she did so out of fear that the Christians would baptize them and they would grow up as Christians. In Worms some of the Jews converted in order to care for the children who had been captured by the Christian community, ‘so they will not exist in their errors, for they are small and do not distinguish between good and evil’. The writers of these chronicles sought to warn their fellow Jews of the Christians’ intentions so these could be guarded against. They related how the Christians would first separate children from their mothers: and they took him from his mother’s arms by force and took him away with them. And three days before they informed them [the women] of this compulsion [abduction] the officials of the palace came and sealed off the well that had water in it for fear that they would throw their children in and put them to death.

Although it is difficult to estimate the extent to which children were killed to prevent their growing up as Christians, it is evident that infanticide was an important element in the Jewish concept of martyrdom, and created a deep impression on the generations following the first Crusade.6 In 1171 the entire 5

6

It is unclear whether the Jews were aware of the theological controversy on the issue which raged in the thirteenth century. Gratian maintained that allowing the children to be in the custody of their ‘errant’ parents was harmful to the children, and since the Christian princes held the Jews as ‘slaves’ it was permissible to baptize Jewish children by force. Thomas Aquinas objected to taking children away from their parents; he viewed this as contravening natural law. John Duns Scotus maintained that divine authority over the children exceeded that of their parents, and therefore the children should be removed and baptized. See S. Grayzel, ‘Popes, Jews, and Inquisition, from “Sicut” to “Turbato” ’, in Essays on the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Dropsie University, ed. A. I. Katsh and L. Nemoy (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 151–88; W. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach, 1988), pp. 314–31; S. Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews (Toronto, 1991), pp. 253–7, 268–70. Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Zarfat, ed. A. Habermann (Jerusalem, 1945), pp. 33–5, 37, 55–7; H. Soloveitchik, ‘Religious Law and Change: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 12 (1987), 205–21; S. Goldin, ‘The Socialisation for Kiddush Ha-Shem among Medieval Jews’, Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997), 117–38.

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Jewish Society under Pressure Jewish community of Blois was put to death. Jewish correspondence reports that the adults were condemned to the stake and the children were taken to be raised as Christians. The Jews exerted the full force of their influence, both direct and indirect, on the Capetian royal house to secure the release of the hostage children.7 The Christian goal was perceived to be the conversion of all Jewish children. As a consequence the Jewish community developed a special attitude towards their children. This was based simultaneously on tradition and on contemporary needs arising from the conflict with the surrounding Christian world. In his 1991 article, Ta-Shma concluded that, in contrast with the attitude displayed by Christians, the particular way in which Jews regarded children resulted from the influence of the Talmudic tradition in two areas. The first was ‘Pikuah Nefesh’ (the saving of life), the principle that holds the saving of human life to be a paramount concern. The Talmudic tradition of Pikuah Nefesh resulted in keeping a closer watch over children who posed more of a risk to themselves than others. The second was education. The Talmud imposed on fathers the duty of educating their sons, which in turn created a greater awareness of the parent-child relationship.8 I intend to examine this important observation in light of the specific historical context, and of the goals and needs of the community in two aspects: the attitude of the family to children and childhood, and the attitude of the community to children and childhood.9

THE FAMILY’S ATTITUDE TO THE CHILD

Breastfeeding The question of breastfeeding and nursing mothers has become for researchers into childhood an important criterion in determining the attitude of mothers and families to their offspring. The importance of the issue stems from an understanding that the physical bonding between mother and infant in the first months of life is extremely significant and affects the child’s future development. A connection has also been made between the consigning of nursing infants to professional wetnurses and high rates of mortality among nursing infants up to two years of age. Mothers who gave up their infants to wetnurses have been branded by some researchers as uncaring and lacking in 7 8 9

R. Chazan, ‘The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 36 (1968), 13–31. See Ta-Shma, ‘Children of Medieval German Jewry’, pp. 265–6. Here, as at other points throughout this article, it would seem necessary to address the issue of the Jewish family’s attitude towards its daughters. Although this article deals with boys and girls, there are significant methodological difficulties inherent in analysing the sources with a view to discussing the issues of girls. I intend to devote a separate article to this topic in the future.

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Simha Goldin maternal feelings. Both Jewish and Christian sources yield numerous references to Gentile wetnurses in Jewish homes and it would seem that Jews frequently hired wetnurses. However, in the Jewish sources this custom is coupled with expressions of acute anxiety regarding the welfare of the child before the age of twenty-four months. How then can we reconcile these two apparently contradictory positions?10 Christian wetnurses were indeed found in Jewish homes, but we must not be misled by the extent of the sources. The marked preoccupation with the issue in both Jewish and Christian records gives little indication of the scope of the phenomenon. Rather it stems from the doctrinal and theological questions the issue posed for both religions. First, the Church put great emphasis on its theological superiority to Judaism and therefore regularly castigated those Christians, members of the ‘master race’, who shamefully served Jewish masters, members of the ‘servant race’. Secondly, the Church had an ongoing fear of the overwhelming influence of Jews on Christians living in Jewish homes. Lastly, after receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist, the female Christian communicant underwent the deep and significant experience of merging her body with that of Jesus Christ. This created a situation whereby the milk of devout Christians, suffused with the vitality of the Messiah, was being used to nourish Jewish children. These three themes appear repeatedly in the writings of the various pontiffs and clerical commentators, and in local councils and synods throughout Latin Christendom. Again and again Christian women are warned against serving as wetnurses in Jewish households. Transgressors were threatened with an array of sanctions in this world as well as the next. The constant repetition confirms that numbers of Christians went against the authority of the Church and continued to serve and to live in Jewish homes.11 Frequent concerned references in Jewish sources to Christian wetnurses can similarly be traced primarily to two causes. On the one hand, Christian wetnurses, and indeed other Christian servants, were naturally ignorant of Jewish commandments and customs and by their very presence might endanger the observance of Jewish law in the household. ‘Gentile wet nurses and maid servants were wont to eat forbidden foods in the house and the small children would eat these too and even the adults could not observe caution in the matter of utensils.’12 On the other hand, medieval Jews believed 10 See Shahar, Fourth Estate, pp. 53–76. For the early modern period see E. Badinter, L’Amour

en Plus (Paris, 1980), pp. 62–5, 85; J. Flandrin, Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 203–7. On the Jewish attitude see: Kanarfogel, Jewish Education, pp. 17–18; Goldin, ‘Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie’, pp. 218–23; Ta-Shma, ‘Children of Medieval German Jewry’, pp. 268–70. 11 For example see S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (Philadelphia, 1933), p. 107 (Innocent III: March 23, 1204), p. 115 (Innocent III: July 15, 1205); Kanarfogel, Jewish Education, p. 33 n. 11; Goldin, ‘Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie’, p. 24 n. 28; Shahar, Fourth Estate, pp. 58, 279 n. 30. 12 See Sefer Hasidim [according to Parma MS.], ed. J. Wistinetski (Frankfurt, 1924), p. 348 no. 1039; Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, Responsa: Rulings and Customs [Hebrew], ed.

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Jewish Society under Pressure that the period of breastfeeding played a significant part in determining the child’s future character. Great care had therefore to be taken not only in the matter of the infant’s food but also in determining what things the child should and should not hear. Wrongly managed, these, it was believed, could damage the child’s tender psyche and leave scars that lasted a lifetime as the auther of Sefer Or Zarua says: ‘What he is nourished on in childhood resounds in him in adulthood.’ The Gentile wetnurse was thus perceived to be a true danger. She might lull the baby to sleep by singing songs she had learned in church or prayers she had memorized, thus damaging the infant’s soul. In as much as she did not observe the Jewish dietary laws, she might contaminate the baby with her milk. This sheds light on the comment by Pope Innocent III that for three days after a Christian wetnurse had received Holy Communion at Mass the Jewish father who employed her would force her to spill her milk out into the sewage. It is undeniable that the Jews feared this sacrament, which to them smacked of witchcraft intended to harm them and their children. In terms of Halacha, the way Jews conducted themselves in the light of Jewish law, it was not actually forbidden to employ a non-Jewish wetnurse. It was already established in the Talmud that a Gentile wetnurse could nurse a Jewish infant, but that close supervision was called for. The Jews of medieval Europe continued the Talmudic tradition on this question. They would employ Christian wetnurses but at the same time take precautions to ensure that the physical and emotional wellbeing of the baby was not threatened. The author of Or Zarua wrote ‘One must take care with an idol-worshipping wetnurse lest she feed the baby pork.’ And on another occasion he noted that ‘A wetnurse should be warned not to eat pork or other abominations.’ In both cases his reasoning was the same: ‘So that they may be good Jews . . . so that the baby will be God fearing . . . for what he is nourished on in childhood resounds in him in adulthood and might encourage him to stray into bad company.’13 Despite this, Christian wetnurses were a permanent fixture in many Jewish homes throughout the period under discussion, which ranged from the time of Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi, d. 1105), who mentions that the Jewish tradition of giving children money for Purim was extended to the Gentile wetnurses as well, until well into the thirteenth century when we find evidence in the writings of Meir ben Barukch of Rothenburg. The important point remains,

I. Z. Cahana, 4 vols. (Jerusalem, 1957–60), II, 230 no. 131; idem, Sheelot u-Teshuvot Maharam bar Barukh (Lemberg, 1860), no. 150; Kol Bo (Lemberg, 1860), no. 96. 13 Isaac ben Moses, Sefer Or Zarua, 2 vols. (Zhitomir, 1862), II, 21 no. 48; p. 127 no. 279. For Innocent III see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, p. 115. See Babylonian Talmud, Abodah Zarah 26a: ‘A heathen may suckle a child of an Israelite woman, so long as there are others standing by her, but not if she is on her own.’ See the commentary of Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) ;*-!9:*$ and commentary of Tosafot .*",&, ;$"&3. Haggahot Maimuniyyot to Moses ben Maimon, Mishneh Tora, Hilcot Akum, ch. 9, 16. Moses of Coucy, Sefer Mizvot Gadol (Venice, 1807), lav, 45. See Rashi commentary to Exodus 2:7–8 ‘Shall I go and call a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby for you?’, and Babylonian Talmud, Sota 12b.

29

Simha Goldin however, that so long as there was a Christian wetnurse in the household, parental concern and supervision increased accordingly.14 On the question of breastfeeding, as on the question of wetnurses, the medieval Jews of Ashkenaz abided by the essentials of the rulings found in the Talmud. The first principle was that the nursing infant comes to recognize the woman who feeds him and develops a dependence on her which was defined by the term ‘knowing her’. Since the health and development of a baby who ‘knew his nurse’ would be endangered by transferring him to another wetnurse or by prematurely weaning him, both were to be avoided. The second principle was that a widow or divorcee who had a nursing infant under the age of 24 months (considered the maximum age for weaning) was forbidden to remarry until the infant had reached that age. The Talmud contains a long discussion of the possible reasons for this prohibition. These include the woman’s health and the wellbeing of the baby. Greater emphasis was placed on those reasons that related to the child’s welfare. It was noted that a nursing mother did not usually become pregnant and thus her remarriage might harm the baby. One scenario held that the step-father might not ensure that the nursing mother received the foods, such as eggs and milk, necessary to her milk supply. Another was that the mother (with or without pressure from the step-father) might wish to become pregnant by her new husband. Her attempts to conceive might cause her milk to spoil or might prompt her to wean the baby prematurely or to transfer him to a wetnurse, even though he already ‘knew’ her. To prevent these eventualities, the prohibition on remarriage before the infant reached the proper age for weaning was held to apply to divorcees as well as to widows. The divorced nursing mother was considered to be in a better position than the widow, since her child still had a father who shared a responsibility for him. Even in this case, however, there was both the difficulty of finding a suitable wetnurse and the risk to the infant who ‘knew his nurse’.15 An indication of how strictly the rule was adhered to in the Middle Ages can be found in a specific case of a widow who tried to contravene the norm. The widow remarried though she had a nursing infant not yet weaned. She took precautions to ensure that the baby was not harmed by her action; she hired a Jewish wetnurse to replace her and had her swear publicly that she would not abandon her position until the baby was ready to be weaned. Nevertheless the mother was severely censured for her deed. Her critics argued that this case caused a number of breaches in the wall that had been raised by the Talmud to protect the baby. One argument claimed that this would set a precedent which in the future might be used to

14 See Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), Teshuvot Rashi, ed. I. Elfennbein (Jerusalem, 1943), p. 158

no. 131. 15 See Babylonian Talmud, Ketubbot 60a, Rashi .*9:3 $3; Yevamot 42b, 36b and Rashi $(! 9"$;

Gittin 75b and Rashi !%*:; Mahzor Vitry, ed. S. Hurwitz (Jerusalem, 1963), p. 549, Ketubbot 70b, Tosafot ;/ !;,-%& and 0&#,. Haggahot Maimuniyyot, Nasim, ch. 11, no. 25–6. Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, I, 72.

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Jewish Society under Pressure hire a Gentile wetnurse to replace the nursing mother; she in turn could be released from her vow by the Gentile authorities. Other critics argued that the wetnurse’s husband could release her from her vow and so terminate the nursing prematurely. Still others were concerned that to permit a marriage while the baby was being weaned would create a precedent, but that in future cases the necessary precautions might not be taken and the substitute nurse might not be sworn to remain nor guarantees be given. All the critics quoted the Talmudic prohibition on the premature weaning of an infant as a preliminary to remarriage. It is therefore evident that concern for the welfare of the infant was the prime motivation. Consequently the nursing widow or divorcee was bound to her infant until he reached the age of twenty-four months. During this time his welfare took undisputed precedence over hers.16 Even in ordinary families strong emphasis was placed on the importance of breastfeeding, especially on the importance of not replacing the nurse once the baby ‘knows’ her. Contemporary Jews gave breastfeeding such an elevated status that a woman who had only one child could argue that the baby ‘knew her’ in order to postpone weaning him although this prevented another pregnancy, thus delaying by two years the fulfilment of the commandment to be ‘fruitful and multiply’. In other words, a mother needed the services of a wetnurse in any one of the three following cases: her milk supply was insufficient; she had more than one or two babies, in which case she hired one or two wetnurses; or she wanted to conceive again and, since breastfeeding might interfere with conception or pregnancy might spoil the milk, she would need a wetnurse. A prospective wetnurse would be closely evaluated both in terms of the quantity of her milk and her manners and habits, since once the baby became accustomed to her they could not be separated without jeopardizing his wellbeing. Even if she subsequently turned out to be a liar or a thief, the father was forbidden to dismiss her so long as the baby ‘knew her’.17 It is evident from all the cases we have examined that the use of wetnurses signified neither apathy nor neglect towards the baby; on the contrary it indicated a deep concern for his health and welfare.

The bond between parents and children As I have described elsewhere, we find in Jewish sources a distinct ideology in describing childhood as ‘the way of children’.18 This may be summarized 16 See note 10, and I. Ta-Shma, ‘On the History of Polish Jewry in the 12th–13th Centuries’,

Zion 53 (1988), 347–70. The sources are: Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, I, 206–7 no 740; Meir ben Barukh, Sheelot u-Teshuvot ha-Maharam (Prague, 1895), no. 864; Meir ben Barukh, Sheelot u-Teshuvot Maharam bar Barukh (Lemberg, 1860), no. 362, Haggahot Maimuniyyot, Nasim, answer no. 24; E. E. Urbach, Abraham ben Azriel, Sefer Arugat Habosem: Prolegomenon (Jerusalem, 1963), pp. 120–1; E. E. Urbach, Ba’alei ha-Tosafot, 4th edn (Jerusalem, 1980), p. 490. 17 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 72 no. 184, p. 67 no. 159. 18 See Goldin, ‘Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie’, pp. 213–14, 252 nn. 5–13; Ta-Shma,

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Simha Goldin briefly: ‘the way of children’ is the way in which children grasp the world, owing to their tender age. Their understanding is different, special and develops gradually. They are extremely sensitive psychologically and of course vulnerable physically. They are easily frightened, helpless, and pose a danger to themselves. They must consequently be closely and carefully supervised. This attitude creates a special bond between children and adults in general, and between children and their parents in particular. To understand the relationship between parents and their offspring, we must identify moments characterized by intimacy and concern as opposed to apathy and neglect. These have been identified particularly in the area of daily life where close human relationships might exist and at times of crisis such as illness or death. Within the Jewish group we can detect multifaceted relationships characterized by great intimacy and concern throughout the period of childhood. Concern for the physical wellbeing of an infant during the circumcision ceremony hardly requires comment, but in Ashkenaz we also find expressions of sympathy with the psychological state of the eight-day-old baby. In the twelfth century, two blessings which traditionally had been said at the circumcision were deleted. One was the Shehehiyanu which pertains to new things, and the other concludes with the words ‘that happiness is in his home’. The reasoning behind the changes was that the baby was miserable: ‘The father should not utter the blessings “Shehehiyano” and “that happiness is in his home” at the feast for the baby who is deep in sorrow.’19 As part of a lecture to parents on their duty to educate their children properly, the author of Sefer Hasidim (later twelfth or early thirteenth century) describes the concern of a parent for the health of his child. We read of parents who are troubled and fearful of simple childhood illnesses, ‘lest he feel ill in his head or another of his organs’. When the author describes parental anguish over the illness of a child he uses the example of Job, who lost all his sons and daughters, and emphasizes, ‘how many fasts and supplications, how much wailing a man does when his son is ill, for his soul is devestated over his son’s body’.20 The sources forcefully emphasize the efforts made by parents to heal sick children. They would search far and wide for new medications; often they would change a sick child’s name in an effort to save him. Families which had previously suffered a high rate of child mortality would conduct a ceremony of ‘selling’ the sick child to another family in order to save him. Parents had no scruples about using magic to heal a sick child, and were even willing to try Christian advice and methods in order to reverse the course of an illness. ‘Children of Medieval German Jewry’, pp. 266ff; Hanawalt, ‘Medievalists and Childhood’, pp. 443–53. 19 See Babylonian Talmud, Ketubbot 8a; Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, II, 53 no. 107; Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, Sefer Roqeah (Venice, 1549), no. 108; Meir ben Barukh, Responsa, II, no. 210; Meir ben Barukh, Sefer Sharei Teshuvot (Berlin, 1891), p. 129, Haggahot Maimuniyyot, Hilcot Milah, ch. 3, 3. 20 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, pp. 5–6 no. 2; p. 12 no. 13; p. 93 no. 301; p. 178 no. 583–4; p. 236 no. 960.

32

Jewish Society under Pressure One source relates the case of a Gentile woman who urged a Jewish mother to dose her sick child with a stone from the sepulchre of the Christian God renowned for its healing properties. In the event she rejected the advice, but she was probably deterred only after she had weighed any possible benefit against the harm which could be caused to the child by employing a charm which related directly to the Christian Messiah. This cooperation between Jews and Christians concerning the use of medicinal charms was quietly common, though the Jewish sages took trouble to urge moderation and directed that in no case should a sick Jewish child ever be left in a Christian home.21 Accounts of heartbreak and sorrow at the death of a child demonstrate that the deaths of children were cruel and painful blows to the mother and the family. We hear of a mother who went out of her mind with grief at the death of her son, and of parents who threw themselves into their child’s grave, clutching the corpse and begging that he take them with him. The author of Sefer Hasidim considered it his duty to admonish those who wanted to kiss their dead children and refused to be parted from them: ‘a man whose son or daughter has died must not kiss him or her and must not allow his wife to do so because this will shorten the days of his sons and daughters’. Parents whose child had died were thought to be emotionally extremely vulnerable. The texts advised other parents to refrain from expressing affection for their children in the presence of bereaved parents: ‘If a man has lost his small son or daughter and he has no other child left, another man should not soon bring his small children into the presence of the childless man for this will remind him of his sorrow.’22 Expressions of intimacy and affection between adults and children are not confined to times of sickness and bereavement. Examples from daily life present a positive picture of family life. So great was the pleasure and enjoyment to be derived from children that when a man expressed a desire to become a ‘Hasid’ (a radical religious ascetic) he was first advised to limit the time spent playing games or going on outings with his children and to concentrate more on their education. The Sefer Hasidim suggests that spending time conversing or walking with a child was a foolproof way for an adult to forget his troubles and sorrows. Thanks to ‘the way of children’ – that is their unique characteristics – children were perceived to be essentially different from adults. Thus for an adult to spend time with children was considered not only to bring pleasure and benefit to the child, but also, and perhaps primarily, to 21 Ibid., p. 71 no. 174; pp. 111–12 no. 363–6; p. 233 no. 1352; p. 303 no. 1218; Babylonian

Talmud, Avoda Zara 26a, Tosafot .*",&, ;$&"3; J. Shatzmiller, ‘Doctors and Medical Practices in Germany around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sefer Hasidim’, Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1983), 583–93. 22 See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, pp. 102–3 no. 327; p. 106 no. 345; Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 80b, Tosafot %:3/ !&%% *,; Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 56 no. 102–3; Badinter, L’Amour en Plus, pp. 73–89 (76–9); Flandrin, Families in Former Times, pp. 198–203.

33

Simha Goldin the adult: ‘One whose heart is full of sorrow on the Sabbath should converse with a youth and thus banish the melancholy from his heart.’23 Physical intimacy was marked: references to kissing children are frequent; babies were held in their father’s arms even during the prayer service on the Sabbath, during the reading of the Torah, and during the blessing over the food.24 Such behaviour is especially significant since children at this age were not expected to be continent and might easily soil themselves and those around them. Despite this, we find no injunction to remove small children from the focus of family activities and ceremonies. Nor were children kept away from the table when the family gathered at mealtimes. Even in Sefer Hasidim, where a strong emphasis is placed on physical cleanliness, fathers are advised how to protect themselves from the soiling of small children with only one gentle recommendation to distance the child briefly while making the blessing over food. On the Sabbath the father is told to put a pillow between himself and the child he is holding on his lap lest his one outfit of Sabbath clothes be soiled. Family members are asked to cover up the child’s mess during mealtimes or in the synagogue during the reading of the Torah: ‘While the Megillah [one of the five scrolls] or the Torah is being read and the baby urinates, he [the father] can ask someone else to fetch water.’ Although the preservation of sacred books and scrolls was of primary importance to the Jews of the Middle Ages, no admonition to keep small children away from them is to be found. Nearly every time we hear of an adult being occupied with sacred writings, we find a small child with his father. Even if the child insists on being on the table, even if he has soiled his surroundings, the father should not remove him, but rather ‘cover the books and then take away the dirt and tidy up and bring water’.25 In the framework of the immediate family we can see a tendency towards integration which placed the child in the centre: ‘It is customary to send the children away from the synagogue in order to hear the candlelighting on time before welcoming the congregation for the Sabbath with the Sabbath blessing. The candlelighting should not be held before the afternoon prayer [Mincha] or delayed until after the welcoming of the Sabbath so that it may be done on time.’26 From this seemingly mundane passage we can reconstruct a social practice in which the child becomes the chief emissary between the father and the mother in the family’s complete fulfilment of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The importance of this commandment extends beyond the details of its observation into the realm of Jewish family life. On Fridays the children accompanied their father to the synagogue for the afternoon prayer,

23 See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 194 no. 770, p. 206 no. 815, p. 242 no. 984, p. 15 no. 16. 24 See Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara 17a, Rashi &%*$( *"!; Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski,

pp. 127–8 no. 432; p. 258 no. 1031. 25 See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 137 no. 484; p. 164 no. 60; pp. 272–3 no. 1073; p. 402

no. 1663. For the attitute towards books see p. 178 no. 683–4. 26 Eliezer ben Nathan (Raban), Sefer Raban (Jerusalem, 1965), Shabbat 342.

34

Jewish Society under Pressure while the mother remained at home for the cermony of lighting the Sabbath candles. She would know approximately when it was time, but she waited for the small child to return from the synagogue and inform her that the afternoon service was over and it was time to light the candles. At precisely the time the mother lit the candles at home, in the synagogue the father would commence the prayers welcoming the Sabbath.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE GROUP TO THE CHILD

The age a child is obliged to fulfil the commandments Medieval Jews employed Talmudic terms to define children in terms of age, but they applied these terms in such a way as to reflect their own attitudes towards children and childhood. In the Mishna and the Talmud, different ages were established for different obligations. I will focus first on the connection between age and the obligation to observe the commandments. The position of the texts here is particularly interesting because no particular age was specified for the obligation to fulfil this commandment. This is unlike issues of personal status, for example marriage, including yibum (marrying one’s deceased brother’s childless wife) and halitza (the widow’s release from yibum), in which biological-chronological age served as a yardstick. It was also unlike issues relating to the swearing of oaths and vows, in which the criterion was biological-intellectual maturity.27 Medieval Jews borrowed two terms from the Talmud: ‘a youngster who has reached the age of education’ and ‘a youngster who has reached the age of knowledge’. These they combined to create a new age group termed ‘a youngster who knows and has reached the age of education’. This definition is related neither to the child’s chronological age nor to his biological development, but rather depends on his capacity for understanding. In their view not all children were equal and each case had to be judged on its own merits.28 By definition, a child who was chronologically a ‘youngster’, that is below the age of thirteen, but in terms of intellectual capacity had reached the age of knowledge, was said to have ‘reached the age of education’. This meant he had to be educated and made to perform certain commandments. This was despite the fact that his chronological age dictated that he could not yet be 27 See Y. D. Gilat, ‘Thirteen Years-old: The Age of Commandments?’, in idem, ed., Studies in

the Development of the Halakha (Ramat-Gan, 1992), pp. 19–31; Kanarfogel, Jewish Education, p. 25 n. 43; Ta-Shma, ‘Children of Medieval German Jewry’, pp. 265ff. Cf. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 25–6. 28 The Talmud examines an apparent contradiction whereby certain actions are defined in one place as recommended for children and in another place as forbidden to them. The resolution of the controversy lies in the fact that each case referred to a different category of children: those who had reached the ‘age of education’ and those who had not. See Babylonian Talmud Hagiga 4a, Sukka 28b, Rosh Hashanah 33b, ’Arakhin 2b.

35

Simha Goldin punished for non-performance.29 Jews of this period were relying on portions of the Talmud in which children were defined as being obliged to fulfil certain commandments, regardless of chronological or biological age. In the Talmudic literature there is a definition of a ‘youngster who has reached the age of knowledge’ and a number of required commandments are enumerated: a youngster who can wave the lulav (the symbolic palm branch carried on Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles) is required to carry one; a youngster who can wrap himself up must wear the zizit (fringed garment); the father of a youngster who can care for his phylacteries must provide him with a set.30 Medieval Jews demanded more extensive tests than those required by the Talmud in order to define the youngster who has reached the age of knowledge. They based the elaboration of the tests on sources found in post-Talmudic literature as well as on ideas developed by their own contemporaries: a child who can keep himself clean and can remember not to enter the lavatory while wearing his tefillin (phylacteries) is a child who has ‘reached the age of education and knowledge’ and thus is required to wear phylacteries and recite the basic prayer of ‘Hear, Oh Israel’ (Kriat Shmah).31 According to the Talmud, a child can be given the ceremonial prayer shawl (tallith) when he is ‘able to wrap himself in it’. In the Middle Ages the child was required to demonstrate a familiarity with the details of the commandment, ‘It is not enough just to wrap oneself, one must toss two corners to the rear and two corners to the front, and properly hold the fringes while reciting the Shmah according to our custom.’32 As for carrying the lulav, again medieval Jews were not satisfied with the requirements set out in the Talmud that required merely that he be ‘able to wave it’. They examined the method by which the boy used the lulav in prayer and checked to see whether he knew precisely when to use it.33 In the case of the requirement to recite the Shmah, they accepted that this applied to a child who had reached the ‘age of education and knowledge’.34 Rather than emphasize that such a child might be below the age liable for punishment, however, they stressed the need to establish to what extent he understood the finer points of the commandment, for ‘not everyone is equal, each according to his merits’.35 29 Babylonian Talmud, Sukka 28b, Tosafot 0!,. 30 Tosefta, Hagiga, ch. 1, Teharot, ch. 3, in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukka 42b, ’Arakhin 2b. 31 See Sukka 42a, Rashi 0*-*5; 9&/:-; Berakhot 20b, Rashi 0/& 0*-*5;%; Mahzor Vitry, ed.

32

33 34

35

Hurwitz, p. 645 no. 514. Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, 4 vols. (Jerusalem, 1964), I, 367 no. 61; II, 405–6 no. 699; Meir ben Barukh, Kol Bo, p. 13b no. 21. Babylonian Talmud, Sukka 37b, Tosafot &$&%"; Eliezer ben Samuel of Metz, Sefer Yere’im (Wilna, 1901), no. 401; Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, Sefer Roqeah, no. 220; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, I, 367 no. 61; II, 405–6 no. 699. See Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, II, no. 314; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, II, 389, 399, 405–6, 411; Haggahot Maimuniyyot, Hilcot Sisit, ch. 3, 9. See Sefer Mizvot Gadol, ’ashin no. 18; Sefer Mordekhai on Berakhot no. 60; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, I, 36 no. 61; 405–6 no. 699; Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 175 no. 657. See Babylonian Talmud, Sukka 28b, Tosafot 0!,.

36

Jewish Society under Pressure The origins of this practice can be traced to the end of the eleventh century and more particularly the beginning of the twelfth. Evidence is found in the writings of Rashi (d. 1105 in northern France) and his disciples and grandsons (known as the Tosafists) in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France and Germany. The Talmud and the Mishna raise the question of whether a child should be prevented from performing prohibited actions, such as extinguishing fire on the Sabbath or eating forbidden foods. The Talmudic conclusion is that since the child is not required to observe the commandments, he is exempt. If his father is aware of the prospective transgression, however, he should act to prevent it, since, at this stage in the child’s life, his father is responsible for his actions. In the Middle Ages the commentators (Rashi and subsequently the Tosafists) reassigned the question of awareness from the father to the boy. Rashi suggests that the child should be deterred from executing the forbidden action, for example extinguishing fire on the Sabbath, when aware that this action is actually a convenience for his father and he would be performing it for his father’s benefit. The Tosafists, consonant with this position, explained that the need to prevent a child from performing a forbidden act depends on whether or not he is a ‘youngster who has reached the age of knowledge’. If he is, he should be deterred in order that he not transgress. In other words, this is not a problem relating to the father, but rather a small child is required to develop a deep awareness of the commandment even if he is not bound by the commandment itself.36 The Mishna says that small children are exempt from reciting the Shmah prayer and from laying phylacteries. Rashi took the position that fathers were not required to ensure that their small children recited the Shmah, because they were not usually with the children at the appropriate times. Rashi’s grandsons, the Tosafists, however, criticized his interpretation. They contended that he had misunderstood the Mishna. In their view the children who were exempted by the Mishna from reciting the Shmah were children who had yet to reach the age of education. In their commentary they deploy terms not present in the Talmudic source, including ‘a youngster who knows’, ‘who has reached the age of education’. Since it is written in the Talmud that a youngster who has reached the age of knowledge must perform the commandment of laying phylacteries, then obviously such a youngster must also recite the Shmah, since it is written that, ‘He who knows how to speak, his father teaches him Torah and the first verse of the Shmah.’ Rashi’s interpretation, that a child who has reached the age of education is exempt from reciting the Shmah owing to his father’s absence, is hence untenable. According to the Tosafists, when the Mishna refers to a child who is exempt from reciting the Shmah, the reference is to a child who has not yet reached the age of educa-

36 See Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 114a; Shabbat 121, Rashi &*"! ;3$ -3; Tosafot %*1*/ 3/:;

Eliezer ben Samuel, Sefer Yere’im, no. 226.

37

Simha Goldin tion.37 From this, and other sources, we can deduce that this new childhood stage, ‘reached the age of education’, was established between the time of Rashi and the time of his grandsons, the Tosafists, in the first half of the twelfth century.38

Lowering the age of liability The school of thought that lowered the age of liability – and sometimes also the age at which a child is punishable – below the traditional age of thirteen, and linked the punishment to the child’s degree of knowledge and intellectual capacity, was particularly prominent among the Hasidim of Ashkenaz.39 In their view, a child who understands his actions – ‘a child who has reason’ – is liable to be punished for his sins against God, and even for his sins against his fellow men, the consequences of which are exacted by men. They even recommend punishing a child as young as four for cursing or for defiling the Sabbath, and their sages call for the punishment of anyone who admits to stealing before reaching the age of thirteen. Drawing on a quotation from an early Midrash, the Hasidic source concludes his opinion that ‘everything depends on reason, not on years, but rather on wisdom, because there are those under thirteen years whose reason is cunning, for good or for bad’.40 The lowering of the age at which a child is required to fulfil the commandments did not remain a mere recommendation. We can find evidence for it in social practice. A key example is the duty to fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The Talmud says that only children who have reached the age of responsibility must fast, but that in order to accustom them to fasting it is wise to start educating them towards fasting a year early. It is unclear whether the Talmud is recommending an actual fast a year before reaching the age of responsibility or whether the intention is merely to delay the child’s usual mealtimes by an hour or so during the course of this year.41 In the Middle Ages there was a tendency to lower the age at which a child first participated in the fast. Ordinary Jews were aware that fasting was more harmful to the health of a child than that of an adult, and they made at least a theoretical distinction between the prohibition on wearing leather on the Day of Atonement, which applied to small children as well, and the prohibition on eating 37 See Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 20a, Rashi and Tosafot .*1)8%&; Sukka 28b, Rashi 0)8;

Tosafot 0)8" 0!,; Rosh Hashanah 33b, Tosafot !*1;.

38 See Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, pp. 412–13, no. 359; Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, II, 136

no. 314; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, II, 366 no. 640, p. 411 no. 710. 39 See H. Soloveitchik, ‘Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim’, Association for Jewish Studies

Review 1 (1976), 311–57; I. Ta-Shma, ‘The Practice of “Talmus-Torah” as a Social and Religious Problem in “Sefer-Hassidim” ’, Bar-Ilan Annual 14–15 (1977), 43–98; Kanarfogel, Jewish Education, pp. 86–99. 40 Seder olam Rabba (Wilna, 1894–7), ch. 2; Midrash Tanhuma (Wilna, 1885), p. 70a, Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 21 no. 15; p. 77 no. 216; p. 422 no. 1773; p. 482 no. 1966. 41 See Mishnah, Yoma, ch. 5, 4; Tosefta, Yoma, ch. 4; Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 82b and Rashi.

38

Jewish Society under Pressure and drinking which did not apply to small children because it posed a threat to their health and development.42 Despite this, throughout the Middle Ages, children began fasting very young, the opinions of contemporary sages notwithstanding.43 In the middle of the twelfth century, for example, Rabbi Yacob ben Meir Tam had actually to justify parents who fed their small children on Yom Kippur, and to emphasize that they were acting in accordance with the dictates of Halakha. Ordinary Jews, however, remained unconvinced by the advice of their spiritual leaders, and the practice continued throughout the Middle Ages. In the late thirteenth century Sefer Kolbo provides evidence that Jews frequently began training their children to fast as early as the age of nine, and not merely by delaying meals but by imposing an actual fast.44 Fasting was regarded as an important activity, and like prayer, was considered to be the form of supplication most preferable to the Almighty, a means of altering and improving difficult situations. It would seem that this perception was even applied to small children.

Children in the synagogue An important yardstick for evaluating the position occupied by children in Jewish society can be found in their position in the synagogue, the most important institution in the Jewish community and the primary locus of the socialization process.45 The small child under the age of responsibility occupied a prominent place in the synagogue, emphasizing his importance and the attitude of the community which treated him as an adult. Children of all ages were regularly present in the synagogue. Very small boys accompanied their fathers even, as we have seen, if they were not yet continent and even if there was a real risk that they would disrupt the service. Because children ran around freely, it was recommended that on the eve of the Passover holiday a very careful search be made in the synagogue for breadcrumbs or other leavened foods. The congregation was concerned about the comfort of the children in the synagogue, and special areas and appropriate seats were set aside for them. The children’s benches were contributed by members of the community and were considered the property of the synagogue. Prayer was interspersed with many devices intended to educate, guide and involve the children in what was going on in the synagogue. For example, the Scroll of Esther (the Megillah), read on the festival of Purim, contains a number of verses scattered throughout which are recited aloud by the entire congregation, thus

42 Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 78b Rashi; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, II, 202 no. 531;

Sefer Raban, 75b. 43 See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, p. 377 no. 1540; p. 467 no. 1931. 44 See Yacob ben Meir Tam, Sefer HaYashar (Berlin, 1898), pp. 108–111 nos. 51–2; Meir ben

Barukh, Kol Bo, p. 32b. 45 See S. Goldin, ‘The Synagogue in Medieval Jewish Community as a Integral Institution’,

Journal of Religious Studies 9 (1995), 15–39.

39

Simha Goldin ensuring the alert attention of the children through the entire reading: ‘And this custom is only to bring joy to the children . . . it brought pleasure to the little ones and stimulated them to pay attention to the reading of the Megillah.’ A similar custom was the ritual of having small children kiss the Torah scroll after the reading.46 Much can be learned regarding the importance of the children in the synagogue from R. Isaac ben Moses in his book Or Zarua, written in the middle years of the thirteenth century, though his opinions were perhaps more theoretical than applicable in practice. He held that a child who was below the age of thirteen, but had ‘reached the age of education’, could be called up to read from the Torah just like an adult, thus greatly enhancing the respect paid him by the congregation. This privilege extended to the other commandments which such a child would fulfil, as has already been discussed, such as sitting in the sukkah, waving the lulav (palm branch), blowing the Ram’s Horn (shofar), wearing the ceremonial fringe (zizit), wearing phylacteries and so on. In other words, in practical terms, a child who had reached the age of education was integrated into the framework of fulfilling the commandments before he reached the appropriate age chronologically.47 However, the clearest expression of the adult manner in which children were treated can be found in the ongoing argument and discussions over whether or not a boy under the age of thirteen could be counted as the ‘tenth man’, an adult among adults, for the purpose of completing the Minyan, the quorum of ten men required for public prayer. One of the early sources for this is R. Isaac Bar-Yehudah, one of the prominent figures in Mainz in the 1070s: ‘once during a fire in his town he collected a Minyan to pray and he could find no more than nine men of an age required to perform the commandments, so he brought a small boy holding the Pentateuch to pray as the tenth man’.48 Throughout the medieval era we find evidence of this controversy, and it would seem that critics were addressing a real issue. Closely related to this argument is another fundamental question relating to small children, namely whether they should be included in a group of people – whether three or ten in number – who have been summoned to recite the Blessing Over the Food. One Talmudic reference states that small children cannot be included in the summons, but another source says that a small child can be included as an ‘adjunct to the ten’. The Talmud does, however, pose as a condition that the youngster must know in Whose honour he has been summoned. The Tosafists linked the question of the summons to the question 46 See Goldin, ‘Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie’, pp. 209–33; Sefer Hasidim, ed.

Wistinetski, p. 56 no. 95; p. 127–8 no. 432; p. 137 no. 484; Eleazar ben Judah, Sefer Roqeah, p. 145 no. 266; Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, p. 210 no. 245; Meir ben Barukh, Sefer Sheelot u-Teshuvot (Cremona, 1557), no. 145; Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, II, 21 no. 48; Babylonian Talmud Hagiga, Tosafot *$,. 47 See Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, I, 215–16 no. 752; II, 20 no. 43. Tosefta, Megila, ch. 3, 11; Mishnah, Megila, ch. 4, 6; Babylonian Talmud, 23a. 48 See Teshuvot Rashi, ed. Elfennbein, pp. 349–50; Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, pp. 50–1; A. Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 298ff.

40

Jewish Society under Pressure of participation in the minyan. Their conclusion is of interest: a baby ‘lying in his cradle’ cannot be included in a summons to be one of three, not because of his chronological age, but because he does not know to Whom the blessing is being offered. On the other hand, it is permissible to include him in a group of ten. Therefore, concludes Rabbi Tam, a child can, as in the case of R. Isaac Bar-Yehudah, be included in a minyan in order to conduct a prayer service. Tam is vehemently opposed to the custom of letting a child hold the Pentateuch so as to make him eligible to participate in the minyan. He stresses that it is the child who is significant, since it is he who completes the minyan and not the accompanying Bible.49 Indubitably the practice can be attributed to the tiny size of each community and the desire to conduct prayer services during the day; nevertheless in practice the child substitute came to be accepted as one of the men for the purposes of prayer. As can be deduced from the many published interdictions, this practice was vigorously opposed by numerous sages throughout the period, but the pragmatic needs of contemporary communities defeated them. Their efforts were particularly futile given that the children permitted to participate in the minyan were above ‘the age of knowledge and education’. Advocates for their inclusion relied on the extensive range of duties these children assumed in the synagogue from the moment they reached the age of education and displayed knowledge and understanding.50 Another area in which the increasingly elevated status of children is evident is that of the portion of the prayer service known as the ‘Orphan’s Kaddish’.51 In the Middle Ages Jews believed that this mourner’s prayer for the souls of those who had died had the power to alleviate their situation in the afterlife. Naturally, this burden rested with the children of the deceased. During the course of the twelfth century, a new practice emerged whereby a ‘youngster’ who had not yet reached the age of thirteen, and who thus could not ordinarily lead the prayers, recited the Kaddish before the entire congregation. This indicates how much he was valued as a member of the congregation, as a member of the community, and as the bearer of a crucial responsibility for ameliorating the condition of his dead parents’ souls in the hereafter.52

49 See Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 47b, Rashi and Tosafot (9&5 0)8; Berakhot 48a, Tosafot

!;,-% ;*-; Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, p. 50.

50 Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, pp. 105–6 no. 133 (about Rashi in Babylonian Talmud, Megila

24a), Eleazar ben Judah, Sefer Roqeah, no. 334; Sefer Raban, no. 185; Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, Sefer Rabiah, I, 113–15 no. 128; Meir ben Barukh, Responsa, I, 184–5 nos. 120, 196. 51 I. Ta-Shma, ‘Some Notes on the Origins of the “Kaddish Yathom” [Orphan’s Kaddish]’ [Hebrew], Tarbiz 53 (1984), 559–68. 52 Ibid., p. 560 nn. 3–7. Mahzor Vitry, ed. Hurwitz, pp. 112–13 no. 144; Isaac ben Moses, Or Zarua, II, 22 no. 50.

41

Simha Goldin

CONCLUSION

Modern research has shown that in order for children to be effectively socialized, it is essential that the child’s family, as well as the larger social group, devote a great deal of attention to him, express appreciation for his efforts on a regular basis, and encourage him to behave in a manner approved by the group. In light of the very real Christian threat to convert Jewish children, Jewish society sought to have its members socialized in, and so internalize, those values that were fundamental to their identity. Chief among these was their uniqueness in practising and preserving a singular religion by fulfilling the commandments and practising a way of life very different from those around them. The main pedagogical driving force was the desire to perpetuate the concept of ‘chosenness’, that Jews were God’s ‘Chosen People’. This tenet was under constant attack by the Church which presented an array of alleged ‘evidence’: the truth of Christ’s Gospel; the abandonment of the Jewish people by God; the transference of ‘chosenness’ to the Christians. The concept of being the Chosen People, and the superiority inherent in this position, were powerful tools in the process of self-persuasion. The group sought to convince its members that deserting the group in favour of the exterior, Christian world meant a decline in the moral value of each individual who left. The tenet of ‘chosenness’ was internalized through the socialization process conducted chiefly in the focal institution of the community, the synagogue. As we have seen, for the messages contained in the socialization process to have the desired influence on children, as new members of the group, the entire process in all its various stages had to work efficiently and effectively. Our sources indicate that in Northern France and Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the small child was considered to be at the heart of the Jewish family. There existed a clear perception of childhood as a distinctive phase in a person’s life. This was associated with an educational theory of how individual children should be treated. We find in the attitude of parents to their offspring much understanding, great warmth and intimacy, a clear expression of emotions, deep concern for children’s welfare, and in general a keen awareness of their particular needs. Another trend becomes apparent from our examination of the attitude of the Jewish community to children and childhood. From the time the child reached the age of education, the group initiated a process of rapid incorporation into the normative framework, often at a stage much earlier in the child’s chronological and biological development than previous generations had judged appropriate. By viewing the child even from a very young age as a responsible individual with valued opinions, Jewish society positioned him at the heart of that society and required him to shoulder heavy responsibilities with maximal liability. Despite this desire to incorporate the small child into adult society at a very early age, the group nevertheless continued to treat the child as child and not as an adult. The central problem facing the Jewish communities of Europe in 42

Jewish Society under Pressure the Middle Ages was the external threat of conversion. Children received an abundance of care and attention, but also an education intended to prepare them for a unique process of socialization. The community indeed recognized childhood as a special time, but because of the threat posed by the Church, it was thought imperative to equip children with the necessary tools as early as possible. That children were partially assimilated into the adult world does not mean that the special needs of childhood were ignored, but rather that the worlds of children and of adults coexisted in tandem.

43

Desiring Virgins

Desiring Virgins: Maidens, Martyrs and Femininity in Late Medieval England Kim M. Phillips

INTRODUCTION

Imagine the scene. A gentry girl of, shall we say, fifteen, is sitting with her family in their parish church, in a private pew near the chancel.1 It is during Lent, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the priest has chosen for his sermon the well-worn theme of the seven deadly sins.2 He begins with the first mortal sin, pride, and among the admonitions our maiden hears this cautionary tale: A countas, chast of body, gret in doing almes-dedys, devowt in prayerys, deyid, & was drawyn wyth feendys to helle-ward, & cryed, ‘alas!’, & aperyd to a lady of fraunce, fowl as a feend, & seyde to here: ‘be þou ware be me & alle oþere! For I was a good lyuere in alle oþere thynges, saaf I hadde dely
te in pride and veynglorye, in prowde aray of myn heuyd & of my body, in longe traynes, & in brode hornys, and I desyred werdly worschyppe. And only for þis pryde I am dampnyd wyth-outyn ende!’3

1

2

3

On private pews for the gentry in the fifteenth century see C. Richmond, ‘Religion and the Fifteenth Century English Gentleman’, in The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Stroud, 1984), pp. 193–208; P. Graves, ‘Social Space in the English Medieval Parish Church’, Economy and Society 18 (1989), 297–332 (p. 317). For inspiration in the writing of this article I am grateful to Jeremy Goldberg, Felicity Riddy, Katherine Lewis, Barry Reay and Martin Jones. Sermons were one among several modes of instruction in the elements of the faith, and Sunday was the most likely day for such instruction. This could take place at any time in the year, but especially on one of the great feasts or during Lent. See H. L. Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), pp. 71, 203, 207–16; G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1450 (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 144–8. Jacob’s Well: An Englisht Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. A. Brandeis, vol. 1 (no more published), EETS OS 115 (London, 1900), p. 80. This text, from a unique manuscript of c. 1450, provides ninety-five sermons probably designed to be preached during the period from Ash Wednesday to the vigil of Pentecost. One cannot be sure to what extent they were preached orally or whether the text was primarily for private reading, and it has been suggested that they are the work of a Franciscan, so it is not certain that

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Kim M. Phillips The dangers posed not only to a woman’s own soul but also to those of the men who might behold her fashionably dressed and adorned body are hammered home some minutes later when the priest, having been diverted onto other themes through discourses on wrath, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, reaches his crescendo with lechery, which some called the sin ‘fyrþest . . . fro heuene’,4 because it damns two souls in one act. Again, our maiden and other female parishioners are urged to think on their carefully tended hair, their fine dresses, their eye-catching headdresses, and the desperate state of damnation which these could lead them, and others, into: Men may synnen ofte in sy
t of wommen; as nyce wommen þat dy
ten hem qweyntly to make men to mys-vsyn here sy
t on hem, and
it þei wenyn þei synen nou
t, for þei consentyn no
t to hem. but þei synne grevously, for þei are cause þat þe soulys of manye men are lost.
if þe womman in here entent doth so in here aray, þat men þat beholdyn here hadde desyre to don foly wyth here, þanne sche is cause of here synne.5

What does our maiden make of the tirade? Perhaps she gives the lesson barely a passing thought – after all, the themes have been so often reiterated during her short life.6 But part way through the lengthy discourse her eyes drift from the priest to the painted panels arrayed behind the pulpit.7 Each brightlypainted panel separately depicts a beautiful young woman, dressed in extravagant and fashionable clothes, with golden hair rippling loose down her back, and an expression of elegant serenity. There is little to tell one maiden apart from another, except for the items that they clutch – a tower, a tooth in pincers,

4 5 6

7

any fifteen-year-old girls ever heard these very words in their parish churches although they may have heard or read them in other places. See Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 31, 214–15; R. R. Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. A. E. Hartung, 9 vols. (New Haven, 1986), vol. 7, p. 2262. However, their message was so commonplace that it is used here to represent a constantly-repeated theme of this period (see note 6 below). Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 2 vols., EETS OS 119 and 123 (London, 1901–3), II, line 7340. Jacob’s Well, ed. Brandeis, p. 159. The dangers posed by the beautiful and adorned woman are conveyed with exhaustive repetition in homiletic and instructional literature. See The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. N. Francis, EETS OS 217 (London, 1942), pp. 43–4; Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. R. Morris, EETS OS 23 (London, 1866), p. 47; Middle English Sermons, ed. W. O. Ross, EETS OS 209 (London, 1940), pp. 234–5; Handlyng Synne, lines 3241–350 and 7611–22; and G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1966), pp. 48–9, 118–20, 377–9, 390–404 for a sample of this evidently favoured theme. Men’s interest in their own clothing was frequently condemned too, but more often for engendering pride than lust: Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 404–11. Eamon Duffy discusses such fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century panels and provides illustrations in ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’, in Women in the Church, ed. W. S. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1997), pp. 175–96, and The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 171–3 and figs. 59, 60, 68.

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Desiring Virgins a wreath, a wheel – which identify the individual virgin martyrs. This array of conventionally beautiful virgins must draw the eye of any half-attentive member of the congregation, given their prominent placement, and their visual appeal. While this scene is a imaginary one, it attempts to illustrate the ways in which young medieval women were the recipients of conflicting messages regarding feminine beauty. While it would be inaccurate to accuse priests and clerical authors of crude hypocrisy – after all, no one ever portrays St Margaret or St Agnes preening her golden locks or plucking her elegant eyebrows – it is apparent that medieval maidens were presented with inconsistent messages on physical femininity. Lessons on the vices and exemplary tales, though they usually do not condemn natural beauty in itself, constantly warn of the perils of women’s bodies and fashionable dress. Visual and textual representations of virgin martyrs, on the other hand, bring those feminine attractions into the foreground of vision. Those viewing the martyrs varied tremendously, from female monastics and male clerics, to aristocratic women patrons and book owners, and also, given the ubiquity of the martyrs’ representation, lay men and women of all social levels.8 Each group no doubt found different appealing elements in their lives and representations. This chapter offers suggestions about just one way in which the virgin martyrs, or certain of them, might have functioned in the lives of their real-life counterparts: wealthy, unmarried maidens in their teens. The focus will be on the fifteenth century, and much of the evidence examined will relate to East Anglia in particular. Two kinds of medieval feminine ‘youth’, the real and the ideal, are thus examined here.9 Ultimately, it will be argued that many of the virgin martyrs’ lives provided a powerful model of sexual restraint, but that the power of those legends was in their use, rather than their avoidance, of images of desirable femininity. Maidens of the higher social orders could be more effectively taught the value of virginity and chastity if the models of such virtues were of a feminine type likely to appeal to elite lay maidens, rather than through a total reliance on the ascetic messages delivered in sermon and homiletic modes. Young women’s relationship with their own femininity was not always one of struggle and resistance, but often involved acceptance,

8

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On audiences see Duffy, ‘Holy Maydens. Holy Wyfes’; B. Millett, ‘The Audience of the Saints’ Lives of the Katherine Group’, Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990), 127–56; J. Wogan-Browne, ‘Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37 (1991), 314–32; K. J. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000), esp. pp. 14–25; S. Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 46–8. The ages covered by women’s ‘youth’ or ‘maidenhood’ are impossible to define exactly in years, but here the broad boundaries of the life-cycle phase are marked at the lower end by attainment of legal maturity in canon and secular legal codes (from twelve to around fifteen) and the age by which a woman would be expected to be ‘fully’ married (usually from the late teens into the mid-twenties). See K. M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003), ch. 1.

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Kim M. Phillips perhaps even partly the creation, of models of lay femininity which were easily absorbed into the social system of patriarchal and materialistic concerns which surrounded them.

DESIRABLE VIRGINS

Viewing fifteenth-century virgin martyrs as models of glamorous femininity requires a rethinking of the nature of their appeal as desirable women. My interpretation rests on the theory of ‘parasexuality’, a notion which usefully extends the concept of sexuality beyond the simply titillating or the obviously erotic. In recent years scholars have debated whether virgin martyrs’ lives and visual portrayals would have been perceived to have had any kind of sexual content by their medieval audiences. Thomas Heffernan, Kathryn Gravdal and Simon Gaunt, among others, have found powerfully erotic or voyeuristic elements especially in the scenes of stripping and torture of the youthful virgins’ flesh, and see these as holding appeal for male readers.10 Catherine Innes-Parker, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Katherine J. Lewis and Sarah Salih are prominent among those who have disputed this approach, finding the reading neglectful of known female audiences and reductive in their assumptions about portrayals of the body. Too blunt an equation of virgin martyr vitae with pornography overlooks the martyrs’ agency, courage, strength of will, and ultimate triumph in the face of terrible torments.11 But the notion of ‘parasexuality’, though devised for a quite different historical context, can allow us to see a sexualized content to representations of virgin martyrs which could have appealed to audiences of the lay female elite through a more subtle process than straightforward titillation. The neologism was coined by Peter Bailey in his study of Victorian barmaids of the 1830s.12 He chose the prefix ‘para’ for its two meanings: ‘almost’ or ‘beside’ (as in ‘paramedic’), and ‘against’ or ‘protection from’ (as in 10 T. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford,

1988), pp. 267–86; K. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Law and Literature (Philadelphia, 1991), ch. 1; S. Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 194–8. 11 C. Innes-Parker, ‘Sexual Violence and the Female Reader: Symbolic “Rape” in the Saints’ Lives of the Katherine Group’, Women’s Studies 24 (1995), 205–17; J. Wogan-Browne, ‘Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader’, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. R. Evans and L. Johnson (London, 1994), pp. 165–94 (pp. 174–81), and Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), ch. 3; Lewis, Cult of St Katherine, pp. 85–93, and ‘ “Let me suffre”: reading the torture of St Margaret of Antioch in Late Medieval England’, in J. Wogan-Browne et al. (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, 2000); Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 74–106. 12 P. Bailey, ‘Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’, Gender and History 2 (1990), 148–72.

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Desiring Virgins ‘parachute’). Thus ‘parasexuality’ denotes ‘a secondary or modified form of sexuality’, ‘everything but’ actual sex, and ‘protection from or prevention from sexuality [. . .] an inoculation in which a little sexuality is encouraged as an antidote to its more subversive properties’. ‘Parasexuality then is sexuality that is deployed but contained, carefully channelled rather than fully discharged.’13 Bailey devised the term to explain the appeal and function of the English barmaid of the 1830s, a figure who underwent a transformation at this time along with the pub itself.14 As pubs became ‘gin palaces’, bright and inviting monuments to alcohol-fuelled male society, the barmaid became a figure of ‘glamour’, groomed and smiling and ‘an item of allurement among its [the pub’s] mirrors and mahogany, its brassware and coloured tile’. However, the barmaid’s attractions were for display only. The newly-installed bar had the double effect of providing a frame, or a stage, for her charms, while simultaneously ensuring her virtue by providing a ‘boundary or cordon sanitaire’ between her and the customer. The barmaid was therefore a parasexual, rather than fully sexual, figure, with her ‘obvious but safely anchored sexuality’ fitting the phenomenon’s ‘safely sensational pattern of stimulation and containment’.15 Bailey claims the barmaid as the prototype of ‘glamour’, where ‘glamorous’ could stand as a synomym for ‘parasexual’, but acknowledges that ‘claiming cultural firsts is always likely to be a dubious exercise’.16 Indeed, reading his article immediately made me think of virgin martyrs in late-medieval English representations, suggesting a new way of interpreting such representations and, more importantly, assessing the uses they may have had for their women readers, particularly the young unmarried women of my primary interest. My reading takes the idea beyond Bailey’s in stepping outside of a straightforwardly heterosexual matrix, in examining how young women might have responded to virgin martyrs parasexually. The emphasis here is on the virgin martyrs’ lives written by three monastic authors, living and working within fifty miles of one another within East Anglia in the first half of the fifteenth century, producing works for an enthusiastic circle of mostly lay female patrons. This was also the region where many churches would commission the most spectacular panel paintings of virgin martyrs in the second half of the century. The texts are Osbern Bokenham’s series of lives individually produced between 1443 and 1447 and now known as Legendys of Hooly Wummen, John Lydgate’s 1429–30 version of the ‘Legend of St Margaret’, and John Capgrave’s c. 1445 ‘Life of St Katherine of Alexandria’.17 The women of gentle and aristocratic society known to be

13 14 15 16 17

Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 150–1. Ibid., pp. 149, 167. Ibid., p. 165. O. Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. M. S. Serjeantson, EETS OS 206 (London, 1938); J. Lydgate, ‘The Legend of Seynt Margarete’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed.

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Kim M. Phillips associated with these authors include Anne Mortimer (née Stafford), Lady March (for whom Lydgate wrote his ‘Margaret’), her kinswoman Isabelle Bourchier, the countess of Eu (patron of Bokenham’s ‘Mary Magdalene’), Katherine Denston (mentioned in Bokenham’s ‘Anne’ and ‘Katherine’), Katherine Howard (also mentioned in Bokenham’s ‘Katherine’), her kinswoman Lady Elizabeth de Vere (in Bokenham’s ‘Mary Magdalene’ and his ‘Elizabeth’), Isabel Hunt (mentioned with her husband John in Bokenham’s ‘Dorothy’), Agatha Flegge (in Bokenham’s ‘Agatha’), Katherine Babyngton, subprioress of Campsey Priory in Suffolk (who owned a copy of Capgrave’s ‘Katherine’), and the unnamed gentlewoman for whom Capgrave wrote his life of St Augustine.18 The women who merit mention by the authors themselves are surely just the tip of the iceberg of gentle and aristocratic female readers who enjoyed these saints’ lives. Moreover, as the recent studies by Karen A. Winstead and Sheila Delany point out, these authors were producing their vitae in a largely worldly environment.19 This worldliness sets these fifteenth-century legends apart from earlier versions, such as the thirteenthcentury ‘Katherine Group’, which most scholars associate with an audience of religious women.20 Of all the narratives, Bokenham’s life of St Margaret paints the clearest portrait of the virgin martyr as an ideal of fifteenth-century feminine glamour. In this as in other of the vitae, the association of virgin martyrs with desire is most apparent in the moments when the reader’s attention is directed towards the martyr’s face or body through the eyes of the textual viewers. Growing up Christian under the care of her nurse in the countryside, Margaret is fifteen, and a ‘merour of al bewte’ (line 406), when she catches the eye of the pagan prefect Olibrius as he rides by. The reader’s eye is drawn to Margaret through Olibrius’ desiring gaze: [. . .] sodeynly his eye On hyr he kest, of contenaunce demure,

H. N. MacCracken, 2 vols., EETS ES 107 and OS 192 (London, 1911–34), I, 173–92; J. Capgrave, The Life of St Katharine of Alexandria, ed. C. Horstmann, EETS OS 100 (London, 1893). 18 On these authors’ female audiences and patrons see S. Moore, ‘Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1450’, parts I and II, PMLA 27 (1912), 188–207, and 28 (1913), 79–105; A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Transmission and Audience of Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen’, in Late Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 157–67; K. K. Jambek, ‘Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200 – ca. 1475’, in The Cultural Patronage of Late Medieval Women, ed. J. H. McCash (Athens GA, 1996), pp. 228–65 (pp. 229–30, 238–9, 241, 257n., 265n.); K. A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, pp. 118–23. 19 S. Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England. The Work of Osbern Bokenham (New York, 1998); K. A. Winstead, ‘Piety, Politics and Social Commitment in Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 17 (1991), 59–80, and her Virgin Martyrs, ch. 3. 20 Recently Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, pp. 34–63.

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Desiring Virgins And anoon hyr bewte so sore dede lure Hys herte, that euene stylle he stent, And of hyr he took more auysement. (lines 444–8)

Olibrius is rendered helpless, almost passive, as Margaret’s beauty brings him to a standstill. In Lydgate’s ‘Life of St Margaret’ the prefect is ‘rauesshede anoon with hir beaute’ (line 113). In Bokenham what Olibrius, and thus the reader, see is a maiden of pure conventional beauty who could have been plucked straight from the pages of a romance: And whan he sey hyr forheed lely-whyht, Hyr bent browys blake, & hyr grey eyne, Hyr chyry chekys, hyr nose streyt and ryht, Hyr lyppys rody, hyr chyn, wych as pleyne Pulshyd marbyl shoon, & clouyn in tweyne, He was so astonyd of that sodyen caas That vnnethe he wyste wher that he was. (lines 449–55)

The beauty which so disorients Olibrius matches point for point the archetypes offered by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme in their guides to poetical description, and which Bokenham must have been drawing on directly given his references to these authors elsewhere in the life (lines 88, 1183).21 There is, however, a difference, for Bokenham is adapting a secular ideal for a religious text. Margaret could be Guy of Warwick’s Felice but for the important point that her charms never become the sexual possession of a man.22 Having supplied this worldly image, Bokenham shifts the reader’s gaze away from Margaret as an object of desire, noting that Olibrius ‘lokyd no ferthere than in hyr face’ (line 456), a comment which suggests that he and his audience know better and can see beyond her surface attractions to her still more remarkable state of virtue. In this incident Bokenham invites his readers to view Margaret briefly, but safely, through a sexual lens, offering a familiar and appealing sight, before turning the gaze aside and the thoughts to more elevated matters. Margaret is like Bailey’s barmaid, in her ‘obvious but safely anchored sexuality’, and the incident offers the ‘safely sensational pattern of stimulation and containment’ characteristic of parasexuality. Bokenham’s Christina has something of the parasexual too, entering her sexual maturity at twelve and possessing ‘grete bodyly beute’ (line 2124), so much so that her father fears for her chastity and conceals her in a high tower with twelve maidens. The tower acts as an even more efficient cordon sanitaire than a gin palace bar, physically ensuring the maiden’s virginity while height21 Matthew of Vendôme, The Art of Versification, trans. A. E. Galyon (Ames, 1980), p. 43;

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, The Poetria Nova: translation in The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine, trans. E. Gallo (The Hague, 1971), pp. 45–7. 22 The Romance of Guy of Warwick, ed. J. Zupitza, 3 vols., EETS ES 42, 49 and 59 (London, 1883–91), rp. in one volume (London, 1966), lines 65–74.

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Kim M. Phillips ening the reader’s sense of Christina as an object of desire. The tower does nothing to detract the attentions of wooers, who come begging her father for her hand (lines 2139–40). Bokenham’s Agnes, at thirteen blossoming into sexual maturity, draws the eye of the prefect’s son (and thus of the reader) as she walks home from school (lines 4120–2). Her body becomes more emphatically the focus of attention when the prefect, angered by her refusal of her son’s advances and of pagan religion, orders that she be ‘spoylyd shamefastly’ [stripped] and thrown into a brothel (lines 4352–3). No sooner has attention been thus directed to the maiden’s body than the bands which hold her hair fall away and it grows down to her feet to cover her nakedness, so thoroughly that she is better covered by her hair than could be by clothes (lines 4358–64). On entering the brothel she finds an angel waiting to cover her with a bright light which renders her untouchable and invisible, and a white stole awaiting her in her cell, in which she quickly dresses herself (lines 4368–84). With these incidents the attractions of the virgin are made apparent, but any danger of the text turning the reader into a voyeur is quickly averted. Assaults on Agnes’ virginity are avoided too, when the prefect’s son enters the brothel to exercise the ‘flesshys foul lust’ with her, only to be struck dead (lines 4407–27). The brothel theme recurs in Bokenham’s life of Lucy, when those who come to drag her to the brothel find that she is miraculously rooted to the spot, and immovable (lines 9248–326). This thwarts the consul Paschasius’ plan to see her raped to death. Again a sexual element is introduced, only to be turned aside. This tactic whereby the author seems to say ‘Look!’, then ‘Look away’, is also apparent in some of the scenes of the stripping or torture of the virgins. Although some scholars have exaggerated the importance of the stripping of the virgin during scenes of torture and the voyeurism thus encouraged,23 certain lives do draw the reader’s attention to the tormented virgin’s desirable face or naked body. Bokenham’s Dorothy is said to have her beauty enhanced, rather than destroyed, following torture and the ministrations of angels to heal her while imprisoned (lines 4785–805). Enraged by repetition of this process, her tormentor Fabricius orders that her face be beaten with staves, ‘Tyl of hir face were no semyng’ (lines 4876–81), but to no avail. Readers of Lydgate’s (though not Bokenham’s) life of Margaret are directed to view her through the eyes of spectators, who cry out in distress, ‘ “Whi hast thout lost thyn excellent fairenesse,/ Whi hast thou lost this shape and thy beaute?” ’ (Lydgate lines 246–7). The erotic implications of the naked body are apparent also in Bokenham’s Agatha, who, immured in prison following the torture and tearing-off of her breasts, is visited by an old man (later revealed as St Peter) who has come to heal her wounds. First ashamed to let him see her body, Agatha soon relents, acknowledging that so wounded is she that ‘No man of lust myht tempyd be’ (lines 8639–80). Although this scene could be

23 An approach critiqued by Lewis, ‘ “Let me suffre’ ”; Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 74–98.

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Desiring Virgins read as indicative of the non-erotic nature of the virgin martyr’s naked body, I feel that it is subtle in directing the reader’s attention to the body, only to divert it again. Even St Katherine, whose attractions are at least as intellectual as physical in Bokenham’s account, has attention directed to her naked body during the excursion into the wilderness with the Hermit Adrian which Capgrave inserted into his version of the Life. The Virgin Mary strips Katherine in readiness for her baptism by Adrian, but the reader is assured of the decorum of this scene: ‘tho was Katarine spoyled – but blind was þe frere/ Bothe in hir spoylenge and in hir bapteme’ (Capgrave, lines 1104–5). The theme of sexual desire is constantly alluded to in virgin martyrs’ lives, only to be deflected.24 The strategy of first inciting then defusing the reader’s sexual attention, safely highlighting the glamour of the virgin martyrs, may ultimately have offered a stronger tactic for enforcing the ideal of premarital virginity in young girls or women than more crudely repressive models. To confirm this we need to turn our attention to young women living in late medieval England, and gain some sense of their desires.

VIRGINS DESIRING

If we are to speak of young lay virgins responding with desire to the youthful female martyrs of these tales, what kind of ‘desire’ are we talking about? The possibility of homoerotic titillation will not be explored here. Desire can be the longing for emulation, and that longing may have a sexual tinge where the viewer wishes to emulate the sexual appeal of the object. Often, for women observing women, the desirability of the object is likely to be enhanced when the latter’s sexual attractiveness is subtly rather than blatantly evident, as that provides a more appealing model for emulation. The parasexual object is more likely to appeal than the pornographic, especially in a culture with highly ambivalent attitudes to female sexuality. Medieval maidens were encouraged, even by conservative authors, to pay heed to virgin martyrs and to model themselves upon them.25 Knowledge of what maidens themselves thought about virgin martyrs, or anything else, is of course tremendously limited, given the paucity of sources in which young unmarried women

24 That Bokenham’s lives of Ursula and the 11,000 virgins, Faith, Cecilia and of Dorothy

contain little that could be construed as parasexual warns one not to look for such elements in all representations of virgin martyrs. As Lewis notes, it is a mistake to assume that all virgin martyrs and their lives are essentially the same: Cult of St Katherine, p. 81. Winstead emphasizes changing representations over time: Virgin Martyrs, pp. 13–16 and passim. 25 W. Caxton (trans.), The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, EETS SS 2 (London, 1971), cap. 72; C. de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards (New York, 1982), pp. 219–40; K. J. Lewis, ‘Model Girls? Virgin Martyrs and the Training of Young Women in Late Medieval England’, in K. J. Lewis, N. J. Menuge and K. M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women (Stroud, 1999).

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Kim M. Phillips expressed themselves. The handful of texts which are available do, however, make it plausible to suggest that well-off English maidens would have responded favourably to the worldly and sexual attractions of the martyrs. While the daughters of the late medieval English elite did not leave expressions of open enthusiasm for virginal asceticism in the historical record (at least, not while they were still young), some did express strong interest in their appearance. This tended to take the form of concern with their clothes. Of course, clothing was about showing status at least as much as it was about sexual attractiveness, but the strong link made between lechery and women’s clothing in religious didactic texts shows the extent to which fine and fashionable female clothing signalled sexuality. Virgin martyrs’ bodies were erotically charged through glimpses of their naked bodies in their vitae and some visual representations, but the fashionable and form-fitting clothing in which they were frequently visually depicted, such as in the East Anglian rood screens, could also convey messages of sexual attractiveness which seem likely to have resonated with young wealthy women. The best testimony from young unmarried women comes from a slightly later period, but is unlikely to be much different from the views of maidens a few decades earlier. In the 1530s, while boarding with aristocratic families in France, teenaged Anne and Mary Bassett wrote several letters to their mother Lady Lisle which included requests for more, or more fashionable, garments and accessories. In May 1534 Anne asked for demi-worsted for a gown, a kirtle of velvet, linen for smocks, hose and shoes, and three ells of red cloth to make a cloak with a satin hood. ‘I send you back again the gold ornaments which I brought with me, because I know not how to make use of them here. I heartily beseech you that it may please you to send me some other.’26 By August 1535 Anne, now about fifteen, was painfully conscious of the demands of fashion. Madame, I would most earnestly entreat you that if I am to pass the winter in France I may have some gown to pass it in, as I am all out of apparel for every day. Madame, I know well that I am very costly unto you, but it is not possible to do otherwise, there are so many little trifling things which are necessary here which are not needed in England, and one must do as others do.27

Her sister Mary was less demanding, but in November 1534 asked her mother to pay a gold crown to secure for her the purchase of a gold ornament worth five crowns, and in September 1535 her hostess Madame de Bours asked Lady Lisle to procure some pearls for Mary’s headdress, such ‘as her sister hath’.28 Lady Lisle, although conscious of the expense of keeping her daughters in such fine state, seems to have shared their concerns with worldly 26 The Lisle Letters, ed. M. StC. Byrne, 6 vols. (Chicago, 1981), III, no. 571. 27 Ibid., III, no. 578. 28 Ibid., III, nos. 575 and 579.

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Desiring Virgins status, and wrote in response to Mary’s request for new sleeves ‘I think the cost of you well employed.’29 Fragmentary evidence is found from the fifteenth century. Dorothy Plumpton, boarding with her father’s mother-in-law, wrote to her father Sir Robert, asking him for a fine hat and some kerchiefs.30 The importance of having maidens in great households dressed to fit their station is clear from the concerns of the Duchess of Suffolk, who had taken Mary Barantyne (née Stonor) and her sister Elizabeth (or Isabel) Stonor into her household, and who reportedly complained that the sisters be ‘no better arayed’, and warned that ‘with owght they be otherwyse arayed [. . .] sche may not kep them’.31 The ‘peer pressure’ of medieval wealthy maidens to dress finely derived from concern to display social status. If maidens not only cared about their appearance but were expected to do so, it makes sense that they would have responded favourably to the conventional attractiveness of virgin martyrs. Such young women would have been familiar with both textual and visual portrayals of the martyrs. The sheer ubiquity of their representations in the stained glass, wall and panel painting, and sculpture of parish churches, the oral delivery of their vitae in sermons and textual versions available in manuscripts identified as household books, and in conduct literature, as well as in separate publications, make it far more unlikely for medieval maidens to have been ignorant of virgin martyrs and their representations than otherwise, and it is not stretching plausibility to suggest that the martyrs would have had a deep effect on their imaginations and perceptions of femininity.32 More concretely, and to return to an East Anglian context, Isabelle Bourchier, daughter of Anne Mortimer and Richard, earl of Cambridge, would have been a young woman when her aunt, Lady March (wife of Isabelle’s maternal uncle, Edmund Mortimer), commissioned Lydgate to write a life of St Margaret for her in 1429 or 1430.33 Twenty years later, as a great lady in her own right, the countess strolled through her chambers on

29 Ibid., III, no. 590a. 30 Plumpton Correspondence, ed. T. Stapleton, Camden Society 1st series, 4 (London, 1939),

no. 165. 31 Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, ed. C. Carpenter (Cambridge, 1996),

no. 172. 32 For details about the audiences for virgin martyrs’ lives see n. 8 above. For a modern

reader’s response in girlhood see K. A. Winstead (ed. and trans.), Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca, 2000), p. 1. Margery Kempe made many references to the martyrs, especially Katherine and Margaret, in her Book, but we do not know how she may have responded to them in her youth. 33 D. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1321–1449): A Bio-bibliography (Victoria BC, 1997), p. 51. Isabelle was also connected to Lady March by marriage, as her mother-in-law, the countess of Stafford, was the mother of Lady March by her second marriage, and of Isabelle’s husband Henry Bourchier by a third marriage: D. Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p. 168. Isabelle cannot have been born after 1415, when her father was executed for treason. Her brother, Richard, duke of York, was born 1411: G. E. Cockayne, The Complete Peerage, 13 vols., 2nd edn (London, 1959), XII, 905–9.

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Kim M. Phillips Twelfth Night 1445, chatting with the Friar Bokenham of the neighbouring priory of Clare.34 In this decidedly secular and courtly environment, as the countess’s young sons and others danced and cavorted in their best clothes (whose bright colours of white, blue and green the friar commented on approvingly, lines 5023–34), the countess and the friar’s after-dinner conversation turned to the lives of saints which Bokenham had composed: of the matrons Anne and Elizabeth, but also the virgins Margaret, Dorothy, Faith, Christina, Agnes, and Ursula and the 11,000. Hearing that another great countess, her friend Lady Elizabeth de Vere, had commissioned a life of St Elizabeth from Bokenham, Isabelle admitted to a particular devotion of Mary Magdalene, a saint who most powerfully combines the worldly with the devout and penitent, and commissioned from the friar a life in English of that saint (lines 5035–75). The countess stands as an example of fifteenth-century aristocratic femininity: respectable and devout, but with an eye to temporal concerns of fashion, and a taste for piety which embraced rather than precluded secular concerns. Her upbringing in a family and social milieu which prized the possession of lives of glamorous martyrs by famous authors seems appropriate, and perhaps helped foster this worldview. Isabelle’s friend Elizabeth de Vere was already long married when her kinswoman, Katherine Howard, was one of the recipients of Bokenham’s life of St Katherine.35 Elizabeth’s choice of St Elizabeth as the subject for commission might indicate a leaning towards, or idealization of, a more completely ascetic piety. Katherine Denston, however, as second recipient of Bokenham’s Katherine, was brought up in a family which strongly mixed materialism with devotion. Her uncle, John Baret (d. 1467), was a wealthy clothier and property owner, who made his fortune in mercantile activities, even if he imitated gentlemen in his patronage of religious houses in later life.36 While his cadaver tomb strives to make a fierce statement of the renunciation of earthly vanities, the guilty bequests in his will to those he has ‘caused to lose silver’ or otherwise cheated, point to an avaricious past. Even on his tomb, below his ghastly cadaver, he could not resist including a small relief portrait of himself in extravagant merchant dress at the height of his material prosperity.37 Katherine’s half-brother, John Clopton (d. 1494), made enough money as a cloth merchant to make spectacular endowments to Long Melford church late in life and in death.38 The fervent piety displayed by these men in old age and death does not disguise the fact that their earlier lives were dominated by 34 This scene has struck many commentators for its vividness, from Moore, ‘Patrons of

Letters’ II, 87–9, to Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, pp. 142–3. 35 Elizabeth married John de Vere in around 1425, when both were very young, and

Bokenham’s St Katherine was written between 1445 and 1447: Delany, Impolitic Bodies, pp. 19, 34. 36 G. M. Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), pp. 72–9. 37 Ibid., pp. 74–7. 38 Ibid., pp. 80–9.

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Desiring Virgins material concerns, and this was the environment of Katherine Denston’s youth. Of the other women linked to virgin martyr devotion in fifteenth-century East Anglia less is known, but it is intriguing that Agatha Flegge, wife of Sir John Flegge, had a daughter called Joan, who was about to be married and therefore in her teens or early twenties when Bokenham produced his life of St Agatha for her mother c. 1445–47.39 Joan could have found echoes of her own life in the tale of Agatha and the other virgins as nubile, highly sought-after maidens of high social status. She would have been accustomed to the lengthy diatribes delivered from the pulpit and in homiletic literature against the dangers of the attractive woman, and have heard countless times that fashionable dress, tended hair, and carefully curving eyebrows were a danger both to her own soul and the souls of men who beheld her. As a young woman about to be married, how much more attractive would the beautiful Agatha, or Margaret with her curving brows, or indeed any of the virgins with their golden tresses and rich gowns, have seemed as models of pre-marital virginity and life-long chastity? Some scholars interested in female audiences of virgin martyrs’ lives have suggested that those women responded most warmly to the defiance, courage and endurance displayed by the martyrs. Wogan-Browne, in particular, has written of the functions of such lives especially in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England. She sees the martyrs’ strength of character as offering ‘serious encouragement to female readers’, and makes sense of their rejection of unwanted marriages in a historical context in which real women, such as Christina of Markyate, fiercely resisted parental attempts to force her into marriage over a period of several years (as many as eight, or more), which included dragging her to her betrothal at the altar and aiding her bridegroom in attempting to rape her.40 No doubt many medieval women were attracted to this aspect of virgin martyrs’ character, especially those women who dedicated themselves to perpetual virginity or would have liked to, but this reading does not seem entirely appropriate for the East Anglian noblewomen of the fifteenth century who have appeared here and seem mostly comfortable with their lives in the world. As Winstead argues, virgin martyr vitae and their female audiences took a turn towards the worldly and the ‘decorous’ in the fifteenth century. Although young women readers have not left their own direct testimony regarding virgin martyrs, in the 1470s Margery, daughter of Sir Thomas Brews of Topcroft in Norfolk, would compose two letters to the man she hoped to marry, John Paston III, which offer an unusual window onto

39 John Flegge was in the retinue of Richard, duke of York, alongside members of the

Denston family: Edwards, ‘Transmission and Audience’, p. 165. Thus Agatha Flegge was linked socially, if tenuously, to Isabelle Bourchier and Katherine Denston. Joan Flegge was married to Sir Theobald Gorges of Somerset in 1447: Delany, Impolitic Bodies, p. 20. 40 Wogan-Browne, ‘Virgin’s Tale’, p. 181; eadem, ‘Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader’, pp. 316–17.

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Kim M. Phillips young women’s concerns.41 Margery seems almost the antitype of Christina of Markyate, in her passionate enthusiasm for her proposed marriage to John Paston. Indeed, it appears that her purpose in composing the letters was a desperate attempt to intervene in the stalled marriage negotiations taking place between Paston and Thomas Brews: ‘þe mater betwyx my fader and
owe’. Aware that Paston has been enquiring about the prospects of another lady, one who might prove a better financial bargain, Margery uses the only tools she has – her charming powers of persuasion – through portraying herself as a vivacious, warm and loving young woman. Consciously or otherwise, she emphasizes her conventionally feminine appeal in order to win Paston’s heart. There is nothing of the defiant or the anti-worldly about Margery, though she does share the virgin martyrs’ capacity for agency and strength of will. Whether Margery herself had any kind of devotion to virgin martyrs is unknown, but note that this, the time of her maidenhood, was also the time in which the magnificent East Anglian rood screens were beginning to be painted in parish churches all around the region in which she grew up.42 Just twelve miles as the crow flies from Topcroft is the village of Burlingham, whose church of St Andrew contains a panel painting of an exceptionally comely St Cecilia, while about 19 miles to the north lies Barton Turf, with its peculiarly late-medieval representation of Apollonia as a beautiful maiden.43 Between the two, fifteen miles to the north of Topcroft, is Ranworth, whose paintings take a maternal theme and include St Margaret. Thirteen miles to the south-east in Suffolk, Westhall’s south screen portrays eight female saints, five of them virgins martyrs (including another youthful Apollonia). Further afield, at 28 miles to the north-west, Litcham All Saints’ screen of eight women saints includes six virgin martyrs, and North Elmham, about 25 miles northwest of Topcroft, has the most extravagantly beautiful of all the screens, with virgin martyrs as seven out of its eight female saints. East Anglia in the fifteenth century provided an environment in which both visual and textual representations of virgin martyrs flourished in more dazzling fashion than ever before in England. The maidens and ladies of the elite of the region delighted in representations of the saints which held the greatest resonance for them, combining piety with worldly concerns such as a fashionably-adorned and attractive appearance. The theory of ‘parasexuality’ 41 The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. N. Davis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971–6),

I, nos. 415–16. 42 See Duffy, ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes’, pls. 1–3, 5, and idem, Stripping of the Altars, pls.

59–60, 68; S. Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens in Norfolk – Their Construction and Painting Dates’, Norfolk Archaeology 40 (1987), 44–54. 43 The portrait of Cecilia was donated, along with one of John the Baptist, by John and Cecily Blake: Duffy, ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes’, p. 176. In lives of Apollonia from an earlier period the martyr was depicted as an aging matron. Her transformation into a standard, youthful beauty alongside the other virgin martyrs is a feature of late medieval art: D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1992), p. 28.

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Desiring Virgins allows us to view the sexual appeal of the martyrs in a new way, one which accommodates the interests of female audiences, and opens up the possibility that young women’s indoctrination in the virtues of chastity were fostered through such images of enticement, alongside more obvious ones of repression. But the question has not been asked, who was in control of this process? Did the women readers and viewers play an active role? Clearly, it would be simplistic to see the legends as merely representative of crudely ‘masculinist’ views of their authors. If texts are, as in the Vološinovan paradigm, a two-sided act as the product of a reciprocal relationship between speaker (or author) and listener (or reader), then the predominantly male authors of the virgin martyr lives are by no means solely responsible for the final representations. As Paul Strohm put it, ‘The text is not transmitted from the author to the reader, but constructed between them as a kind of ideological bridge.’44 Powerful women, such as the named patrons of Lydgate and Bokenham and the many unnamed women who added to their audiences and Capgrave’s, must count as to some extent ‘co-authors’ of the works produced, if only in the sense that they ensured the popularity of the virgin martyrs and their centrality in late-medieval English religious practice. Perhaps younger, usually silent, women, as readers, listeners and viewers, also played a role in constructing the virgin martyrs in their own image. It was thus not only heterosexual male authors and readers who made the virgin martyrs desirable, but also youthful virgins who, in their own way, desired virgins. In doing so they colluded in their families’ anxiety to see that they, at this dangerous age, remained chaste, but at the same time celebrated feminine qualities of sexual attractiveness and physical beauty. The virgin martyrs were much more than male clerical fantasies of feminine desirability. They were also representative of some laywomen’s ideals of femininity. Then, as now, such ideals were hardly straightforward.

44 P. Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge MA, 1989), pp. 49–50. See also S. Dentith, Bakhtinian

Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, 1995), esp. p. 39.

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Out of the Mouths of Babes

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Authority in Pearl and in Narratives of the Child King Richard Rosalynn Voaden

Authority is a word on everyone’s lips today. The young attack it and the old demand respect for it. Parents have lost it and policemen enforce it. Experts claim it and artists spurn it, while scholars seek it and lawyers cite it. Philosophers reconcile it with liberty and theologians demonstrate its compatibility with conscience. Bureaucrats pretend they have it and politicians wish they did. Everybody agrees there is less of it than there used to be.1

Such is a portrait of authority in contemporary western society painted by John Schaar, a political philosopher of our own day. In marked contrast, the general perception of authority in the late Middle Ages is of an authoritative framework grounded in a commonly accepted, traditional hierarchy: God over king, king over subject, man over woman, parent over child, age over youth, noble over commoner, lord over serf. However, in this essay I shall examine three narratives from the late fourteenth century where it appears that authority based on that traditional hierarchy was being questioned, where the hierarchy itself is represented as being either suspended or subverted. In these narratives, the customary structure of authority is brought into question because the protagonists are children, and the circumstances of the narratives demand that these children be constructed as figures of authority. The narratives are the late fourteenth-century English dream-vision poem Pearl, and chronicle accounts of the coronation of the boy king Richard II in 1377, and of incidents involving the king which occurred during the Peasants’ Uprising in 1381.2 This essay is an exploration of some intriguing parallels between Pearl and the Ricardian narratives, with the intention of discovering how customary representations of the hierarchy of power are contested in order to invest a child with authority. I shall also consider how

1 2

J. H. Schaar, ‘Legitimacy in the Modern State’, in Power and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science, ed. P. Green and S. Levinson (New York, 1970), pp. 276–327 (p. 276). Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1953); The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), pp. 107–14 and 143–51; The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and B. F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982); T. Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols (London, 1862), I, 329–39 and 454–67.

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Rosalynn Voaden the authorizing of a child in these narratives reflects a questioning of traditional patterns of authority in the larger culture. I hope not to wring from any of these narratives meanings that others cannot also discover, or to wrench them out of shape to fit my thesis. Nevertheless, I am aware that the risk is there. While I am not suggesting any overt link between the poem and the political situation, this period of history – the late fourteenth century – was a time when traditional hierarchies were being questioned. There was, for example, the gathering momentum of discontent among the rural working classes which, in England, culminated in the Peasants’ Uprising of 1381.3 Equally worthy of note is the considerable controversy around the time of Richard’s accession over the works of the theologian John Wyclif, who argued that neither spiritual nor temporal lordship was derived from God, and that every person could have unmediated access to God’s grace. Wyclif’s reforming doctrines garnered enough support to alarm the ecclesiastical authorities, who condemned his writings in 1382. Vulgarized versions of his work formed the basis of Lollard teachings, teachings which questioned many of the institutional practices of the church, and argued for a priesthood of all believers.4 Additionally, the fraternal orders – the Friars – who had increased in numbers and influence during the last half of the century, were condemning the wealth, power and corruption of the Church, and agitating for disendowment.5 At such a time of ferment, when customary structures and traditional institutions were under attack, and when the basic principles underlying the ordering of society were being debated, the ways in which a child was transformed into a figure of authority obviously had significance. My point of departure is the suggestion that in these three narratives (Pearl, the coronation and the Uprising) the need to establish the authority of a child contributes to an apparent suspension of the traditional hierarchy. It is replaced by a system of ordering whose signifiers derive from the perceived attributes of the child: innocence, purity and a marginal position in the social structure. Obviously such a new order has enormous implications for the traditional authority structure and for society as a whole, and both Pearl and the Ricardian narratives manifest the tension between the new and the old orders. Pearl was probably written between 1360 and 1395; its composition is therefore roughly contemporaneous with Richard’s accession to the throne in 1377.6 The poem recounts a dream vision experienced by the narrator, wherein 3 4

5 6

The Peasants’ Uprising had been brewing for some decades, and there had been a number of minor revolts and outbreaks. For Wyclif and his influence on Lollardy, see A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). For Wyclif’s influence on the Peasants’ Uprising, see S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 67–101. K. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 172–6. Pearl, ed. Gordon, p. xliv. Most critics suggest that Pearl was written towards the end of this period.

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Out of the Mouths of Babes he sees a maiden, whom he identifies as the child, probably the daughter, he has lost. She tells him that she is now a queen in heaven, one of the company of 144,000 virgins. His patent disbelief launches a lengthy dialogue between them, interspersed by lectures from her on Divine Grace and the essential equality of Heaven. A large part of the dreamer’s difficulty in accepting the Pearl-maiden’s teaching is that not only does he resist her message – that there are no ranks in heaven, and that deserts are not necessarily just – but he also resists the authority of the messenger. She is his daughter, a child; it is she who should be taught by him. Ecclesiastical doctrine was quite clear about the appropriate hierarchy of instruction: the man was the head of the woman, and women could only teach in private to other women or to children.7 And here is the one lowest on the scale, a female child, instructing him.8 The dreamer is a man who insists on the right ordering of things, in other words, a man conditioned by the traditional hierarchy. This belief that there is, indeed, a right order to things is what social theorist Anthony Giddens categorizes as an ‘interpretative scheme’. Within any society, he argues, actions occur in relation to a commonly held idea of structure which permits members of the society to reach a mutual understanding of the significance of those actions.9 In Pearl, the dreamer’s interpretative scheme is shaped by the established belief that the ordered ranks of heaven are mirrored here on earth – and vice versa. His understanding is confounded both by the arguments the Pearl-child is making and by the fact that it is she

7

8

9

At the end of the thirteenth century, Henry of Ghent addressed the question of women teaching and preaching. He concluded that, while it was permissible for women to teach other women and children in private, for them to teach men in similar circumstances is not permitted, since they could inflame the men to lust, and because it would be shameful for men to be taught by a woman. When God did allow women to prophesy, wrote Henry, it was a sign that men had become emasculated (Henry of Ghent, Summa Questionum Ordinariarum: Facsimile Reprint of the 1520 Edition (St Bonaventure, New York, 1953), fol. lxviii). See also A. Minnis, ‘The Accessus Extended: Henry of Ghent on the Reception and Transmission of Theology’, in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and their Medieval Readers, ed. M. D. Jordan and K. Emery Jr. (Notre Dame, 1992), pp. 275–326 (pp. 312–13). Evidence that the debate over women preaching was a concern at this time is offered by the heresy trial of Walter Brut, a lay follower of Wyclif, before the Bishop of Hereford from 1391–3. Brut’s claims that women should not only be permitted to preach, but also to administer the sacraments led to a revived interest in earlier writers like Henry of Ghent. See A. Blamires and C. W. Marx, ‘Women Not to Preach: A Disputation in British Library MS Harley 31’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993), 34–63. The fact that this is no longer a child but a resurrected body does not significantly affect the dreamer’s response, although it should have. The principal tension of the poem, after all, is found in the dreamer’s inability to recognize his child’s altered state. A Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 70–83. Paul Strohm discusses Giddens’ theory in his essay ‘A Revelle: Chronicle Evidence and the Rebel Voice’, in Hochon’s Arrow: the Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 33–56 (pp. 51–2).

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Rosalynn Voaden who is making them. She challenges the very basis of his understanding of the ordering of his world – and the next. I may not traw, so God me spede, Þat God wolde wryþe so wrange away. Of countes, damysel, par ma faye, Wer fayr in heuen to halde asstate, Oþer elle
a lady of lasse aray; Bot a quene! It is to dere a date. (lines 487–92)

The issue of investing a child with authority was one which, at this time, could well have affected the ‘interpretative scheme’ of more actors and beholders than just a fictional dreamer. In 1376 Edward III was dying; so was his eldest son and heir, the Black Prince. The heir presumptive was Richard of Bordeaux, son of the Black Prince, then a child of nine. The Black Prince predeceased his father, and in 1377 Richard, at the age of ten, succeeded to the throne. The most obvious way in which both the Pearl-child,10 a two-year-old infant, and Richard, a ten-year-old boy, acquire authority is through being attached to another ‘body’ which has its own innate authority. In Richard’s case, it is the sacred body of the king. In this context, it is suggestive that at Richard’s coronation the order of the ceremony was changed, so that the archbishop asked the people if they gave consent only after Richard had taken the coronation oath, rather than before.11 This meant that the people were consenting to be ruled by one who had already acquired the status of king, rather than by one who was still a child. In the case of the Pearl-child, the body that she is attached to is a sacred body in another sense; it is the resurrected body of a heavenly queen, ‘a mayden of menske, ful debonere’ (‘a courteous maiden, of noble manner’) (line 162).12 However, neither Richard nor the Pearl-child is totally transformed or subsumed into these sacred bodies; in both cases, the natural child remains, like a palimpsest.13 For example, the Anonimalle Chronicle account of Richard’s 10 In this paper I distinguish between the Pearl-child, where the natural child is to the fore,

and the Pearl-maiden, who is a queen in Heaven. 11 D. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York, 1987), p. 222; Anonimalle,

p. 110. 12 The form which a body would take when resurrected was a matter for intense and

complex theological debate and speculation throughout the Middle Ages; it was a matter which was, not surprisingly, never satisfactorily resolved. The best critical work on the topic is probably C. W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), although it stops just short of the period with which my essay deals. 13 Paul Strohm describes how a number of crucial issues in England at this time manifest anxiety over ‘seeming and being’, as he puts it. These issues range from debates over the doctrine of transubstantiation, to Lollard trials, to the efficacy of coronation for the usurping king Henry IV (England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, 1998), esp. pp. 32–62). He cites Roger Dymmock, articu-

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Out of the Mouths of Babes coronation reports his tiredness after the ceremony; his being carried by his tutor, Sir Simon Burley; the fact that he lost part of the coronation regalia, one of the slippers, because it was too big for him;14 and that at dinner the crown was too heavy for him to wear and had to be held over his head. ‘. . . le count de la Marche tenist sa corone a manger del part dextre sur soun test a cause qil fuist si pessaunt et ponderaunt qil mesmes ne purroit porter pur sa iuvence’ (‘. . . the earl of March held his dining crown slightly above his head, because it was so heavy and weighed so much that the king could not support it himself because of his youth’).15 This may be an anointed king, but, readers are reminded, he is also a tired little boy. Similarly, the dreamer in Pearl has no difficulty in immediately recognizing the Pearl-maiden as his dead daughter. It is, in fact, the child whom he sees first; then he sees the maiden she has become. I se
by
onde þat myry mere A crystal clyffe ful relausant; Mony ryal ray con fro hit rere. At þe fote þerof þer sete a faunt, A mayden of menske, ful debonere; Blysnande whyt wat
hyr bleaunt. I knew hyr wel, I hade sen hyr ere. (lines 158–64)

Just as the little boy is still present in the king’s body, so in Pearl is the child present in the form of the maiden. In addition, at times during their discussion the dreamer’s obtuseness provokes reactions from the maiden which are much more exasperated child than queen of heaven. Wy borde
e, men? So madde
e be! Þre worde
hat
þou spoken at ene: Vnavysed, for soþe, wern alle þre. Þou ne woste in worlde quat on dot
mene; Þy worde byfore þy wytte con fle. (lines 290–4)

The perception in both cases that the child remains attached to the sacred body creates a state of tension between the authority implicit in the sacred

lating the orthodox position on the eucharist, as stating ‘. . . what sensible change do you see in a boy newly baptized, in a man who has confessed, in a boy or a man who has been confirmed, in consecrated bread, in a man ordained into the priesthood, in marriageable persons betrothed or joined? All receive a new virtue, except the bread, which simply ceases to exist without any kind of sensible change, and is transubstantiated into the body of Christ. In what way also is the body of a king changed, when he is newly crowned, or anyone similarly advanced’ (p. 61; my emphasis). 14 It is of interest that the Monk of Westminster blames the loss of the slipper on Simon Burley’s thoughtlessness in taking the king, dressed in full regalia, out of the Abbey (Westminster Chronicle, p. 417). Both explanations of the loss, though, emphasize the king’s tender years. 15 Anonimalle, p. 114. My translation.

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Rosalynn Voaden body and the lack of it, according to traditional hierarchical structures, in the natural body of the child. This tension can be resolved only by creating an alternative form of order in which the traditional hierarchy is suspended, or shifted, in favour of an order determined by what are commonly believed to be defining qualities of children: innocence and purity. This is not to argue that the crowning of Richard II did, in fact, usher in a new world order of innocence and purity and proto-democracy. It is rather to acknowledge the problems Richard’s youth presented – problems of deference, legitimacy, command – and to observe how, nevertheless, in these chronicle narratives, he is symbolically invested with authority. A monarch’s coronation is probably the most symbol-rich event of an entire reign. Accounts of Richard’s coronation, and of the festivities surrounding it, therefore offer an invaluable insight into how symbols were invoked and employed to address the issue of his youth. The description from the Anonimalle Chronicle of the procession from the Tower of London to the Abbey is particularly illuminating in this regard. On 16 July 1377, a day of celebration and thanksgiving, when the houses were hung with cloth of silver and gold, Richard left the Tower of London, riding a white horse, all dressed in white trimmed with gold. He was surrounded by all the nobles and knights of the land, by barons and bishops and squires, by the mayor and aldermen of London. Et au darrein le dit prince veint de la toure en vesture blaunk drape bien et honurablement arraye come affert a tiel seignur et toutz ses chivalers en mesme al suyt et chivacherount devers Loundres. Et a comensement de lour chivache, chivacherent les communes de Loundres en vesture de blaunk et puis les esquiers des seignours et chivalers et puys chivalers et apres eux les aldermen et apres eux le meir et les deux viscountz toutes en vesture blaunk et apres, le duk de Loncastre et les countz de Caumbrigge et de Herforth et adonques le prince par luy mesmes par graunde espace et apres le prince les countz et barones et autre seignurs . . . (And then the prince came from the Tower all in white robes, well and handsomely arrayed as were his lords and all his knights who followed as they went in procession toward London. At the beginning of the procession went the commoners of London in white robes, then the squires of the lords and knights, then the knights and after them the aldermen and after them the mayor and the two viscounts, all in white robes and afterwards the duke of Lancaster and the earls of Cambridge and Hereford and then the prince by himself surrounded by a great space, and after the prince the counts and barons and other knights . . .)16

All are dressed in white. Here is that symbolic shift, that suspension of the traditional hierarchy. The usual robes and regalia which signify rank and position have been replaced by white robes which do not carry any of those 16 Anonimalle, pp. 107–8. My translation.

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Out of the Mouths of Babes customary connotations. The lords and governors of the nation have instead adopted a symbol of the essential, undeniable quality of the king – his youth – as a signifier of a different order. As all are dressed alike, this in turn represents a kind of levelling out. Although it is still apparent who is who, nevertheless there is an impression of commonality. The prince’s superior status is indicated only by his isolation – ‘par luy mesmes par graunde espace’ – while the remainder are presented as a relatively undifferentiated mass.17 There are striking similarities between the description of the procession immediately before Richard’s coronation, and that of the procession of the 144,000 virgins into the Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl. The procession in Pearl functions as a manifestation of the central doctrine of the poem: that there is no hierarchy in heaven, and that all dwell there together in egalitarian bliss. The dreamer describes the 144,000 virgins, all dressed alike in brilliant white robes trimmed with pearls, thronging the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, surrounding the Lamb, who is similarly dressed in white and pearls. So sodaynly in wonder wyse I wat
war of a prosessyoun. Þis noble cité of riche enpresse Wat
sodanly full, withouten summoun, Or such vergyne
in þe same gyse Þat wat
my blysful an-vnder croun. And coronde wern alle of þe same fasoun. Depaynt in perle
and wede
qwte; In ychone
breste wat
bounden boun Þe blysful perle with gret delyt. With gret delyt þay glod in fere On golden gate
þat glent as glasse; Hundreth þowsande
I wot þer were, And all in sute her liuré
wasse. Tor to knaw þe gladdest chere. Þe Lombe byfore con proudly passe Wyth horne
seuen of red golde cler; As praysed perle
his wede
wasse. Towarde þe throne þay trone a tras. Þa
þay wern fele, no pres in plyt,

17 Further evidence of an apparent levelling of the hierarchy is found in the sermon

preached on the day following the coronation by Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester. Brinton took as his text ‘simul et unum dives et pauper’ (‘both rich and poor together’) (Ps. 48:3) and argued that, ‘God from the beginning did not create one man of gold from whom sprang the rich and also the noble, and another of clay from whom are descended the poor and the ragged . . .’ (Sr M. A. Devlin, OP, The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), Camden Third Series 85 (London, 1954), xxvii–xxviii (emphasis mine); 194–200 (p. 194)). Devlin tentatively suggests that John Ball’s famous sermon on Blackheath may have been inspired in part by Brinton’s sermon (p. 195 n. 3).

67

Rosalynn Voaden Bot mylde as maydene
seme at mas, So dro
þay forth wyth gret delyt. (lines 1095–116)

The parallels between accounts of the two processions are beguiling: the serried ranks of white-clad followers;18 the sense in both accounts of celebration and joy; the music of the heavenly hosts or of the royal trumpeters; legions of angels scattering incense before the Lamb, beautiful maidens scattering gold coins before Richard. And at the centre of both processions is the sovereign who subverts the traditional concept of kings – Christ by his humility, Richard by his youth. But, of course, the essential difference between Pearl and the chronicles of Richard II is that although heaven may be a realm of bliss, late fourteenthcentury England most definitely wasn’t. The symbolic variants in the trappings of Richard’s coronation were a response to the specific problem of the youth of the king, not indicative of a real shift in hierarchical authority. However, at the same time there were forces at work in the country agitating for just such a real shift, agitation which culminated in the Peasants’ Uprising of 1381. I intend now to consider the representation and role of Richard as a child in some of the chronicle narratives of events during the Uprising, and to do so in the light of some of the teachings of Pearl in which the child functions as exemplum as well as exegeticist.19 In Pearl, the dreamer assumes that the traditional earthly hierarchy reigns in Heaven. His ‘interpretative scheme’, the way in which he makes sense of things, requires that reward should be on the basis of hours worked, that rank in heaven should reflect age and status. Þyself in heuen ouer hy
þou heue, To make þe quen þat wat
so
onge. What more honour mo
te he acheue Þat hade endured in worlde strong, And lyued in penaunce hys lyue
longe Wyth bodyly bale hym blysse to byye?

18 I am grateful to Rosamund Allen for pointing out that white clothing connotes baptism.

This is particularly important in the case of the Pearl-child, since her white clothing establishes her superior status as one who has been baptized and who is therefore entitled to a place in the kingdom of heaven (as opposed to unbaptized children, who go to limbo). As far as Richard is concerned, although he had technically passed the age of innocence (which ends at age seven, even in modern theology), the wearing of baptismal white for a coronation would have linked the two sacraments in a highly effective manner. 19 The chronicle accounts, of course, reflect the entrenched bias and vested interests of their compilers rather than the motives, actions, or experiences of the rebels. However, I am intrigued by the way in which the different chronicle accounts simultaneously decry the rebels as rustic beasts, howling in packs, while imagining – and giving textual form to – a kind of early socialist ideology as a motivating factor for the Uprising. A number of recent works have explored various aspects of this ambiguity, most notably perhaps Justice, Writing and Rebellion; see especially pp. 9–10; 59–66, and Strohm, ‘A Revelle’.

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Out of the Mouths of Babes What more worschyp mo
t he fonge þen corounde be kyng by cortayse. (lines 473–80)

Even when the Pearl-maiden embarks on the Parable of the Vineyard the dreamer counters with a quotation from the Psalms to the effect that God rewards each according to his deserts (Psalms 61. 11–12). Eventually though, the dreamer is persuaded of the truth of the version of heaven which the maiden lays before him, and which he is later to see manifested in the procession. This heaven is ordered according to the grace of God: all there are of equal and aristocratic standing and all share alike in the blessings of the Lamb. Þe Lombe vus glade
, oure care is kest; He myrþez vus alle at vch a mes. Vchone
blysse is breme and beste, And neuer one
honour
et neuer þe les.

(lines 861–4)

The Pearl-child herself exemplifies this new order, since she who was a mere babe, and untaught, is now a queen in Heaven. Indeed, it is her status as a child which simultaneously makes the situation so difficult for the dreamer to understand and makes him challenge her authority. But it is precisely her status as a child which provides the most compelling evidence of the doctrine. The tension between the interpretative scheme whereby the dreamer previously understood the structure of authority, and the new understanding the maiden offers him is only ultimately resolved by visual evidence. He glimpses his child, his ‘little queen’, surrounded by her fellow brides of the Lamb (line 1147). Only then can he fully accept her teaching, and find some consolation. The Pearl-maiden, because she is simultaneously a child and a queen in heaven, is finally able to persuade the dreamer of God’s grace and a heaven of happy equality. Richard II’s dual status as king and child is also apparent in accounts of some events in the Peasants’ Uprising. As Paul Strohm has pointed out, the chronicles of the Uprising invest it with elements of the carnivalesque: inversion, insubordination, transgression of boundaries. He writes: The rebel ‘body’ – both collective and individual – is . . . a grotesque body, Bakhtin’s body of carnivalesque licence, behaving with rudeness, effrontery and an unwillingness to accommodate itself to established forms and precedents, and hence threatening the divinely ordained social hierarchy of tradition.20

One of the common features of carnival was the election of a boy king to rule for the period. It may well be that Richard’s youth appeared to offer the rebels

20 Strohm, ‘A Revelle’, p. 48.

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Rosalynn Voaden a point at which their desires might intersect with and ultimately subvert the reigning hierarchy. For a movement which sought the complete inversion of the traditional, being ruled by a boy king might seem a logical part of that scheme. The chronicles all recount that it was only Richard with whom the leaders of the Uprising were prepared to meet, and that the rebels’ loyalty to the king was never an issue. The preacher John Ball, in his well-known sermon as reported by Froissart, said: We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve; whereby can they say or shew that they be greater Lords than we be, saving by that they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend . . . and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right. Let us go to the king, he is young, and shew him what servage we be in . . .21

It is the king’s youth which both supplies the justificatory argument for approaching him, and offers hope of understanding. The assumption would seem to have been that relations between the rebels and the king could be direct and egalitarian rather than formal and hierarchical, because the king, by virtue of his youth, was marginal to that hierarchy. The reformed society to which the rebels aspired appears remarkably similar to the heaven the Pearl-maiden inhabits. They hope for that which is suggested by the symbolism of Richard’s coronation procession – a flattening out, a levelling, of the traditional hierarchy resulting in a community of equals grouped around their leader. Their egalitarian aspirations are simultaneously enshrined and vilified in chronicle accounts of Wat Tyler’s encounter with the king at Smithfield. It was variously reported that Tyler rode up to the king with his head covered, that he shook the king by the hand and addressed the king as brother.22 When the king asked him what his demands were, Tyler replied that there should be no lord in England but Richard, no bishop save one, and that all men be free and of one condition. As Thomas Walsingham described it, they had risen ‘for liberty, planning to become the equals of their lords, and no longer to be bound by servitude to any master’.23 They looked to the king to bring this about. And, in a way which brought the illogical carnival state full circle, Richard did indeed cause this to happen. For a fleeting moment the boy king ruled over a realm where all men were free and equal and subject to none but him. For, the day before he

21 The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. R. B. Dobson, 2nd edn (London, 1983), p. 371. My

emphasis. Some of the chronicles report that John Ball delivered this sermon to the rebels while they were camped at Blackheath, on 12 June 1381, the eve of Tyler’s meeting with the king (H. F. Hutchison, The Hollow Crown: a Life of Richard II (London, 1961), p. 62). 22 See Anonimalle, pp. 147–8; Westminster, pp. 10–11; Historia, I, 464–5. For other contemporary accounts see The Peasants’ Revolt, ed. Dobson, pp. 181–211. 23 The Peasants’ Revolt, ed. Dobson, p. 132.

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Out of the Mouths of Babes met with Tyler, Richard, at Mile End, had agreed to virtually all the rebels’ demands: that villeinage be abolished, that all feudal dues and services should be commuted for a rent of four pence an acre and that a general pardon and amnesty be declared. A small army of clerks was on hand to draw up all the necessary documents, and a number of the rebels started to make their way happily home to their fourpenny plots in paradise. Unhappily for them, all of this was a plan designed to draw the besieging rebel forces away from the Tower of London and to allow Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor, and the Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales, to escape. It was never intended that these promises be honoured.24 Nevertheless, the next day, at the Smithfield meeting with the king which Tyler had demanded, this enactment of an egalitarian realm was seemingly realized. After Tyler’s initial exchange with Richard, there was a brief fracas which resulted in Tyler being seriously wounded.25 The rebel forces drew their bows, but Richard rode towards them, calling them his men and crying that he would be their captain, their king and their leader. As Walsingham reported it, in language reminiscent of a fairy tale, the king also promised them all that they might wish for. What is this, my men? . . . Do not attack me, and do not regret the death of that traitor and ruffian. For I will be your king, your captain and your leader. Follow me into that field where you can have all the things you would like to ask for (omnia quaecunque nos petere delectabit).26

The king then rode at the head of the rebel army and led them away from the city to Clerkenwell Fields, before bidding them go to their homes. Here was the rebels’ dream come true – here was the youthful monarch who, as virtually his first independent and spontaneous act of kingship,27 abolished the traditional hierarchy, and appointed himself their leader, a first among equals. Here the symbolic implications of Richard’s coronation procession took on reality. But that reality was brief and illusory, grounded in deceit. At the end of Pearl the dreamer is sent home, but at least he has the Grace of God and the Kingdom of Heaven to look forward to. The rebels, some of whom may have thought – briefly – that they had created heaven on earth, were quickly stripped of their dreams as Richard’s acts of reprisal speedily reasserted the traditional hierarchical structure of authority. Walsingham reported him saying:

24 Froissart’s account of this deception is probably the most vivid: The Peasants’ Revolt, ed.

Dobson, pp. 190–3. 25 For the various chronicle descriptions of the incident, see n. 22 above. 26 The Peasants’ Revolt, ed. Dobson, p. 179; Historia Anglicana, I, 465. 27 Up until this point Richard’s actions and decisions had been controlled by what was

effectively a council of Regency.

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Rosalynn Voaden Rustics you were, and rustics you will remain; you will remain in bondage, not as until now, but in a state even more vile.28

In the next world, a child may indeed become a queen in heaven. In this world, the child king had grown up.

28 Historia, II, 18; cited in Strohm, ‘A Revelle’, p. 56.

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A Safe-Haven for Children?

A Safe-Haven for Children? The Early Humiliati and Provision for Children Frances Andrews

Some time in the early 1190s a knight, identified only as ‘B’, who had been cured of a severe illness, decided to enter the religious life in the monastery from which he held his land. He also required his under-age son to take the habit as a monk. Unfortunately, the boy did not adapt to the monastic life and, having reached the age of ‘discretion’, after only ten weeks he absconded. With the support of other relatives he then claimed his father’s goods back from the abbot. The relatives swore that the boy had been under age and unwilling when he took the habit and, on encountering resistance from the abbot, took the case to the papal curia. In 1195 Pope Celestine III (1191–98) ruled that if it were true that the boy had not been willing to be professed and had left the monastery when he had attained the age of discretion, he was to be considered free and was not to be compelled to return to the monastery. He was also free to demand the goods of his father which belonged to him by succession. Celestine’s decision was of such significance that it was included in the Decretal collection drawn up for Gregory IX (1227–41) and established as a precedent for later disputes.1 This case raises interesting questions about the relationship between parental responsibility and religious vocation. In this episode there were other relatives who could help the boy and seem to have done so with some vigour, pursuing his cause all the way to the pope. But the dispute also reveals the dilemma for the parent who wished to do something for the good of their soul and yet had responsibility for children. The knight wished to take the habit and resolved the problem of his son as he saw fit. Presumably, as eventually happened in this case, relatives might quite often take on the children of such individuals. But what if there were no relatives? Oblation, in spite of a slight waning in popularity from the twelfth century, remained a common way of providing for children.2 But what happened if the child did not wish to be separated from their family, or for that matter, if the parent did not wish to be separated from their child? Was there any other way to combine family and 1

2

X 3.31.14 c.573. The case was discussed by J. Doran, ‘Oblation or Obligation? A canonical ambiguity’, Studies in Church History 31 (1994), 136, and briefly by J. Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers (London and New York, 1988), p. 313. See Doran, ‘Oblation or Obligation’.

73

Frances Andrews full participation in the religious life? This essay will argue that in one region and one period at least, there was: that the way of life adopted by the order of the Humiliati in northern Italy in the early thirteenth century, and imitated by other groups adopting the name, may have offered an alternative for some parents and their children. The Humiliati first appeared in the area of Milan in northern Italy in the 1170s. The first explicit reference is to men and women living a life of religious devotion in a house in Milan in 1178: the document describes a man named Suzo Bagutanus representing a group of men and women who had humbled themselves for God ‘qui et que sunt humiliati per deum’. This is the first mention of the community of the Brera which, perhaps by virtue of its early foundation and position in central Milan, was to enjoy authority in the wider order of the Humiliati as it developed in the thirteenth century. In the same decade a group of religious were building a church at Viboldone a few miles from the gates of Milan and, although they did not yet use the name, they established another house which was to become prominent in the later Humiliati order.3 The earliest account of the life pursued by the lay members of these and other groups of Humiliati in northern Italy is given by an anonymous chronicler from Laon in north eastern France, who described them as: inhabitants (cives) of Lombard towns who lived at home with their families, chose a distinctive form of religious life, refrained from lies, oaths and law suits, were content with plain clothing and argued for the catholic faith.

They went on to request papal permission for their way of life, which the pope (Alexander III 1159–81) granted them, ‘provided they did all things humbly and decently; but he expressly forbade them to hold private meetings or to presume to preach in public’.4 It was their insistence on preaching in spite of this ban which was to lead to the condemnation of the Humiliati by pope Lucius III (1181–85) in the bull Ad abolendam of 1184. The practical impact of the ban seems to have been very limited and their brief venture into heresy was to be short-lived. After they approached the pope, an enquiry into their activities was initially entrusted to prelates from northern Italy charged with finding a way of bringing them back into unity. Finally, in June 1201 pope Innocent III (1198–1216) gave papal approval to their way of life, paving the way for the ordo humiliatorum to become a substantial presence in the ecclesiastical life of the north Italian towns. The organization of the new order was based on three distinct elements catering for a variety of religious types: a First order using the ordo canonicus, apparently mostly male, but including some women in their communities; a Second order of men and women living in regular communities; and a Third 3 4

For further background on the Humiliati, see F. E. Andrews, The Early Humiliati (Cambridge, 1999). Anonymous Chronicler of Laon, ‘Chronicon Universale (excerpts)’, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS, XXVI (Hanover, 1882), pp. 442–57, pp. 449–50.

74

A Safe-Haven for Children? order of lay men and women (Tertiaries) living in their own homes but pursuing a life of religious devotion as described by the Laon chronicler. Both the First and Second orders followed a specially written rule, known by its opening phrase, Omnis boni principium. The three-part structure is described in Innocent III’s letters of approval of 1201, but was almost certainly developed before that date and may have been a solution dreamt up by the Humiliati themselves to allow for the different sorts of recruits within the order. The distinctions between the three types of religious life seem to have worked in practice, as documentary references to houses of the First and Second orders prove. However, these are in general relatively late in appearing and in many cases the task of tracing which group a particular house or individual belonged to is problematic, particularly before 1288, when an attempt was made to separate the first and second orders.5 Nor is it yet clear to historians exactly what the distinctions meant, particularly as the First and Second orders used the same rule and all types of house appear to have included individuals committed to different vows. Fitting children into this picture is equally complex. In 1911 a general history of the Humiliati, written by Luigi Zanoni, included in an appendix partial transcripts of a series of five separate contracts stipulating the conditions for the entry of six adults and seventeen children into what appear to be Humiliati communities (see table 1).6 In the first four cases, one or two adults chose the religious life, giving themselves and all their property to the community and bringing their under-age children with them, just as the knight B had done. In the fifth a grandfather made provision for two under-age granddaughters, but apparently did not himself enter the religious life. There are problems with these documents. Zanoni published them as unquestioned sources for the Humiliati, but on closer examination this assertion proves unreliable. The house of the Brera mentioned in document three was, as we have seen, an early and important Humiliati house and is identified with the monastic second order. The canonica or domus of Viboldone in document four is similarly easy to identify, and is described as a First order house in several records, including the late thirteenth-century catalogues of the order. However the status of the other houses mentioned here as what I would term ‘networked’ Humiliati communities, associated with the official order as approved in 1201, is less clear. The domus Humiliatarum albarum mentioned in the contract of 1233 (document one) was next to the church of Sant’Eustorgio in Milan which had been given to the Dominicans in 1220. As Zanoni himself pointed out, use of the Humiliati name for this house of women continued until the fifteenth century, 5 6

According to the fifteenth-century chronicler of the order; see G. Tiraboschi ed., Vetera Humiliatorum Monumenta, 3 vols. (Milan, 1766–8), III, p. 265. L. Zanoni, Gli Umiliati nei loro rapporti con l’eresia, l’industria della lana ed i comuni nei secoli xii e xiii (Milan, 1911).

75

Frances Andrews although by this date the women were certainly under the care of the Dominicans. There is no evidence for an administrative link with the Dominicans in 1233, but nor is there any evidence to suggest a link with the ‘official’ Humiliati. Similar uncertainty surrounds the status of the domus de Sollario in Senago, mentioned in the second and fifth documents summarized here. In 1255 Marchisius Burri and Leo Borrinus (presumably relatives) entered the house with the three small daughters of Leo: Isabellina, Varenza and Petra. At this date the community was clearly identified as a domus humiliatorum, but in 1277, when Dolzebellina and Zanebellina were placed there by their grandfather, the house is described as de ordine Sancti Augustini. It is certainly the same house since in the second document it is identified by the name of one of the men who had entered in 1255: domus quondam fratris leonis burri, and this adoption of the name of a senior member to identify a community is typical of Humiliati houses. The use of the ordo canonicus by the First order of the Humiliati may even have inspired the use of Augustinian terminology, but, unless further documentation emerges, we cannot be certain that this was still (if it ever had been) a ‘networked’ Humiliati house. The links with the Humiliati in some of these records are thus tenuous. What they reflect is a shared culture, Umiliatismo, communities inspired by similar ideals of poverty, simplicity and evangelism, rather than official, papally-endorsed ‘Humiliati’ congregations. Yet, in a period and place where we are lucky to find even the most fleeting references to children, these documents give details of the names, ages and the provisions made for seventeen of them. Given the general invisibility at this date of documentable children (rather than theoretical ones), this information is invaluable. The original editor of these documents, Luigi Zanoni, used them to illustrate his model of the Humiliati as fulfilling what he termed an ‘eminently social role’ or what Boswell might have called ‘social utility’.7 He described the contracts as primarily the stipulation of vitalizi, or corrodies for the adults, with the extra advantage of providing a safe haven (un asilo sicuro) for the children of older parents. Elsewhere he suggested that the children were taught a craft, understood to be wool-working, a documented activity of the order in the thirteenth century. Zanoni saw the establishment of the Humiliati as part of the class struggle. Getting together under the umbrella of a religious organization was the only way for the humblest salaried workers of the wool trade to unite against the slavery imposed by the exploitation of the capitalist mercatores. The idea of children being provided with a skill, along the lines of an apprenticeship, to enable them better to cope with the world once adults, fitted well with this picture. This model of the Humiliati has been largely dismantled in the decades since Zanoni wrote, though few historians have come near to his in-depth

7

Zanoni, Gli Umiliati nei loro rapporti con l’eresia, pp. 192–4; Boswell, Kindness of Strangers.

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A Safe-Haven for Children? knowledge of the local records. His analysis was founded on the twin beliefs that the recruits to the new communities were from the ‘proletariat’ and, as we have seen, that their main purpose was not religious but social utility, and centred on wool-working. His ‘proletariat’ view was first challenged by Herbert Grundmann in the 1930s, but only recently has renewed investigation of local archive material revealed that, where identifiable, the recruits were from the families of tailors, butchers, notaries, small landowners and the odd noble.8 In Zanoni’s terms these were themselves, if anything, the exploiters, and were certainly not lacking in funds. At the same time, studies of the papal material have highlighted the religious importance of the movement, swinging the pendulum away from Zanoni’s ‘eminently social role’ to underline the religious motivation behind the actions of the Humiliati.9 How then do we explain why the Humiliati or these Humiliati-style communities took on children? The adults undoubtedly were thinking of these Humiliati or quasi-Humiliati communities partly as safe-havens for their children. This seems quite likely to be the principal motive in the contract of 1277 (document five) in which a grandfather made provision for his under-age granddaughters, but did not himself enter the community. However, the case for seeing such contracts as apprenticeships is less strong: they provide remarkably little information about what was expected of, or for, the children during their stay with the Humiliati. Of the five documents, three say nothing whatever and in the remaining two, no mention is made of learning a craft. Stada and Madia, aged ten and five respectively, who entered the domus Humiliatarum albarum with their mother in 1233 (document one) were to be brought up by the house, supported by the fructus on the donation made on their behalf. At the age of fourteen they might choose to leave to marry. Similarly, the seven Polvale boys who entered Viboldone in 1276 were to be fed and clothed by the community. They were to live under obedience to the superior and might not ask for any further expenses or fructus, but there is no reference to any specific training or apprenticeship to prepare them for adult life. Rather, as in all the contracts, a child choosing to leave was simply to receive their ‘legitimate portion’, their rightful inheritance, or a fixed sum. This is not straightforward child-oblation. In two cases related to document four we know the children did choose to remain in the house: after eleven years, in 1287, Ambrosinus Polvale donated all the property he had inherited in the areas of Torrevecchia, Landriano and S. Ambrogio in Zibido to the canonica of Viboldone, in return for maintenance, and stated that he planned to stay there for the rest of his life with his mother, domina Belfiore (who had not previously been mentioned in the records). His cousin Paxinus Polvale also stayed at Viboldone, apparently as a lay professed brother which is how he

8 9

H. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1961), pp. 160–1; Andrews, The Early Humiliati, pp. 31–2. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

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Frances Andrews was described over forty years later, in documents from the 1320s.10 However, these children had not been irrevocably committed by their parents. In all cases the contracts allowed some freedom of choice permitting the children to leave either at a specified age or, less precisely, before making their profession. The age at which they might withdraw is not given in all the documents, but fourteen is given as the minimum in one and sixteen or eighteen are used as limits in two of them. Thus Stada and Madia were free to marry from the age of fourteen, but had to decide before the end of their eighteenth year. Similarly, the seven Polvale boys entering Viboldone had to make the decision to stay or go before the age of sixteen. The achievement of majority and the responsibility which goes with it would thus appear to lie between fourteen and eighteen, a remarkably wide band of time in the case of the two girls. It does, conveniently, fit the ‘southern European’ pattern identified by historians of early marriage for women, but does not seem to fit canonical expectations concerning the age of majority (normally twelve for girls and fourteen for boys) which might be associated with ages for profession of vows.11 So why did the Humiliati accept children? The Humiliati acquired the donations of property which came with them and which were occasionally substantial. In 1266 frater Tomardus de Tomardis gave approximately 138 perches of land, including extensive vineyards, three sedimina and a house with other buildings in the city of Milan, which was to revert to the Humiliati after the death of his daughter Tutabella and her son. Even if the children who entered the Brera with him eventually chose to leave, the community would retain something. Such evidence might allow us to explain Humiliati acquiescence in purely financial terms. However, a passage from the rule Omnis boni principium points to another possible way of viewing such contracts, perhaps reflecting contemporary concerns akin to those about abandonment of infants identified by Boswell.12 Omnis boni principium specified that adult postulants with small, frail or sick children to whom they were entirely indispensable were not to be accepted until the children had been provided for: ‘si tamen filios habet parvulos, debiles et infirmos, quibus omnino necessarius sit donec illis provideat non videtur recipiendus’. In other words, such children were not to be abandoned. The rule thus protected the children, but it would also mean that individuals with such responsibility would be unable to lead a full religious life unless provision could be made for the children. By accepting the children, even temporarily, the Humiliati would enable the adults to join their order and to fulfil their religious vocation, surely an important consideration. The children were not

10 M. Tagliabue, ‘Gli umiliati a Viboldone’, in L’abbazia di Viboldone (Milan, 1990), pp. 20–1. 11 See R. M. Smith, ‘Geographical diversity in the resort to marriage in late medieval

Europe: work, reputation and unmarried females in the household formation systems of northern and southern Europe’, in Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200–1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud, 1992), pp. 16–59. 12 Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, pp. 322–63.

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A Safe-Haven for Children? irrevocably committed, but nor were the adults prevented from pursuing their own spiritual well-being. The only record (document three) in this group which sets down a reason for choosing to enter the order gives a religious and a family one. Frater Tomardus de Tomardis records that he entered the Brera with his children Guardianus and Filipina and his granddaughter Martinela because he wished to do penance together with his children: ‘quia vult agere penitentiam simul cum Guardiano et cum Filipina . . .’. The language used to describe his commitment is formulaic of course, but cannot simply be ignored. It is worth noting that Tomardus is already described as a brother. He had perhaps already spent time as a novice with the community in order to acquire this title. Or he may have been a tertiary who was now making a commitment to the regular, enclosed life of a Second order community. Either way, just as they made financial provision for the adults and their offspring, these contracts also enabled parents actively to pursue a full religious life while keeping their children with them. Allowing for adults to fulfil a religious vocation without having to abandon their children, entrust them to relatives (if this were possible) or wait for them to be old enough, may perhaps have contributed to the popularity of the Humiliati at all levels. It is tempting to allow the pendulum to continue to swing and to emphasize the religious aspect of these contracts at the expense of Zanoni’s ‘social role’. But this once more tells only half the story. These contracts reflect a combination of more or less conscious purposes: they undoubtedly made financial provision for the adults and their offspring, but they also enabled them to pursue a full religious life while keeping their children with them and this last point is worthy of reiteration. Frater Tomardus de Tomardis said that he wanted to do penance with his children: the removal of the need to choose between a religious vocation and the responsibility for his child faced by the knight with whom I began surely helps to explain the success of the Humiliati and similar groups. They provided an alternative to coercion, foisting children on relatives or literal abandonment. It is a solution which may have appealed both to reluctant parents who welcomed the opportunity to escape or share the responsibility for child care and for those at the other end of the spectrum who did not wish to have to choose between religion and family, by enabling the family to stay together as long as they wished. This optimistic picture should not be overstated and the case of a parva puella shows that this willingness to take on children or young people without the certainty of irrevocable oblation and with or without their parents, did not obviate disputes and raises the question of whether the Humiliati were wise to take on children. Two of the contracts given in the table (documents one and four) provided the Humiliati with insurance against finding themselves supporting un-professed individuals ad infinitum, but this was not the only potential risk, as the case of domina Marca Spaçamensa illustrates. In August 1236, witnesses from the house of Ognissanti in Borghetto Lodigiano (south of Milan, near Lodi) were called to answer questions in a dispute over the exemption of their community from the jurisdiction of the 79

Frances Andrews bishop.13 In pursuit of the question of autonomy, two test-cases were raised by the investigators concerning individuals who had complained to the bishop about the former superior of the house, the provost dominus Ugo. The case which concerns us here is that of Martha or Marca Spaçamensa who, it was suggested, had been a sister in the house and had complained to the bishop. If this were true, it would assist the bishop in proving that he had enjoyed jurisdiction over the community. Five witnesses made depositions concerning Marca: Ugo, the ex-provost himself, the brothers Vitalis, Johannes of Verona and Iacobus of Milan and sister Flora de Castello, described as magistra. Ugo was questioned first and was unsurprisingly evasive: asked whether Marca had complained about him to the bishop (surely a memorable event if it were true) Ugo replied that he did not recall and anyway Marca was not and never had been a sister of the house. Next came brother Vitalis, who had been in the house for over thirty-three years and a founding member of the community, but seems less sure of his ground. Asked whether Marca had been a sister of the house and again whether she had made her profession and lived as a sister in the house, he replied that she had made a donation of her belongings to the church when she was a parva puella, a young girl, presumably a minor, but that she had stayed only a short time and that he was not present at the donation or at the drawing up of the carta donacionis vel professionis, but that the donation had been recorded with a witnessed charter (cartam atestati). Marca had later changed her mind and returned to live at her home in Lodi. She wanted to get married, but it was certain that she had continued to be supported at the expense of the house of Ognissanti while at home with her mother. He freely admitted that he did not know whether she had complained to the bishop because he did not remember. Nonetheless he had heard it said that Marca had advertised in Milan for a husband: dicit tamen quod dici audivit quod fecerat preconizari per civitatem Mediolani quicumque vellet eam accipere in uxorem quod se nubere volebat. Vitalis admitted that he did not know this for certain (tamen nescit illud pro certo) and ended his account of Marca by saying that he knew nothing more, except that she had given the provost Ugo ‘multam brigam’, which may be politely translated as ‘a good deal of business’, an understandable sentiment if Marca really had been a sister of the house, but probably one which had been shared by Marca herself. If true, it also incidentally undermines the version of the provost Ugo himself which would have had to be based on quite extraordinary absent-mindedness to allow him to forget such a trouble-maker. The next witness was Iohannes of Verona who had been a brother in

13 Archivio della mensa vescovile, Lodi, Armario VIII, Fondo pergamene antiche, docu-

ment 186. Partially transcribed by G. Tiraboschi, Vetera Humiliatorum Monumenta, 3 vols. (Milan, 1766–68), II, pp. 183–91. Now in E. Mercatili Indelicato, ‘Per una storia degli Umiliati nella diocesi di Lodi. Le case di S. Cristoforo e di Ognissanti nel XIII secolo’, Sulle tracce degli Umiliati, ed. M. P. Alberzoni, A. Ambrosioni and A. Lucioni (Milan, 1997), pp. 343–492, appendix iv.

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A Safe-Haven for Children? Ognissanti for twenty-four years. Asked whether Marca had complained about Ugo, he replied that she had indeed had a case before the bishop and that the bishop had resolved it (expedivit et determinavit) but that he was not present at this affair (ad ea negocia). Asked whether Ugo had obeyed the bishop’s instructions (unspecified) he replied that the bishop had praised Ugo’s actions and that he did obey but he added that this did not prejudice the status of the church. Next came Iacobus of Milan, who had been a brother in the community for approximately fifteen years. Iacobus started by declaring that he knew nothing about the case of domina Marca but was then very informative. As far as he knew she had never had the religious habit in the house and she stayed in Lodi. He then added, however, that when she died she was brought to the church and buried there and that her mother had come there: ‘portata fuit ad dictam ecclesiam et sepulta apud ipsam ecclesiam et mater eius ad huc venit ibi’. This crucial piece of information had not been mentioned by the earlier witnesses, probably because it was already familiar to all concerned. So Marca was no longer available to give her version of events. Asked whether she had made a donation to the church of her property, he replied that he had heard it said but knew no more. Finally, sister Flora the magistra, a member of the community for thirty-three years, and one of the founding sisters, reported only that Marca had lodged a case against the provost before the lord bishop. Marca’s status was and is uncertain. Two witnesses (Johannes and Flora) confirm that she had made a complaint against Ugo (who was either amnesiac or keen to forget the episode). Ugo says she was never a sister. Iacobus says that she didn’t take the habit in the community (not quite the same thing perhaps). Vitalis tells us that she had made a donation when a young girl, and then refers to a carta donacionis vel professionis, a written record of the donation or profession, as if he simply did not know which it had been, or that he thought the two were interchangeable or automatically linked. None of the brethren call her a sister, and perhaps as a parva puella she was too young to have made profession legitimately. Certainly, according to Vitalis she had been supported by the community even when she left for home, suggesting that they accepted that she had not been professed. Whether or not there was a complaint before the bishop, the dispute was surely resolved before she died – or else the community simply saw her burial in their church as a way to avoid further bad feeling and perhaps to retain some if not all of her original donation. The main concern of the witnesses in 1236 was the relationship between bishop and community. Marca’s case was incidental to this and its resolution must be left to conjecture. It may indeed have been pre-empted by her death, but the facts as they stand indicate the uncertainties and misunderstandings which taking on young people might call forth. Marca may have initially intended to make a full commitment, but she then changed her mind (penituit se). Her complaint to the bishop may have concerned the rights to her property and expenses. Her mother’s role is not clear: did she approve of her daughter’s departure for the community of Ognissanti? Did she indeed send 81

House

Domus . . . Humiliatarum albarum . . . apud ecclesiam beati Eustorgii (Milan)

Domus Humiliatorum de Sollario in Senago

Brera (Milan) (domus Humiliatorum de Braida Guertii)

Viboldone (ecclesia seu canonica seu domus)

Date

1. 1233

2. 1255

3. 1266

4. 1276 Ambroxius Polvalis and his wife Contisia

frater Tomardus de Tomardis

Marchisius Burri and Leonus Borrinus de Senago

Domina Adelaxia daughter of the late Ubertus Perenzoni and wife of Guidotus son of the late Arguinus de Osenago (Milan)

Adults

Their sons: Paxinus, Petrinus, Miranetus and their nephews, Martinus, Albertinus, Zaninus and Ambrosinus (all under 16)

His children: Guardianus, Filipina and his grand-daughter, Martinela

Daughters of Leonus: Isabellina, Varenza and Petra (minoris etatis)

Their daughters: Stada (10) and Madia (5)

Children (ages)

Omnibus . . . bonis . . . et in universo orbe nichil in se penito reservato (extensive properties)

Omnibus suis bonis (including very extensive properties)

Se et sua . . . omnibus suis bonis

Se cum omnibus iuribus bonis et rebus (esp. 50 lire terzoli from her dowry and a sedimen sive cassina with buildings)

Donation

May leave before 16 taking their ‘legitimate portion’; after that age, community not bound to continue supporting them unless they make profession

May leave ante tempus professionis taking 200 lire terzoli or equivalent property (Guardianus) or 50 lire terzoli (the two girls)

May leave when reach ‘legitimate age’ taking up to 36 lire each (from property given by Leonus)

To stay till 14, supported by fructus on the donation. May leave to marry between 14 and 18 with a share of the donation but not the fructus. After 18 must stay.

Conditions for children

TABLE 1. THE EARLY ‘HUMILIATI’ AND PROVISION FOR CHILDREN: THE DOCUMENTS

Domus fratrum de ordine Sancti Augustini . . . inferioris Senago . . . domus quondam Fratris Leonis Burri (Ottobonus de Lazzate)

Dolzebellina and Zanebellina, granddaughters of donor (minoris etatis) Omnia bona

May leave quando ad etatem pervenerint, taking 36 lire each

Documents first published in L. Zanoni, Gli Umiliati nei loro rapporti con l’eresia, l’industria della lana ed i comuni nei secoli xii e xiii (Milan, 1911) pp. 311–18. Now re-edited in Gli atti del comune di Milano, ed. M. F. Baroni and R. Perelli Cippo (Milan/Alessandria, 1976–97), I, 303 (1233), II/1, 132 (1255), II/2, 457 (1266), 738 (1276), III/1, 3 (1277).

5. 1277

Frances Andrews her herself? She does not seem to have objected to Marca’s return home to Lodi and later attended her daughter’s funeral or burial at the Humiliati church (since their own church was still being built this was perhaps San Giorgio, a chapel given to the community by bishop Arderic in 1208). Vitalis’ story that Marca advertised for a spouse in Milan is hard to believe (why not Lodi?) – or does it suggest that she could take a very autonomous view of her life because she had property? Marca’s fate is not clarified in the surviving records and left too much open to speculation (both then and now), but whether we conclude that the houses of the Humiliati and others like them took on such children and young people for social, financial or religious motives, what matters here is the effect. By doing so, at some risk to themselves, if only in terms of reputation, they opened the full religious life not just to the unmarried and widows, but to mothers and fathers too. For once there might be no need to choose between parenthood and a full vocation in the religious life. At the same time, children might have the opportunity to sample the religious life, not just as oblates or school children, but as temporary participants, free to choose whether to stay or go, a choice which the son of knight B, with whom I began, would no doubt have been pleased to exercise.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England

Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England P. J. P. Goldberg

In 1301 a series of ordinances was issued for York which was designed to regulate trade in response to the difficulties caused by the residence of the royal court within the city. One of the more remarkable of these was that baldly entitled ‘pigs and prostitutes’. The juxtaposition is a very telling one.1 Not only were pigs symbolic of lust, but they created problems by wandering the streets. So did prostitutes, whose feet, like the archetypal harlot of the book of Proverbs, ‘will not abide within the house’. Thus when the mother in The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage warned her daughter, ‘rene thou not fro hous to house lyke an Antyny gryce’ [piglet], she was intimating that such behaviour implied a lack of chastity.2 Clearly within clerical, didactic and civic governmental sources women’s mobility was frowned upon. Here we may note that only two of Chaucer’s pilgrims were female, the Prioress and, more significantly, that singular creation of anti-feminist discourse, the Wife of Bath. The movement of women may have been regarded as in some way particularly subversive, but the labour legislation of the later fourteenth century warns us that all migration was seen in some quarters to be subversive. The Commons’ petition against vagrants of 1376, for example, saw in the mobility of labourers ‘the great impoverishment, destruction and ruin of the commons’ and hinted darkly that such migrants often became ‘staff strikers’ (clearly the medieval equivalent of New Age travellers) who ‘lead an idle life, commonly robbing poor people in simple villages’.3 But neither the petition against vagrants nor Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims are simple mirrors of society.4 Any perusal of

1

2 3 4

M. Prestwich, York Civic Ordinances, 1301, Borthwick Papers 49 (York, 1976), pp. 16–17. I have developed this point at greater length in P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Pigs and Prostitutes: Streetwalking in Comparative Perspective’, in Young Medieval Women, ed. K. J. Lewis, N. J. Menuge and K. M. Phillips (Stroud, 1999), pp. 172–93 (pp. 172–4). The Good Wife Taught her Daughter, ed. T. F. Mustanoja (Helsinki, 1948), p. 173 (line 8). Quoted from The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. R. B. Dobson, 2nd edn (London, 1983), pp. 73–4. There is every reason to believe that places of pilgrimage would have attracted pilgrims of both sexes. Concerns about married women travelling on their own (cf. Margery Kempe) would have applied neither to married couples nor to younger, unmarried women. For evidence of just such a mixed group see Women in England c. 1275–1525, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Manchester, 1995), pp. 283–4.

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P. J. P. Goldberg conventional historical sources reveals that medieval men and women were both highly mobile and that such mobility played an essential part of the functioning of a complex society. The purpose of this paper is to try to reconcile these two perspectives. There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that medieval society was highly mobile and that significant numbers of people would have moved from their natal homes during the course of their lives. This is implicit from the evidence of locative bynames such as have been analysed by Ekwall in his pioneering studies of migration into medieval London, by Carus-Wilson for the small borough of Stratford-upon-Avon or by McClure in his analysis of urban migration fields.5 It is evident from the concern shown by customary and borough courts, particularly before the Black Death, in the lodging of strangers, and it shows up in Poos’s analysis of population turnover from the tithing records of a number of early fourteenth-century Essex vills.6 After the Black Death it is apparent from the relative ease with which lords filled vacant holdings, landlords found tenants, and towns attracted labour. Indeed we may debate whether English society was more mobile before or after the Black Death.7 What is much harder to determine is who exactly migrated, over what distances, and when in their life course. This is especially true of female migrants. That this is purely a product of inherent biases in the kinds of sources that record migration and not a consequence of women being substantially less mobile than men is easy to demonstrate. The skewed sex ratios that I have elsewhere described as characteristic of English towns of the later fourteenth century is indicative of higher levels of women than men migrating from the countryside at this date.8 Dale’s work on female apprentices to London silkwomen, for example, shows that young women were drawn to learn the trade from at least as far as Yorkshire. Within peasant society the evidence of merchet payments likewise suggests that women commonly married without their natal manors.9 Perhaps the best source available for the study of such phenomena as 5

6

7 8 9

E. Ekwall, Studies on the Population of Medieval London (Stockholm, 1956); E. M. Carus-Wilson, ‘The First Half Century of the Borough of Stratford’, EcHR 2nd s. 18 (1965), 46–53; P. McClure, ‘Patterns of Migration in the late Middle Ages: the Evidence of English Place-Name Surnames’, EcHR 2nd s. 32 (1979), 167–82. J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (Toronto, 1964), p. 136; L. R. Poos, ‘Population Turnover in Medieval Essex’, in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith and K. Wrightson (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1–22. L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350-1525 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 158–79. P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 342–3, 356, 359. M. K. Dale, ‘The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century’, EcHR 4 (1933), 324–35; J. M. Bennett, ‘Medieval Peasant Marriages: An Examination of Marriage License Fines in the Liber Gersumarum’, in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), pp. 193–246.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England propensity to migrate, mean distance moved, and age at migration are depositions from the ecclesiastical courts. Early modern historians, notably Clark, Souden, and Earle, have made excellent use of this evidence and hence provide a comparative basis against which the medieval data may be set.10 Unfortunately biographical information about individual deponents appears not to have been recorded with any consistency even where such deposition evidence survives for the period before 1500. This is certainly true of the York consistory, by far and away the most complete archive spanning the whole of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Though migrational information seems to have been recorded more commonly by the end of the fifteenth century, social and legal prejudices ensure that female deponents will be seriously underrepresented. My own analysis of migrational data from the York consistory suggests that women migrated at a mean age of 19.6 years (N=11, where N is the number of movements) and men at 18.3 years (N=19).11 Poos, using Essex depositions from the London consistory in the last decades of the fifteenth century (1467–97), found a mean age ‘at arrival’ of 28.3 years (N=104) for an almost exclusively male population. The difference between his figure and mine may be explained in part by my use of evidence for all movements by deponents and the relative youth of many of the deponents in my sample, whereas Poos is concerned only with the point at which persons appear to have settled and is derived from a rather older sample population. It follows that my evidence points to the modal age at which people were actively in the process of migrating, whereas Poos is concerned with the point at which this process ended.12 Nevertheless, another sample of male deponents taken from the records of litigation concerning parochial rights in the parish of Waghen and Sutton-on-Hull (and much more akin to Poos’s sample) still suggests a mean age at settlement around twenty years.13 Clark, using some 7,000 depositions from the period 1660–1730, found that most migrants were aged between eleven and thirty years, but he observed differing patterns between genders and between town and country, female and rural male migrants tending to move later than urban males.14 Souden has similarly noted a tendency for young people to migrate during ‘their late teens and early twenties’ using like evidence for the period 1661–1707.15

10 Migration and Society in Early Modern England, ed. P. Clark and D. Souden (London, 1987);

11 12 13

14 15

P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR 2nd s. (1989), 328–53 (p. 333 and tab. 3, p. 334). Calculated from Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, tab. 6.1, pp. 284–7. Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 173–6. York Minster Library (hereafter YML), deposition book, M2(3)c. The depositions are dated variously 1402 and 1429–30. The mean age of removal/settlement where known is 21.2 years (N=19), but if three atypical cases (age 7, 53+, and ?40 years respectively) are excluded, the mean falls to 18.9 years (N=16, standard deviation = 6.6 years). P. Clark, ‘Migration in England during the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries’, in Migration and Society, ed. Clark and Souden, pp. 213–52 (pp. 226–7). This is derived from a sample of 453 deponents for whom actual ‘age at arrival’ is known:

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P. J. P. Goldberg The distances travelled by migrants can also be calculated from the York evidence. The mean distance travelled by the women deponents within the sample is 30.8 miles (N=30, where N is the number of movements), that for men only 21.7 miles (N=22).16 These statistics, however, disguise two essentially different patterns of migration; on the one hand there was sometimes long-distance migration primarily into major towns and on the other local migration, often associated with the movement of servants. Thus Christiana Glover of Leconfield (E. Yorks.), observed in a cause of 1494, travelled some 165 miles to London after her parish chaplain had excommunicated her for refusing to accept the ruling of the Church court meeting at Beverley that she was lawfully married to one John Eshton. On the other hand Alice Dalton made various journeys in the early years of the century between her native Poppleton and different employers in York, a distance of about four miles, whilst she was still single and a servant.17 If movements over fifty miles are excluded, the mean distances travelled by women falls to 14.4 miles (N=23) as against 15.1 miles for men (N=21). This is not so far out of line with Poos’s suggestion, based on customary and royal court evidence, that most migration took place within a radius of about twelve miles.18 Patten, writing about early modern East Anglia, likewise found that most migrant apprentices into three of the major towns of the region moved from within a radius of between eight and twenty miles of those towns, and Clark found that some half of all migrants journeyed fewer than ten miles, but only about ten per cent more than forty miles.19 It would appear thus far that most migrants were relatively youthful, comprising primarily teenagers and young adults, and that, a significant minority of long-distance migrants excepted, most movements were over comparatively short distances. More problematical is an assessment of the propensity of people to migrate. The York consistory data will not allow this to be measured, but Poos’s Essex data provide some clues. Poos found that a maximal figure 24.1 per cent of his almost exclusively male sample (N=137) had remained within their natal communities right up until they made their depositions. The equivalent figure from Waghen and Sutton-on-Hull rather earlier in the fifteenth century is 53.1 per cent (N=49), but this case, concerned as it is with testimony about ancient custom, only highlights the bias implicit in Poos’s data. Deponents who had many years’ residence within a commu-

16 17 18 19

D. Souden, ‘Migrants and the Population Structure of later Seventeenth Century Provincial Cities and Market Towns’, in The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800, ed. P. Clark (London, 1984), pp. 133–68 (p. 142). Calculated from Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, tab. 6.1, pp. 284–7. York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research (hereafter BI), cause papers, CP. F. 210, 284. Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 162–4. J. Patten, ‘Patterns of Migration and Movement of Labour to three Pre-Industrial East Anglian Towns’, in Migration and Society, ed. Clark and Souden, pp. 77–106 (p. 87); Clark, ‘Migration in England’, p. 223.

88

Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England nity, who indeed enjoyed a high degree of stability, might be preferred as deponents over newcomers and the comparatively mobile.20 Such scanty evidence thus suggests that the majority of people did move at some stage in their life course, an observation supported by early sixteenth-century deposition evidence analysed by Poos. Intriguingly this research suggests both marked regional variation in propensity to migrate, but also that women were more likely to have moved from their natal communities within their life course than men.21 Poos has attempted to take his Essex evidence one stage further and explore status-specific patterns of migration, although once again his evidence is limited to males. On the basis of very small samples he has suggested that craftsmen / retailers, a group that for convenience I shall subsequently refer to as artisans, were both less likely to migrate than other groups and tended to settle from an earlier age, whereas labourers were highly mobile. He goes on to argue that whereas labourers might continue to be mobile throughout their careers, husbandmen might take longer to establish themselves, but tended not to move having once done so.22 Poos ties these observations to a tentative model of marriage formation in late-medieval Essex derived from the nominative poll tax returns for the county in 1381. These last indicate that husbandmen and, to a lesser extent, artisans were married in greater proportions than were labourers. Despite the patently defective nature of these returns, Poos argues that the different proportions observed are at least statistically significant.23 Such findings probably say something about mean age at marriage, the likelihood being that husbandmen tended to marry somewhat earlier than artisans or more especially labourers, a conclusion given support by my own analysis of Yorkshire deposition evidence, but it may be even more suggestive of different patterns of propensity to marry.24 The lower proportion of Essex labourers than husbandmen or artisans currently married in 1381 suggests that significant numbers of labourers abstained from marriage, whereas marriage was much more normal for husbandmen or artisans. It is possible to test Poos’s hypothesis using much more convincing data derived from the Howdenshire (E. Yorks.) nominative poll tax returns for 1379.25 Because the tax that year was levied at differential rates following a predetermined schedule, it is possible to distinguish different status groups according to the level of assessment. The remarkable strength of the Howdenshire returns is that not only are artisans, merchants, franklins, 20 YML, M2(3)c; Poos, A Rural Society, tab. 8.3, p. 170 and discussion p. 167. 21 L. R. Poos, paper given at the Department of English Local History, University of 22 23 24 25

Leicester, 23 June 1995. Poos, A Rural Society, tabs. 8.4, 8.6, pp. 171, 177, and discussion pp. 176–8. Ibid., pp. 154–8. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 243–66. ‘Assessment Roll of the Poll-Tax for Howdenshire . . . 1379’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 9 (1886), 129–62.

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P. J. P. Goldberg farmers of manors, and gentry assessed at different rates and so designated, but even minimum-rate taxpayers are given specific designations, as servant, labourer, or husbandman, so as to justify their assessment at the minimum rate. It follows that much more reliable indicators of proportions married of servants, labourers, artisans, and husbandmen may be calculated. It should be noted, however, that small numbers of minimum-rate taxpayers, including numbers of widows, were not designated as servants, labourers, or husbandmen, and that I have chosen to exclude from my calculations servants who were apparently dependents of householders other than where these were also the sons and daughters of householders. As a consequence, my proportions married are the pertinent proportions of all those designated husbandman, artisan etc., their spouses if married, and their children if not themselves specifically designated under another category. On this basis I find that 86.5 per cent of husbandmen (including franklins and farmers of manors), 79.6 per cent of artisans (including merchants and chapmen), 61.6 per cent of labourers, and only 30.1 per cent of servants were married.26 If we place servants on one side for the moment, it will be apparent that these figures significantly enhance Poos’s hypothesis. Relatively few husbandmen and only slightly more artisans seem not to have been married, a simple reflection of the importance of the conjugal unit in ensuring the effective management of a family holding or workshop. In contrast, numbers of labourers may never have married despite achieving adulthood. Given that women are at least as numerous as men among Howdenshire’s population of single labourers, it may also be that some labourers were widows who had turned to labouring as a means of support following their husbands’ decease. For example, in the village of Walkington we find a household that included one Isabella, the mother of John son of Adam, the householder, who was assessed as a labourer.27 The presence of large numbers of servants who do not appear to be household dependents, but some of whom were married, raises questions of terminology. The returns for the Hinckford Hundred of Essex do in fact sometimes include groups of famuli and also of famuli et laborarii together. Some of these famuli, as at Panfield, were married and Poos has presumably included them indiscriminately within his population of labourers.28 But famuli were the permanent workforce of the manor, contracted by the year, but unlike life-cycle servants resident in their own accommodation and certainly not in the manor house. By extension, the generic term ‘servant’ as used in the Howdenshire returns may mean workers contracted by the year, but not necessarily household dependents of their employers. This is suggested in a few instances by occupational bynames. Thus one Roger Schepherde was described as a servant when presented for trespass under the Statute of 26 Ibid. These figures are based on a sample of about half the possible observations. 27 ‘Howdenshire’, p. 143. 28 The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381, ed. C. C. Fenwick, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1998–), I, 206–22.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England Labourers, and in the Howdenshire returns we find one Clement Swynhird listed as a married servant in Melton.29 The strikingly low proportion of married persons within this category of servants may thus be a singularly telling observation. Unlike day labourers, who frequently held small parcels of land and might supplement their livelihoods by combining periodic labouring with smallholding and even small-scale craft activity, servants were almost entirely dependent upon their employment. Few would consequently have had either the means or the incentive to marry. Strikingly in Howdenshire, a region noted for pastoralism associated with wool production, women are very conspicuous among this group, outnumbering single men by a ratio of about 3:2.30 To sum up thus far, it would seem that the young of both sexes were a singularly mobile group, indeed that mobility may be perceived as a facet of youth. Adolescents of both sexes might leave their natal homes to work for a period of years as servants (in the life-cycle sense), though others may have found more autonomous, but still dependent positions as servants (in the sense of famuli) or as labourers, and, given the evidence that in rural areas during the later fourteenth century at least male life-cycle servants outnumbered female, even women who remained within the natal vill and the natal home until marriage might have married outside the vill. Almost certainly they would have moved from their home. On the other hand, not everybody would have settled and married on reaching adulthood. Numbers of men and women who had no expectation of gaining entry to even small parcels of land or who lacked both the means and the access to skills necessary to engage in trade or craft production may have gone through life unmarried. Equally some servants and labourers may have had to wait rather longer than the norm before the land they aspired to came within their possession and hence marriage became a possibility, and some widows may have rejoined the ranks of unmarried servants (again in the sense of famuli) or labourers after their marriages had been cut short. We may thus detect a contrasting pattern between the ubiquitous mobility of youth and the continued mobility of an essentially rootless subclass of landless labour. Here we may cite two examples: John, son of William Smyth of Holywell, was at Colne in 1403 and 1405, at Soham in 1409 and 1413, at Ely in 1420 and 1423, at Ramsey in 1427, 1428, and 1432, and was back in Ely in 1437, all places within a ten mile radius; Joan, daughter of John Beronger of Warboys, had found her way to London by 1440, was in Kent during the 1450s, but is finally observed at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1462.31 I want now to explore the mobility of labourers in greater depth. It is apparent that we must distinguish between the sort of migration asso29 S. A. C. Penn and C. Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from

the Enforcement of the Labour Laws’, EcHR 2nd s. 43 (1990), 356–76 (tab. 1, p. 364); ‘Howdenshire’, pp. 136–7. 30 Calculated from ‘Howdenshire’, 129–62. 31 Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 173, 180.

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P. J. P. Goldberg ciated with a transfer of residence suggested by Poos’s deposition evidence and the daily movement of labourers to their places of work. This last is suggested by the observation that the distances moved by day labourers to take employment were invariably very small. Presentments under the Statute of Labourers for the later fourteenth century regularly record persons leaving the vill to seek employment, but rarely specify the actual destinations. In a few instances, however, these are recorded and there is little reason to believe that they are unrepresentative of the broader pattern. Penn and Dyer, using this source, thus present evidence for the actual movements of only twelve women and twenty-five men, but the picture that emerges is relatively uniform.32 The women moved a mean of 4.4 miles against 6.4 miles for the men. If three atypical cases of movement over distances of 20, 20, and 24 miles respectively are excluded then these means fall to 3.1 and 5 miles respectively. These are comparatively short walking distances and it is reasonable to conclude that such labourers travelled to work on a daily basis, returning to their homes each evening. Indeed the only reason why some enter the record is because these short journeys technically took them without the boundaries of the vill and hence the provisions of the Statute of 1351, although in other instances the presentment was made in respect of ‘excessive’ wages. That there is a modest difference in the mean distance travelled by male wage-earners as against female is probably not a reflection of the presence of a number of building workers within the male sample. The longest distance recorded, the twenty-four miles travelled by one William Session of Little Barningham to take employment in Forncett (Norfolk), was indeed in pursuit of his craft of thatcher, but the mean distance travelled by men not engaged in building crafts was actually much the same as for the entire sample.33 It may be, therefore, that men tended to journey to work over slightly greater distances than women. Most of the other men and certainly all but perhaps one of the women were presented in relation to harvest employment when, of course, labour was most in demand and hence wages were at their most volatile. The relative conspicuousness of women amongst those so presented has led Penn elsewhere to speculate that jurors may have been particularly inclined to present women in an attempt to enforce wage differentials.34 In fact there is no need to argue this line, though this is not to deny the likelihood that the Peace sessions were mindful of the presence of numbers of 32 Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings’, tab. 1, pp. 364–5. 33 The mean for all male, non-building workers is 6.4 miles. If the atypical movement of 20

miles is excluded, the mean falls to 5.5 miles, slightly above the mean for all males less movements of 20 and 24 miles. The female sample is, however, influenced by the presence of a group of six women who travelled only two miles. It would thus be unwise to conclude that women tended to travel to work over shorter distances than men on the basis of so small a sample. On the other hand the evidence suggests that male building workers were as likely to walk to work on a daily basis as harvest workers. 34 S. A. C. Penn, ‘Female Wage-earners in late Fourteenth-century England’, Agricultural History Review 35 (1987), 1–14 (p. 5).

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England women among those presented under the Statute. Most labour within the medieval countryside would have been conducted without wages by family members. Even lords of manors, who during the course of the later Middle Ages were increasingly reliant on hired labour over customary labour, engaged a regular staff of employees, otherwise famuli, and depended on day labour only at particularly busy seasons or for specialized tasks not covered by the regular staff. Numbers of small rural employers, both artisans and husbandmen, likewise relied to varying degrees upon live-in servants. This would have been especially true of pastoral and mixed farming regions which were characterized by a less seasonal labour demand, but which also required workers to care for livestock outside the ordinary working hours of a day labourer. An expansion of this sector of the agrarian economy in the decades following the Black Death coincided, moreover, with acute wage inflation, but, from the 1370s at least, a downward movement in the price of grain. Live-in servants, who were employed primarily for bed and board, thus enjoyed a growing competitive advantage over wage labour from the time of the advent of plague until at least the earlier decades of the fifteenth century. It thus follows that a significant part of the labour force called upon to meet the exigencies of the harvest were persons not normally engaged in paid employment, hence the numbers of women harvest workers, both married and single. Thus among the Penn and Dyer sample noted earlier are both Margaret, the wife of John le Bere and Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry de Screffington.35 The harvest thus drew upon numbers of women who were otherwise household dependents and not independent wage earners.36 No doubt the attraction of high wages for a few weeks in autumn would have been valued as a significant boost to the familial economy. That this could be earned without having to stay away from the family home outside the working day would have been an additional benefit and would have ensured that this seasonal work would have only been marginally disruptive to the routine of the peasant household. Although many women probably found harvest employment no more than a few miles from their homes, some women do appear to have travelled over slightly greater distances. Margaret, the wife of John le Bere just noted, was presented in 1362–3 for going from her home in Wantisden to find work as a reaper in Ilketshall (Suffolk) some twenty miles distant. It is unthinkable that she would have walked back each evening since her work would not have ended until darkness was falling and she would have been already exhausted by a long day in the fields. We can only speculate that the high wages available in the immediate aftermath of the second pestilence or Grey Death of 1361–2 reconciled her and her husband to the necessity of living away from home during the harvest period. Margery Spuret, a servant in the employ of a York 35 Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings’, tab. 1, p. 364. Most of the women presented cannot

in fact be identified by marital status. 36 Cf. Poos, A Rural Society, p. 217.

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P. J. P. Goldberg saddler, likewise arranged to be absent from her employer for a month during the harvest of 1393, an arrangement that may have been quite common, but is here observed only by chance since this was used by one Thomas de Hornby to argue that he could not have married her in York at that time.37 A telling indication that such arrangements need not always be amicable is revealed by another matrimonial cause from the York consistory. One Lucy allegedly left her husband William de Fentrice of Tollesby in the ‘autumn’, the invariable contemporary term for the harvest, of 1356 ‘without the permission of her said husband’ and just when he had most need of her assistance. When she returned she found he was living with another woman whom witnesses had seen ‘doing William’s work’ as might his wife. William subsequently claimed a pre-contract with this other woman, despite seven years of marriage to Lucy, a claim that was upheld by the York consistory.38 Our analysis of the mobility of labourers thus far has shown that labourers and even building craftsmen would often find employment within easy walking distance of their place of residence. As Poos has convincingly argued in respect of the farmer’s accounts of Porter’s Hall at Stebbing in the period 1483–4, where the bulk of the labour needs were met by a staff of eleven famuli, additional day labourers were employed only episodically. Thus 52 labourers were employed for periods totalling between one day and thirty days. Given that the farmer of Porter’s Hall constituted the main local employer, it is highly unlikely that many if any of the labourers so recorded could have survived from labouring alone.39 Labourers must therefore have depended on having small holdings and / or access to craft and retail activities in order to ensure their livelihoods. It follows that it would not normally have been in the interests of such persons to move permanently. It was solely those without ties of land who may have continued to be mobile through adulthood. As I shall argue shortly, it was the mobility of this group, and not of life-cycle servants or occasional day labourers that caused particular friction within medieval society. The periodic movement of servants from one household to another, perhaps within a few miles’ radius of a particular hiring fair, had its own internal logic. It permitted young people to gain access to a range of skills that they might not be able to acquire within their natal homes.40 It allowed them

37 BI, cause paper, CP. E. 159. 38 ‘. . . sine licencia dicti mariti . . .’; ‘. . . facientem opus ipsius Willelmi. . . .’: BI, cause paper, CP. E.

77. One deponent, John Schephyrd, claimed that William often beat Lucy, who had been married before, and it was this that had prompted her to leave in the autumn. Presumably the harvest season was her only (brief) opportunity to get away from her husband since waged work would not normally have been available to her. 39 Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 212–16. 40 This is a strategy that has been described by Esther Goody in anthropological terms as characteristic of complex societies: E. Goody, ‘Sharing and Transferring Components of Parenthood: The West African Case’, in Adoption et Fosterage, ed. M. Corbier De l’Archéologie à l’Histoire (Paris, 1999), pp. 369–88.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England to extend their pool of contacts and friends as they moved from one employer to another and, for older servants at least, it increased the range of possible partners with whom they might initiate courtship relations and in due course even marry. It also allowed employers to match servants by age, experience, and gender to their own particular labour needs. The system of life-cycle service further allowed employers access to labour throughout their life course as parents, since servants could be employed when children were too young to assist within the household economy and after children had left home. Indeed the system depended upon at least some parents permitting children to leave home at precisely the ages that they might have been most useful to them. The movement of such young people between households did not go without comment. As Poos has observed, the spiritual needs of young people who were only temporarily resident within a parish could all too easily be overlooked, hence Myrc’s insistence in his Instructions that parish priests hear the confessions even of those whose ‘howsehold be elles where’.41 It was the movement of young women, however, that generated the most comment if the circulation of the didactic text How the Good Wijf Tau
te Hir Dau
tir is to be regarded as evidence.42 This last was, however, not specifically addressed at women servants and was not concerned with mobility between households as much as conduct within households. It could just as well have been used by parents whose children did not leave home to go into service. Considerable numbers of peasant adolescents and young adults did indeed remain with their natal families until they married. The Howdenshire poll tax evidence suggests for example that numbers of husbandmen and, to a lesser extent, artisans retained adolescent or young adult children within the household, although these groups were also conspicuous employers of servants.43 Children resident within the natal home and life-cycle servants were alike dependents of the heads of their households. They were alike manupasti or mainpasts for whose actions the householder might be held legally responsible. They were alike subject to the government of a father or a master. Their social position thus owed rather more to age than to status or gender. A very different perspective emerges in relation to older people. Most men with access to land, training, or capital probably aspired to marriage and to becoming a householder. I have already remarked the value to men of their wives in managing a peasant holding or running a workshop. It might thus be that marriage for husbandmen, artisans, and indeed such labourers who had 41 Poos, A Rural Society, p. 197. 42 See argument in F. Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy

Text’, Speculum 71 (1996), 66–86. 43 Labourers appear to have retained sons preferentially, artisans daughters. Widows seem

sometimes to have retained preferentially daughters in their households. This last is supported by like evidence from the 1379 poll tax returns for the West Riding (Yorks.) wapentakes of Osgoldcross and Strafforth: C. Dahy, ‘Etude des Registres de la poll tax de 1379’ (unpublished maîtrise, University of Tours, 1992), tab. 13.

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P. J. P. Goldberg sufficient resources to be able to afford to marry constituted a coming of age, a form of social adulthood. For the women who chose to marry husbandmen, artisans etc., marriage was from a legal perspective little more than an extension of their earlier dependent status. They remained mainpasts, the legal dependents of their husbands and subject to the government of their husbands. In social practice, however, wives were very much seen as partners; it follows that for women too, marriage constituted a social coming of age.44 It is to those who achieved adulthood, but yet did not marry that I want now to turn my attention. What this paper has shown, following on from the work of Poos, is that significant numbers of labourers and more especially persons described as servants, but not in the life-cycle sense, must have opted out of marriage. As such they neither became householders nor achieved social adulthood. But since they did not reside with their employers, they were not legal dependents either. Herein lies the essence of the problem. Within the hierarchical structure of medieval society, the landless, the rootless, the unmarried, those not invested with the responsibilities of householding in the conventional sense, and those not subject to the authority of a lord, a husband, or a master were a potentially destabilising and subversive influence. That such persons were drawn disproportionately from the lowest echelons of society would only have reinforced this essentially élitist and magisterial perspective. It follows that migrant labour on the one side and seigneurial, clerical, and aldermanic authority on the other were frequently in a state of tension, but this was enhanced at particular moments. With the advantage of hindsight we can see that the movement of labour was an inevitable and necessary consequence of a changing economy. The years of land hunger and population pressure at the end of the thirteenth into the early years of the fourteenth century, culminating in the Agrarian Crisis, saw numbers of smallholders forced to surrender their holdings and an associated growth in landless labour. This labour necessarily travelled in search of work and in some instances found its way into towns. This is reflected on the one hand, for example, by the numbers of peasants described as vacabundus or vacabunda in the Spalding serf lists of the 1260s and on the other hand by the problems created by the level of immigration into the small town of Halesowen between the 1270s and the Black Death.45 It is further reflected in the concern on the part of local government to ensure that incomers were properly vouched for and, in the case of 44 This social dimension is beyond the scope of this paper, which is primarily concerned

with magisterial and legal perspectives. A discussion of marriage as a partnership, particularly in terms of managing the household economy, is to be found in my ‘Household and the Organisation of Labour in Late Medieval Towns: Some English Evidence’, in The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared, ed. M. Carlier and T. Soens (Leuven and Apeldoorn, 2001), pp. 59–70, but implications of maternity and childrearing for the social standing of women deserves further exploration. 45 BL, Add. MS 35296; R. H. Hilton, ‘Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters’, Past and Present 97 (1982), 3–15.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England males, entered into tithings. Following the Black Death we may observe a restructuring of both the agrarian and urban economies and consequent shifts in the pattern of demand for labour. To no small extent this resulted in a movement of labour, but within the broader context of labour scarcity the problem was less with incomers than with those who left the community, and so deprived the community of a stable and hence cheap labour supply, and with those in transit. Thus we may discern a movement of labour away from the old intensively arable regions of Midland England, but at the same time an influx of labour, particularly female labour, into towns during the course of the later fourteenth century. This of course is the context of the enforcement of the Ordinance and later the Statute of Labourers and its subsequent revisions. Just as the circumstances leading to the movement of labour and likewise the responses to the perceived problems caused by labour mobility varied over time, so it seems likely that the part played by gender in these perceptions changed. Hilton has suggested that some three-quarters of migrants into pre-plague Halesowen were female, but what his evidence may in fact show is that female migrants were disproportionately conspicuous within the borough court since their marginal economic position would regularly have forced them the wrong side of the law.46 In the eyes of borough magistrates, therefore, female migrants would have been regarded as troublemakers. In rural society at the same time the evidence of coroners’ rolls shows that women were conspicuous among the poor begging alms from door to door. How far such persons were indeed supported by the charity of their neighbours is difficult to assess, but it is likely that such mendicants engendered at least a degree of resentment.47 Suspicion of female migrants and of the ‘ungoverned’ woman cannot be said to have gone away in the decades following the Black Death. It is implicit in the circulation of How the Good Wijf Tau
te hir Dau
tir and maybe even in the presentments of women under the Statute of Labourers, but it was the ungoverned single male that aroused most concern in this period of labour scarcity.48 The Commons’ 1376 petition has already been noted, but much the same tone is to be found in a London injunction directed against the ‘yeomen’ (journeymen) tailors in 1415. The concern voiced by their employers was that the journeymen were living together in various houses and associating collectively ‘like unruly and insolent men without head or governance’; responding to this petition, the city governors

46 Hilton, ‘Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters’; Goldberg, ‘The Public and the Private: Women

in the Pre-Plague Economy’, in Thirteenth-Century England III, ed. P. R. Coss and S. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 75–89. 47 For some examples of hostility to mendicants see BI, CP. E. 28 (‘pauperes sunt qui deus odit’: deposition of Richard Hughet; CP. E. 82 (deposition of Robert de Harwod, also translated in Women in England, ed. Goldberg, p. 159); CP. E. 92 (deposition of Thomas son of Ydonson). 48 Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best’; Penn, ‘Female Wage-Earners’.

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P. J. P. Goldberg characterized the ‘yeomen’ tailors as ‘like a race at once youthful and unstable’.49 Patriarchal anxiety respecting the single woman once more became manifest by the later years of the fifteenth century. As I have elsewhere described, in a period of economic contraction women became increasingly marginalized within the labour force and hence increasingly dependent upon marriage as a means to a livelihood.50 Single women were again ghettoized into an economy characterized by petty trading, the retailing of ale, prostitution, and petty crime and hence reinforced magisterial notions of the ungoverned woman as deceitful, sexually promiscuous, and a threat to the social order. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the Coventry city ordinances of 1492 that equated barmaids with prostitutes and required all single women under fifty years of age ‘to go to service till they be maried’.51 By the early years of the sixteenth century, however, male unemployment was sufficiently acute to provoke a new concern on the part of government, both centrally and locally, with the problem of vagrancy.52 The central issue seems not then to have been migration per se, but household status. The householder, he (for it usually was a he) who had responsibility over household dependents, was, from a governmental perspective, the backbone of the medieval social fabric. Through his government, the householder supposedly provided stability to the household, a quality highly valued in an essentially conservative society. We may remember that this was a society in which lords, the leaders of society, were so much associated with place. Thus England as a concept was inseparable from the person of the king. Similarly the de la Poles, who as Hull merchants had rubbed shoulders with the Rottenherrings, became in the fullness of time the Suffolks. Even lords of manors commonly shared their name with the place over which they exercized seigneurial authority. Householding, having jurisdiction over dependents, and stability were qualities that went hand in hand. They were also qualities gained with age. Mobility, in contrast, was a characteristic of youth, but young people occupied a clearly defined position as the legal dependents of their parents, their lords, and their masters. Many young men would have aspired to marriage and indeed would have become householders in their own right upon completing their training, upon inheriting land, or upon otherwise gaining 49 Memorials of London and London Life . . . being a series of Extracts . . . from the early Archives of

the City of London, A.D. 1276–1419, ed. T. H. Riley (London, 1868), pp. 609–12. Translation by Riley of original entry in Letter-Book ‘I’ in Latin. The emphasis is mine. 50 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 261–2, 271–2, 339–40. 51 The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. Harris, EETS OS 134–5, 138, 146 (1907–13), p. 544. P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Coventry’s “Lollard” Programme of 1492 and the Making of Utopia’, in Pragmatic Utopians: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, ed. R. Horrox and S. Rees Jones (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 97–116. 52 For a general introduction to Tudor concerns with the problem of vagrancy see P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), chs 5 and 6.

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Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England land through purchase or even marriage; marriage, householding, and settlement went hand in hand and constituted a form of social adulthood. Even those who had access to comparatively modest holdings and who were obliged to supplement their livelihoods by their own and indeed their wives’ labour would often have remained essentially settled, only travelling to their place of work on a daily basis. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that labourers frequently worked alongside their wives: husbands and wives regularly worked as teams reaping and binding during harvest and thatchers were commonly assisted by their wives, hence the authority of the householder need not have been undermined by his wife’s working.53 Women upon marriage would likewise have become settled. They became partners in the enterprise of the household economy, and frequently they became mothers with responsibility for the socialization of the next generation. They would also have become dependents of their husbands and would only have enjoyed a degree of legal autonomy as householders upon their husbands’ decease. Some men and some women, however, failed to gain access to land or to workshops, never married, and remained rootless and hence potentially mobile. Of these, it was the masterless man who was generally more conspicuous and more feared. This last is especially true, for example, in the decades following the Black Death as seen variously in the contemporary labour legislation, the Commons’ petition against vagrants, or the injunction against the London yeomen tailors.54 Women would, however, have been particularly conspicuous amongst these in the context of economic depression and scarcity of employment as during the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries and again from the later fifteenth century as is apparent, for example, from the 1492 Coventry ordinances. The women so marginalized at these periods were regularly forced the wrong side of the law in order to survive. Numbers indeed turned to prostitution. Our analysis thus comes full circle, for just as migrant women, generically branded ‘Scot’, were prominent among York’s prostitutes, so were women generically named as ‘Frowe’ among the sex workers of the Southwark stews. The prostitute was the outsider, the migrant, ungoverned woman par excellence. And she was the antitype of the respectable woman who, like the Goodwife’s daughter, was well advised to ‘wone at home’.55

53 For an example of a thatcher apparently assisted by his wife, see BI, CP. E. 70. 54 For a discussion of the later labour legislation see C. Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom and

English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthews (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 21–37. 55 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, p. 152; M. Carlin, Medieval Southwark (London, 1996), pp. 211–12; The Good Wife, ed. Mustanoja, p. 199 (line 73).

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances Helen Cooper

The topic of ‘youth’ suggests a natural connection with good advice: the older generation seem to find it irresistible to advise the young. In romances, the giving of advice often takes a very specific form. The young person – most often male, and usually the hero too – has just reached the point where he is about to leave his own family, the familiar society in which he has been brought up. At the very moment at which he reaches the threshold, he is stopped and given what sometimes amounts to several pages of good advice on how to conduct himself in the outside world. The precision of the convention can be seen with particular clarity in a late but thoroughly familiar example: Polonius’s advice to the departing Laertes in Hamlet. The way in which the giving of advice disrupts the schedule for departure is here made explicit to the point of parody: Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard, for shame, The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail, And you are stayed for. I.iii.55–7

But despite this hurry, Polonius still insists on giving his son ‘these few precepts in thy memory’, which indeed make up one of the longer speeches of the play. As advice goes, Polonius’s is not at all bad: it amounts to a fairly comprehensive economic, social and moral survival kit for a young gentleman: don’t borrow or lend money; instructions on dress codes; ‘to thine own self be true’. As such, it constitutes a nice mix of the pragmatic and the ideal. Just the same kind of pattern is found extensively in romances, and especially in late romances. The Hamlet example is also a reminder, however, that the giving of advice is not as straightforward a topos as it might appear at first sight. It is very rare, in fact, for there not to be something odd about it. In this instance, the whole episode invites the basic question of why the passage exists at all. Why, so far as Polonius is concerned, should he hold up the ship? Why, even more pressingly, should Shakespeare hold up the action, for a passage that appears completely irrelevant to the play? If it is done for the sake of characterization, it is extraordinarily clumsy: Shakespeare has ways of drawing character that do not require the action to be halted for so many lines. In romances too, the deployment of the topos often raises more questions than it solves, and 101

Helen Cooper appears at odds with what the author seems to be doing in the rest of the work. Advice to the young is not, indeed, an easy topos to fit into a romance. A motif far more commonly connected with the infant hero is that he should be a foundling: cast away or lost at birth, to be fostered by a bear or a herdsman or a Lady of the Lake. It is almost one of the anthropological definitions of the hero that he should be reared outside his own family, in peculiarly special or unpromising circumstances.1 There are so many such heroes that exemplification becomes redundant: one might mention Arthur and Horn from the early Middle Ages, William of Palerne from the middle, Valentine and Orson from the end, and beyond those characters as varied as Spenser’s Redcross Knight, Shakespeare’s Pastorella and Dickens’ Oliver Twist. This has the result that the two motifs that can be associated with infant romance heroes, of being given advice or being reared as foundlings, are largely exclusive or complementary – that is, the heroes in question constitute two different groups: they are either abandoned, or advised, but very rarely both. One simple narrative reason for this is that good advice is almost always given by parents, as it is in the case of Laertes. Even if it is given by a guardian, that still presupposes some kind of care: a domestic environment, some moral or educational background, such as the foundling hero will not necessarily enjoy. Just occasionally the good advice will be given by hermits, and these do sometimes advise foundlings or those away from parental or familial care. But essentially, foundlings are out in the world on their own from the start, whereas youths who receive advice are about to set out from their homes into the world: the giving of advice marks a moment of transition, almost part of a rite of passage for the youngster passing from boyhood to manhood.2 His parents will typically equip him for the journey that lies ahead of him with money, horses and instructions, three essential requirements for making good in the larger world. In both groups, however, the abandoned and the advised, heroism is almost always innate: it shows from birth. Romance heroes may not go in for such extreme exploits as Hercules’ serpent-killing in his cradle, but they are marked out as special even before they have done anything significant to prove it. It is the beauty of the infant Horn that stops the Saracen invaders from killing him.3 Tor, supposedly the son of a cowherd, refuses to do

1 2

3

See W. Butler, The Myth of the Hero (London, 1979), pp. 28–30. There was no fixed age for such a transition: see K. Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 205–48, for an indication of the range of possible ages. Michael Mitterauer fixes the moment of transition at whatever point the young man leaves home (A History of Youth, trans. G. Dunphy (Oxford, 1992), p. 59). Cf. R. Wall, ‘Leaving Home and the Process of Household Formation in PreIndustrial England’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 77–101. King Horn lines 81–8, in Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance, ed. J. Fellows (London, 1993). The Anglo-Norman version makes Horn’s beauty the key motif of its opening two laisses: The Romance of Horn by Thomas, ed. M. K. Pope,

102

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances anything but play with javelins and watch knights in combat.4 Perceval, raised by his aristocratic mother but in complete social isolation from the court and from any model of chivalry, intuitively senses his own destiny as soon as he first lays eyes on a knight.5 Malory’s Gareth, who does at least know who he is even though nobody else does, is already supreme by the time he embarks on his first adventure: after an initial encounter with Sir Kay, the first significant fight of his career is against Sir Lancelot, in a combat which to Gareth is a little healthy exercise against a useful sparring partner – ‘hit doth me good to fele youre myght’ – but makes Lancelot ‘dred hymself to be shamed’.6 In that respect the life of the hero is analogous to the life of a saint: for both, the outlines of their biographies are fixed, and all an author need do is to fill in individualizing details for his particular protagonist. For saints likewise typically show their sanctity from birth, for instance by refusing to suckle on Fridays; the boy at the centre of the Prioress’s Tale has the fullest devotion to the Virgin by the time he is seven years old. Virgin martyrs are typically around fourteen years of age, and their stories often communicate a sense of growing up similar to the romances, even though where the young hero is setting out from his home into the world, the saint is departing from this world to the next. There is no pretence in the case of the saints, however, that they need advice. The saint, indeed, is often defined by his or her refusal to listen to just the kind of prudential, pragmatic common sense that a parent would give. Yet romance heroes are just as clearly destined for heroism from birth, and therefore giving them advice is equally redundant so far as the plot is concerned. A hero who needed the advice of his parents would be that much less of a hero. One obvious way around this problem of narrative redundancy would be to argue that the advice is not really aimed at the hero at all: romances serve primarily as an education for their readers, and so the instruction has a clear function so far as the audience of the work is concerned, even if not for the characters within it. The teleology of the narrative has less to do with the ending of the story than with its wider use as a courtesy book or a mirror for princes. Such a belief receives generous support from the prefaces and dedicatory material of the romances themselves, especially from the end of the Middle Ages. The idea that the genre offers a palatable form of instruction in manners, morals and conduct to young people is implicit in the presentation of advice within the texts, and explicit in the insistence that the whole work

4 5

6

Anglo-Norman Text Society 9–10, 12–13 (Oxford, 1955, 1964), lines 8–39; translated by J. Weiss in The Birth of Romance: An Anthology (London, 1992). The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols. (3rd edn revised by P. J. C. Field, Oxford, 1990), p. 100 (III.3 in Caxton’s numbering). Les romans de Chretien de Troyes V: Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), ed. F. Lecoy, Classiques français du moyen age (Paris, 1975) lines 125–493; trans. W. W. Kibler, Chretien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 382–7. Malory, ed. Vinaver, p. 299 (VII.4 in Caxton’s numbering).

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Helen Cooper may be similarly educational.7 Caxton frequently encourages the new class of buyers of the printed book with such advertisements: in the prologue to Blanchardin and Eglantine, for instance, he declares that The storye of hit [is] honeste and joyfull to all vertuouse yong noble gentylmen and wymmen for to rede therin, as for their passe-tyme. For, under correction, in my jugement it is as requesyte otherwhyle to rede in auncyent hystoryes of noble fayttes and valyaunt actes of armes and warre, whiche have ben achyeved in olde tyme of many noble prynces, lordes and knyghtes . . . and in lyke wyse for gentyl yonge ladyes and damoysellys for to lerne to be stedfaste and constaunt in their parte to theym that they ones have promysed and agreed to . . . as it is to occupye theym and studye overmoche in bokes of contemplacion.8

It is widely assumed that despite – or because of – Caxton’s stress on ‘noble gentlemen and women’ in his prefaces to the romances he publishes, it was actually the emerging middle strata (formerly known as the rising middle classes) who had the strongest interest in using them as courtesy books, to train themselves in the culture and manners of the aristocracy: the reading of romances thus becomes an expression of social aspiration. A Caxton romance would thus form a kind of secular companion volume to his pious Book of Good Manners, a compendium of advice to the clergy, ‘the state of lordes temporell and of all chyualrye’, the commons, young people, women and children, in which ‘there is nothyng sayd therin but for the moost parte it is aledged by scrypture of the Byble or ellis by sayeng of holy sayntes, doctours, philosophres, and poetes’ to make ‘the comyn people’ less like ‘beestis brute’, and to bring everyone to ‘good and vertuous maners’.9 The French original of this work was brought to Caxton by a mercer of London named William Pratt, and there was certainly an eager audience for moral and practical advice of this kind: works such as How the good Wife taught her Daughter, How the good Man taught his Son, the less declaratorily named Ratis raving, and a large number of similar works from the sixteenth century, all testify to the appetite for such instructional works.10 Romances are commonly thought to offer a more courtly version of such good advice: instruction in good manners in the sense of sophisticated social behaviour and conversation, even instruction in good rule, and not just in piety, household management, financial prudence and so on. The overt giving of good advice would seem to offer a generous opportunity to fulfil such an aim. This present study might therefore be 7

On romances as literature for children, see for instance B. A. Brockman, ‘Medieval Children and the Poetics of Romance’, in The Portrayal of Life Stages in English Literature 1500–1800, ed. J. Watson (Lewiston and Lampeter, 1989), pp. 93–107, and N. Orme, ‘Children and Literature in Medieval England’, Medium Aevum 68 (1999), 218–46. 8 Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. N. F. Blake (London, 1973), pp. 57–8. 9 Ibid., p. 60; chapter headings from de Worde’s 1507 edition. 10 Cf. F. Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum 71 (1996), 68–86.

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances expected to demonstrate just such a courtesy-book function, and the kind of sociological negotiation that such reading practices suggest. In fact, however, the texts resist such an interpretation: they are both less stereotyped and more interesting than would be compatible with class interests or pedagogy alone. There is a handful of romances that do follow a model of that kind, but there are very few that do so unproblematically. If that were the principal function of the advice they contain, indeed, one would expect the advice to be interchangeable between texts, and therefore also to be largely superfluous to the individual plot. In practice, advice that is not in some way closely integral to the particular story that contains it is rare: it is much more likely to be a coherent and integrated element of each individual romance. Furthermore, the advice may well seem very odd indeed if it is thought of as being directed at the reader or listener rather than at a character within the narrative. This division between character and listener, the diegetic and extradiegetic recipients of advice, shows very clearly if one goes back to one of the earliest and most famous examples of a hero who is given advice on leaving home: Perceval, in Chrétien’s Conte du Graal. He has been brought up knowing no one but his mother and the farmhands, and kept in deliberate ignorance of chivalry. As soon as he has laid eyes on a knight, however, he insists on going to be knighted himself, and when his mother can restrain him no longer she lets him go on his way with a final speech of advice on how he is to conduct himself in the chivalric world: Biaus filz, un san vos vuel aprandre ou il vos fet mout bon antandre. 525–6 Fair son, I want to give you some advice that you would do very well to heed. (trans. Kibler, p. 387)

In particular, he is to help maidens in distress; he is to avoid displeasing the lady he asks for love, from whom he may accept a ring; he is to ask the name of companions he finds himself with; and he should pray to Our Lord in chapel and church. This is all perfectly reasonable advice, and might appear to be as unproblematic, and as obvious, as Polonius’s. But it is precisely there that the problems arise; for while any audience may safely be presumed to know such principles without being told them all over again, Perceval knows altogether too little about the world for the instructions to be of any use to him. His first question shows with particular clarity this disparity between himself and the historical audience of this passage of advice: he wants to know what a church is, – Mere, fet il, que est iglise?

571

And given this background of utter ignorance, the results of the instruction he has been given are appalling: it is indeed advice he would have been much better without. He believes a rich tent to be a chapel, and insists on kissing the lady he finds sleeping there and taking her ring; this results in the extended 105

Helen Cooper maltreatment of the lady by her suspicious lover until a wiser and more experienced Perceval restores her to his favour. His mother’s instructions on the exercise of piety remain useless until they are activated later by further advice from a hermit. Anything conceptual is beyond him: in the free English adaptation of the story, Sir Percyvell of Gales, his mother’s advice includes a recommendation to be ‘of mesure’; when he comes to a hall containing a board spread with food, he accordingly divides the meat and bread carefully in half – ‘How myghte he more of mesure be?’11 Such incidents could perhaps be seen as confirming the courtly knowledge possessed by the audience, but they cannot be taken as constituting any kind of advice to the reader: they are indeed based on the premise that the audience knows better, that Perceval’s gaucheness will be a source of amusement, not a source of edification. Perceval goes through a series of such instructional episodes in the course of his career. His mother is the first of his instructors; the second one of major significance is the knight Gornemant; and the third is a hermit. As instructor figures within romances, these are typical – a parent, a chivalric mentor, a man of religion. Usually, however, they would be found in separate romances: it is rare to have three in a single work. In Perceval’s case, however, he needs them all. His mother’s advice leads to trouble; it has been argued that this is precisely because she is his mother, that he needs rather to break away from the maternal to the chivalric sphere.12 It could certainly be argued that Perceval would have been better off as the foundling variety of hero, but it does not follow from this that his mother’s advice is bad, either in itself or because she is the one to give it. What she says is in many respects identical with the principles of chivalry as embodied, for instance, in the oath sworn by Malory’s knights of the Round Table. If she has failed, it is at an earlier stage altogether, in keeping Perceval in such ignorance that he cannot make use of the advice when she gives it; but that is a given of the story, and is not raised as an issue in itself. She is the transmitter of chivalric values, as a number of other women are in later romances, however inadequate the pupil may on this occasion be.13 It does look at first as if Gornemant will do better as an instructor, not least because he tells Perceval not to keep citing his mother as authority for all his actions. Instead, he gives him a training in the knightly skills of managing a spear and a sword, and tries to make up for the many shortcomings that his pupil still displays. Foremost among the instructions here is not to talk too much; and that, of course, is even more disastrous advice than any his mother gave him, since it leads directly to his failure at the Grail castle. 11 Lines 398, 462, in Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Galles, The Anturs of Arthur, ed.

M. Mills (London, 1992). 12 See D. D. Berkvam, Enfance et maternité dans la littérature française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles

(Paris, 1981), p. 74. 13 To this extent the mother can assume a symbolic role of the kind more often associated

with the father: see S. Kay, ‘Motherhood. The Case of the Epic Family Romance’, in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy, ed. K. Pratt (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 23–36.

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances Le Conte du Graal is a distinctive example of the instruction of the hero, not just because it comes so early in the tradition, but because it was so widely known and therefore influential on later romance authors. The model it offers is not one of giving advice to the audience obliquely through the hero as intermediary, but rather of a way of setting up a story: the advice has far more effect in generating the plot than in improving anyone inside or outside the narrative. Later heroes who, like Perceval, lack all knowledge of society are also likely to get advice that cannot possibly tell the audience anything. This is strikingly exemplified by the Chevelere Assigne, which is essentially more of a foundling story. A queen bears septuplets, who are abducted, abandoned in the forest and raised by a hermit; through the nefarious plotting of a wicked mother-in-law, six of them are turned into swans. Twelve years later, their mother is accused of bestiality and threatened with burning. An angel appears to the hermit to inform him of this, and he, on the angel’s instructions, tells the one remaining uncygnified son that he must fight to defend his mother’s innocence. The child’s ignorance of the larger world is greater even than Perceval’s: his first response on being told what he has to do is to ask ‘what was a moder’.14 His instruction clearly has to start from even more basic first principles than Perceval’s. ‘
e, kanste þou, fader, enforme me . how þat I shalle fy
te?’ ‘Vpon a hors,’ seyde þe heremyte, . ‘as I haue herde seye.’ ‘What beste is þat?’ quod þe chylde . ‘lyonys wylde? Or elles wode? or watur?’ . quod þe chylde þanne. ‘I sey
e neuur none,’ quod þe hermyte . ‘but by þe mater of bokes: They seyn he hath a feyre hedde . & foure lymes hye.’ 212–17

As guidance goes, this is a serious case of the blind leading the blind. It none the less amounts to an essential informational survival kit for the child; and his questions – what is a mother? what is a horse? – are important for locating him, first in his family, then in his chivalric status: circumstances that are the defining ones for romance. Equipped with this minimal information, the boy goes to town and intervenes to save his mother from the fire, offering to fight in her defence. He asks the king to provide him with a horse and armour, and, when he sees what they look like, he further requests a word with one of the king’s best and most trusted men: a chivalric mentor, in fact, on the model of Gornemant. The knight takes the boy aside, and the child asks him what all the equipment is for. There follows basic instruction in the techniques of chivalric combat: he is to attack first with the spear, then change to the sword and keep on hitting his opponent with the edge until he has overcome him, whereupon he should cut off head. In his case, unlike Perceval’s, the advice from his guardian and his mentor is enough: he does indeed win the combat and save his mother, with the corollary that the identity of the children is discovered

14 The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, ed. H. H. Gibbs, EETS ES 6 (1868), 210.

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Helen Cooper and five of the other six are converted back into human form (in English, the sixth has to wait for his own transformation for over a century, until the extension of the story in a prose version).15 Like all good heroes, Enyas, as he is christened in the course of the story (Elyas or Helyas in other versions), possesses innate knightly virtue, but it has to be triggered by enabling instruction and good advice: it may be proof of his royal birth that he succeeds, but he still cannot act from nothing. In both the Conte du Graal and the Chevelere Assigne, the basic motif of the story is that of the innocent abroad, and the advice is accordingly very elementary indeed: so much so as to render deeply improbable the suggestion by one critic that the ‘elementary instruction given Enyas in arms permits the speculation that the poem may have been prepared as instruction for boys of about Enyas’ age’.16 The nature of the advice given varies, not with the nature of the audience, but with the requirements of the particular story. The Chevelere Assigne is the simplest, the instruction being the minimum necessary for the release of Enyas’s good qualities. The case of Perceval is more complex. The instruction is important for the plot – it is his misunderstandings that generate the key events of the narrative – but it is not a plot device alone: a major point of the work is the inadequacy of advice as such. What Perceval is told is perfectly reasonable; but he has to learn, not just to understand or obey what he is told, but how to go beyond advice altogether. The crucial lesson he has to learn is to follow his instincts, not his instructions: to ask the question in the Grail castle when his heart tells him to, whatever his mentor’s warnings against talking too much. The Conte du Graal is a romance about how instruction is not enough. One might contrast a knight who gets it right: in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the young Gawain, about to set out on what seems to be one of the earliest adventures of the Arthurian court, receives a chorus of advice from his more sensible fellows that he should not go; setting out again from Bertilak’s castle, he is advised to go off in a different direction while he still can. He insists instead on following the chivalric imperative – ‘What may mon do bot fonde?’17 – and in due course, for all his failure, is adjudged as a pearl beside white peas compared with other knights. In these and other romances where instructional episodes appear, the manner in which the advice is given or acted on serves to some degree to define what the particular romance is doing. The presentation of ideal knighthood may be a part of this. The young hero of the Prose Lancelot, for instance, preparing to leave the tutelage of the Lady of the Lake for Arthur’s court, is

15 A French prose version was printed in 1504; an English translation appeared in 1512 as

Helyas, the Knight of the Swanne (the 1550 edition is reprinted in Early English Prose Romances, ed. W. J. Thoms (revd and enlarged edn, London, 1907), pp. 691–784). 16 R. M. Lumiansky, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1350, ed. J. B. Severs, I: Romances (New Haven, 1967), p. 103. 17 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn revd N. Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 565.

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances instructed by her on the symbolic nature of the knight’s arms as protection of the Holy Church. The passage is clearly intended to confirm Lancelot’s innate excellence, to mark him out as an exponent of veraie chevalerie; and perhaps even to recuperate the idea of the woman as transmitter of chivalric values in the wake of the Conte du Graal.18 There seems to be no element of incipient irony over his future religious failure. If excellence is not innate, then advice will not help: where there is no chivalric intuition to be brought into consciousness, then nothing a parent says can make any difference. This is the principle that drives the strange Middle High German tale of Helmbrecht, written in the late thirteenth century by Wernher der Gartenære.19 This concerns a young man of high ambition, whose social aspiration is given the emblematic form of a beautiful cloak embroidered all over with the stories of romance heroes. He is, however, merely a farmer’s son; and when he determines to leave home to make his way at court, he does so against all his father’s anxious advice to stay in his own station as a ploughman. He is not, however, a Perceval or a Tor, and the consequences for Helmbrecht are disastrous: he joins a band of brigands, is captured and blinded, rejected by his father, and finally hanged. The final lines of the tale stress the importance for youth to listen to good advice, not least that of parents. The lines are addressed out to the wider world: Helmbrecht is not a romance, whatever delusions to that effect its hero may have, but a cautionary tale, perhaps for those who have been reading Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (which replicates the advice passage from Chrétien)20 and imagine that they can pursue a similar career from the fields to romance glory. Other works set up to look like romances also have as their primary aim the instruction of the reader rather than the hero, but without containing such an implied attack on the fantasy element of the genre on which they draw. The thirteenth-century polymath and missionary Ramon Llull wrote two such works in Catalan, both of which were translated for wider consumption. The best known was the Book of the Order of Chivalry, in which an aged knight retires from the world to become a hermit; a squire on his way to seek knighthood passes by the hermitage, and the knight-hermit gives him a book containing instructions on chivalry – in other words, this same book that the reader is holding or hearing: the advice becomes explicitly extradiegetic, aimed outside the narrative rather than to a character within it. The many translations of the work included one into Scots by Sir Gilbert Hay, and one by

18 Lancelot do Lac: The Non-cyclic Old French Prose Romance, ed. E. Kennedy, 2 vols. (Oxford,

1980), I.141–7 (quotation from p. 145), II.131. 19 Wernher der Gartenære: Helmbrecht, ed. F. Panzer, Altdeutsche Textbiblothek (Tübingen,

1974). There is a translation by B. Murdoch in The Dedalus Book of Medieval Literature: The Grin of the Gargoyle (Sawtry, 1995), pp. 86–138. 20 Wolfram von Eschenbach: Parzival, ed. K. Lachmann, 7th edn revd E. Hartl (Berlin, 1952), III.127 (trans. H. M. Mustard and C. E. Passage (New York, 1961)).

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Helen Cooper Caxton into English; but Caxton, whether ingenuously or not, emphasises its social exclusiveness: Whiche book is not requysyte to every comyn man to have, but to noble gentylmen that by their vertu entende to come and entre into the noble ordre of chyvalry.21

Caxton, indeed, regards the reading of romance as an essential element in chivalric self-modelling – Rede the noble volumes of Saynt Graal, of Lancelot, of Galaad, of Trystram, of Perse Forest, of Percyval, of Gawayn and many mo

– but it is a chivalric modelling aimed specifically at the young, just as within the work it is a squire who is given the book. Caxton ends his epilogue with an appeal to the king (Richard III) to commaunde this book to be had and redde unto other yong lordes, knyghtes and gentylmen within this royaume that the noble ordre of chyvalrye be herafter better used and honoured than hit hath ben in late dayes passed. (p. 127)

The second example of Llull’s quasi-romances comes closer to romance proper in that, rather than just inventing a single episode to provide a narrative context for the giving of advice to the squire, it gives a full biography of just such a young gentleman, who is named Blanquerna.22 The work starts in the manner of many romances with the enfance of the protagonist, which here includes guidelines for the proper upbringing of such a child, the appropriate diet, education and so on. But at the moment when the romance model would invite the hero to leave home to prove himself in the chivalric world outside, Blanquerna instead rejects that world and his inheritance for a life of religion. Llull here turns the traditional pattern upside down: the advice Blanquerna’s parents give him at this point, which consists of a strenuous attempt to dissuade him from such a decision, is simply wrong. Instead, he teaches his parents about the true nature of his religious vocation; and he also inspires the young woman who had been intended as his bride, named Natana, to follow his example. The actual moment of his parting from his parents is given over to prayers rather than to secular instruction. Natana herself becomes a nun and in due course an abbess; Blanquerna becomes first a monk, then successively an abbot, the pope, and a hermit. Each stage of advancement is

21 From the epilogue; ed. Blake, Caxton’s Own Prose, p. 126. There is an edition of the whole

work by A. T. P. Byles, The Book of the Ordre of Chivalry, translated by William Caxton, EETS OS 168 (1926). 22 R. Lull, Blanquerna, trans. E. A. Peers (London, 1926). A Castilian version of the original was printed in 1521 (ed. M. Menéndez Pelayo, Biblioteca de filósofos españoles (Madrid, 1929)).

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances accompanied by – or rather, is the excuse for – extensive teaching on Llull’s part: the work doubles as a handbook on all kinds of useful topics, including Christian doctrine, ecclesiastical administration, and the first recorded account of an electoral system by transferable vote that is proof against vote-rigging.23 There is no doubt that one of Llull’s aims was to incite young people to follow the model of Blanquerna and his lady; but he manages to combine this with a sufficient element of subversion to stop the work dying in its tracks. It is not at all clear, for instance, that the book would be reading recommended by parents. Both Blanquerna and Natana act against their parents’ wishes, indeed against their orders. Blanquerna himself takes on the role of adviser, both of his parents, and of Natana. His parents are initially devastated by his refusal of the social role they had planned for him; Natana’s relatives go even further, attempting to smash up the nunnery to which she has retreated. As a model of how parents should counsel their children, or how children should obey their parents, the work is strongly counter-exemplary. The romance-style opening of the work is indeed misleading, for Llull is hardly supporting middle-class or feudal or chivalric values; it may well be for that reason that the work was never as popular as The Book of the Order of Chivalry.24 The advice it contains is the very point of Blanquerna: it closes with the hermit-protagonist giving this same book to a penitent jester to take through the world to read aloud for the increase of devotion. Its fifth section consists of two self-contained works, an Art of Contemplation and the ‘Book of the Lover and the Beloved’, which frequently circulated independently.25 Such an enclosure of one work of advice within another was a practice adopted by other writers on occasion. The slightly earlier French writer Robert de Blois uses his Arthurian romance Beaudous as an excuse to reissue most of his extensive output of didactic works through the mouth of the hero’s mother, as she, like Perceval’s mother, sends her son out from his secluded early life to the chivalric world.26 The advice takes up considerably more space than all the rest of the romance put together, and includes advice to princes and two

23 See I. S. McLean and J. London, ‘Ramon Lull and the Theory of Voting’, Studia Lulliana

32.1 (1992), 21–37. 24 There is no Middle English version, but it was translated into French within twenty years

of its original composition (1283–6, translated before 1306: see B. Woledge, Bibliographie des romans et nouvelles en prose français antérieures à 1500 and its Supplement (Geneva, 1954, 1975), no. 27, Blaquerna. 25 See the bibliography of manuscripts in Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232–1316), ed. and trans. A. Bonner (Princeton, 1985), II.1253–5. 26 Robert von Blois: Sämmtliche Werke, ed. J. Ulrich, 3 vols. (1889–95, repr. Geneva, 1978), 1.iv (extracted from after line 502 of the main text). The frame narrative of Beaudous is given in vol. 1, with an account of the inserted material on pp. ix–xv; full texts are given in vols. 2 and 3. I am most grateful to Jane Gilbert for calling my attention to the work and for allowing me to see a copy of her paper written for the Leeds Medieval Conference, July 1995.

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Helen Cooper complete treatises on conduct addressed to women: Beaudous, in fact, can never really be regarded as a plausible recipient for it even within the narrative. The object here is unquestionably to instruct the reader or listener, as the author admits at the start through the mother’s mouth: Je nel dis pas sanz plus por toi, Mais por touz autres; car je doi Voloir a chascun ke cis sens Puist profitier a toutes gens. I do not say all this for yourself alone, but for all others, as I would wish that this instruction might be of value to everybody.

Beaudous’ own primary function is as the ideal reader-surrogate, who listens to the advice and acts on it; he is accordingly perfect, and, it is universally agreed, utterly devoid of interest. The work does show, however, how deeply incompatible the functions of instruction to the hero and instruction to the reader actually are. Advice successfully given and taken kills the story. The advice to women in Beaudous is addressed through a male listener within the narrative. Although women appear so frequently as advisers, it is unusual for a young woman to be the recipient of such advice within a romance, though there are some notable examples: Natana herself, or, in rather different fashion, the Lavine of the Roman d’Eneas. Lavine’s mother expounds to her the nature and symptoms of love; and although Lavine insists that she will never allow herself to undergo such misery, she none the less finds the symptoms exactly replicated in herself after she lays eyes on Eneas.27 If Lavine was wrong to think she could be proof against love, however, that translation of theory into experience also shows the adviser to be wrong, for her mother is very insistent that the man for whom Lavine should feel such pangs is Turnus, not Eneas. Lavine can only fulfil her own and Eneas’s destiny, and the vector of the romance itself, by disobeying the parent who instructs her. Lavine and Natana must both recognize a personal imperative and an overriding authority – of the gods or of God – that requires as its corollary a rebellion against those parents who cannot comprehend the new role to which their daughter is called. There are occasional examples of advice to women offered under circumstances parallel to those of the male heroes, and which is both good in itself and acceptable both to its recipient within the romance and to its women readers. There is a distinctive English example in William of Palerne, a fourteenth-century alliterative romance modelled on a French original. This is essentially a foundling story, and therefore one where the structure militates against the giving of advice: William must make his own way in the world

27 Eneas, roman du XIIe siècle, ed. J. J. Salverda de Grave, Classiques français du moyen age

44, 62 (Paris, 1925, 1929), 7857–8334; trans. J. A. Yunck, Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance (New York and London, 1974), pp. 209–20.

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances without the support and advice of parents. He is raised by a cowherd, then fostered by the emperor, and falls in love with his daughter Melior; he and Melior then elope disguised as white bears, which they find less than fully successful as camouflage. William eventually finds his true family (a royal one, of course) and is reconciled to the emperor, who is invited to their wedding. It is as the emperor is leaving after the wedding and saying farewell to his daughter that he offers her advice. In this case it is he who is literally setting out and leaving her; but the moment none the less corresponds to the time when young women with less exciting life histories leave their own homes for a new life in their husbands’ households, and it is that rite of passage that he addresses. She has left home once illicitly; now, she is going with her father’s blessing, and the advice is given as a sign that father and daughter are reconciled, that this new departure from him is authorized, and that she is now entering on her proper adult social role. The advice given here is accordingly valid beyond the text itself: Now, dere dou
ter, I þe preie, do bi mi rede. Lok þou bere þe buxumli, and be god and hende, konnyng and kurtes, to komwne and to grete. Be meke and mercyabul to men þat þe serve, and be lel to þi lord, and þis ladi after þat is his menskful moder, and moche þow hire love, and alle þe lordes of þis londe love wel after. And loke, dou
ter, bi þi lif, as þow me lovest dere, þat never þe pore porayle be piled for þi sake, ne taxed to taliage; but tentyfli þow help þat al þis lond be lad in lawe as it ou
t . . . Stifli loke þow strive for state of holi cherche, to meyntene it manli on alle maner wise. Gif gretli of þi god for Goddes love of heven . . .28

As good advice, this is appropriate both to the recipient within the narrative and to any comparable reader; but it is an interesting question as to how many of its readers would be sufficiently comparable. This is a female counterpart to regiminal advice, a mirror for princesses. One does not have to be royal to mitigate heavy taxes (there were plenty of local impositions over which a lady might be able to intervene), but much of the instruction is aimed over the heads of the likely immediate audience to those who wield political power: it is not the kind of thing that any father could say to any daughter. The translation of the romance from the original French was commissioned by Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, so political advice is not completely

28 William of Palerne, ed. G. H. V. Bunt (Groningen, 1985), 5115–25, 5128–9; for the original

(c. 1200?), which is less developed at this point than the English, see Guillaume de Palerne, ed. H. Michelaut, SATF (Paris, 1876), 9019–36. On the different presentations of male and female education in medieval French literature, see Berkvam, Enfance, pp. 77–80.

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Helen Cooper out of place; but even here, its narrative function is more important than its pedagogical use. It matters within the romance, not in the Conte du Graal sense of initiating many of the plot complications, but as something that draws those complications back into simplicity for the close. The father’s good advice here functions as a kind of anti-foundling topos: Melior may have eloped with her unknown lover, but at this stage of the story parental bonds are rediscovered and reasserted. Good advice is a part of good parenting, and is one of the most valuable gifts a child can be given. William of Palerne is a remarkably warm romance: everybody is good, even the werewolf, or at worst converted back from misguided ways. The emperor’s education of his daughter is a part of that, as he commits her into her husband’s keeping with the instruction that will make her a good wife and a good queen. This is clearly a patriarchal act as well as a paternal one; but it also has to do with a genealogical and political context, the passing down of rule that is both legitimate and responsible from one generation to the next. The opposition of the motifs of foundlings and advised heroes becomes very clear in William of Palerne. William, as a foundling, has to find his own spark of nobility within himself that will bring him pre-eminence in the chivalric sphere. Melior, the daughter who is known, is given advice when her rift with her family is healed. The same division of motifs into the foundling and the dynastic is found in the prose Helyas, the Knight of the Swan, which extends the story of the Chevelere Assigne into the following generations. The youngsters instructed here are the grandsons of the Knight of the Swan, key among them being Godfrey of Bouillon, who as a historical figure was to be a leader of the First Crusade and first king of Jerusalem; and they are given the same kind of good advice by their mother as is given to Melior by her father. The instruction here extends into a whole programme of education, though the narrative structure concludes that programme with the fifteen-year-old Godfrey’s leaving home. With this new generation of protagonists, the originary legend for the house of Bouillon crosses the border into something resembling history; and a comparable shift takes place in the nature of the advice given, from the elementary instruction given by the hermit and the knight to instruction such as can be profitably related to the reader’s own social environment. For much of this, too, is good advice that extends its validity beyond the text, instruction that reinforces social and ideological norms: love and honour God and the Church; do not oppress your subjects; support widows and orphans. It is backed up, however, with injunctions to virtue that come from the other side of the romance: the children are to remember their miraculous ancestry and the intervention of an angel into their grandfather’s life. The mother’s advice functions as a nexus in which piety, legend, virtue and history combine to offer a multiple legitimation of a dynasty. Advice has a somewhat similar role to play in Melusine, the dynastic romance of the founding of the house of Lusignan, though with the pious elements downplayed. The good ruler is still to honour God and defend the 114

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances Church, but in this story the element of miracle is replaced by an element of fairy, since Melusine has a fairy mother and is herself under the curse of turning into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. The legend was put into the form of a prose romance in French in the late fourteenth century by Jean d’Arras, and translated into English a century later.29 Melusine gives birth to eight sons, and as they go off into the world she instructs them in how to act, in a thoroughly Polonius-like way.30 When Melusine’s eldest and third sons, Urian and Guyon, reach their teens and ask permission to leave home to fight the Turks, she provides an abundance of men, arms, ships and provisions for them. They load up and are all ready to leave; ‘And Raymondin and Melusyne conueyed theire children vnto the see.’ They do not weigh anchor, however, until four pages later, the interim being filled with Melusine’s good advice. She starts by giving them each a ring to protect them against enchantment (this being something that many good romance mothers do, for instance Floris’s in Floris and Blanchefleur; it is not necessarily linked with her fairy connections). She then gives them a series of precepts in their memory such as will turn them into good knights and good rulers. They are to attend Mass, honour God and defend the Church; to aid widows, orphans, and ladies and maidens generally; to be courteous to everyone, and generous where the recipient is worthy; and to fulfil promises without delay, ‘for long tarrying quencheth much the virtue of the gift’. They should not take counsel from flatterers or biased sources, and should avoid borrowing (‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’, as Polonius put it) and repay any loan fast. All this is followed up with political instruction in good government: they should keep an eye on their people, especially if they are inclined towards rebelliousness; avoid heavy taxation; take good advice; and administer justice rightfully. Finally comes some military advice: be wary of enemies; be courageous, and split any booty with their followers; and, interestingly, avoid treaties that have too much small print. This is certainly a comprehensive programme for conducting one’s life, but 29 Jean d’Arras: Melusine, ed. L. Stouff (1932; repr. Geneva, 1974); Melusine, ed. A. K. Donald,

EETS ES 68 (1895). The passages of advice are on pp. 110–14 and 190–1 of Donald’s edition; quotations from pp. 110, 191. See also Stouff’s edition pp. 84–8, 152–4; the second passage is more than doubled in length in two manuscripts. 30 So like Polonius, indeed, that one wonders if there might be a direct connection. Early sixteenth-century moralists complained about the excessive popularity of Melusine (see J. L. Vives, De institutione foeminae Christianae (Antwerp, 1524), sig. Ciii, and R. Hyrd’s enhanced translation, A very frvteful and pleasant boke callyd the Instrvction of a Christen woman, cap. 5; there were numerous editions in the sixteenth century). The English version of Melusine was printed in 1510; the fact that this survives only in fragments of a single copy invites the speculation that other unrecorded editions were read to destruction. It would indeed be unusual among English prose romances if it had not been reprinted. It is thus by no means impossible that Shakespeare could have read it in the course of a misspent youth – a youth which, I suspect, was rather more devoted to the reading of black-letter medieval romances, the Elizabethan equivalent of pulp fiction, than is generally allowed.

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Helen Cooper one wonders again how useful it would be to what proportion of its readers. Jean d’Arras indicates that his version was commissioned by Marie duchess of Bar, Jean duke of Berry and the earl of Shrewsbury, and if that is the immediate readership he has in mind then the regiminal advice would indeed be appropriate. Most of Melusine’s instruction, however, consists of general principles every bit as platitudinous as such advice usually is (Polonius’s included). Jean does not, however, ignore the narrative context of these passages. When it comes to the turn of her younger sons to leave for the outer world, her advice has less to do with rule. They are to love God, be courteous, not be credulous, and treat their followers well; and finally, they are, like Laertes, to be true to themselves – ‘I ne wot nat what I shuld more saye to you, but that ye kepe euer trouthe in all your dedes and affayres.’ The quantity of advice is certainly generous, to the point where it distracts from the smooth running of the plot; and indeed it is cut out of the rhymed versions, both French and English, presumably because it was not what readers were expected to be most interested in. As to the question of whether all this advice works, whether the sons actually profit from it – one can at least say that Melusine does a great deal better for her children than Perceval’s mother. These four sons all do well, though it never becomes an issue whether their success has anything to do with the advice they are given or not; it does not become part of the plot, as it does in the Conte du Graal. The sixth son, however, Geoffrey, is not given any such teaching before he embarks on his own career, and that turns out to contain some appalling episodes. He is a man of great fierceness, which may be appropriate for his enemies, but it also leads him to fire the monastery in which his younger brother, the seventh son, has become a monk. If there is any moral to the effect that he should have been advised as his brothers were, it is never stated. The elaboration of the advice given in Melusine is typical of the development of romance in the fifteenth century, the period when Llull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry enjoyed its greatest popularity. Even the most seemingly detachable and sound advice, however, continues to be problematic; and two final examples will illustrate how such problems emerge. These examples move away from the more exotic settings of romance towards chivalric biography. Most romances have an element of knightly biography about them, in that they tell part or all of the life of the hero; but these fifteenth-century works are both loosely based on the lives of real people. The more historical of them is the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, which was composed around 1470, some twenty years after Jacques de Lalaing himself had died. Jacques led the life of a knight errant, travelling around Europe challenging anyone who would take him on; he was widely regarded as a living exemplar of chivalry (though not universally: the Church, with its opposition to tournaments, did not approve). The Livre des faits is one of a number of fifteenth-century Burgundian works designed to fashion the young in chivalry, among the others being an historical example of advice 116

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances from father to son.31 According to the Livre, Jacques’ virtues showed early, as they do for every hero of romance, and he was chosen by the duke of Burgundy as a companion to his son. Jacques prepares to leave home early in the morning for the Burgundian court; before he goes, his parents take him aside into a private room, and there follow eleven pages of advice from his father, spoken ‘au long et a loisir’ until dinner time is reached.32 The most important thing in life, his father tells him, is to avoid vice, the nature of which he therefore proceeds to expound: the instruction here consists solely of an analysis of the seven deadly sins as they might be committed by a lover. The lover, for instance, must flee pride if he wishes to acquire the grace of his lady, and so on. The advice given in other romances frequently juxtaposes the pious and the worldly; here, the two are inextricably fused. If this is puzzling, the puzzlement is compounded by reading the work on which this passage draws, to a large extent word for word. Its model was another chivalric biography, Jehan de Saintré, written some fifteen years earlier by Antoine de la Sale, who at a previous stage of his career had been tutor to the son of René of Anjou.33 Jean de Saintré too was a real person, who had lived around a century earlier (c. 1320–68); he was celebrated by Froissart as being accounted the best and most valiant knight in France. Antoine de la Sale, however, was not particularly concerned with retelling his actual biography; Jacques de Lalaing had only recently died at the time he was writing, and Antoine borrows a good many of Jacques’ exploits to attach to his own hero. Arguably, however, it is a work that finishes up as an anti-romance. Jehan’s potential for being a hero emerges when he is thirteen, and a page in the household of the French king. He is talent-spotted by a young widowed lady who is determined to train him up in prowess; she takes him under her wing, and proceeds to provide him with a generous mixture of advice and material help. It is not unprecedented for a lady who is not the hero’s mother to take on the role of mentor – Lancelot, for instance, is reared by the Lady of the Lake; but the widow assigns herself more the role of Guinevere with regard to Jehan. She announces herself to be his lady-love, and insists that they meet by deceit, by means of covert assignations arranged by secret signs. The first session of extensive advice that she gives him is devoted to an exposition of the seven deadly sins of the lover, the passage lifted wholesale by the author of the Livre des faits. This is followed up by further instruction of every kind, for instance that one should attend Mass faithfully and keep one’s nails

31 This is the Enseignements paternels of G. de Lannoy (in Oeuvres de Ghillebert de Lannoy, ed.

C. Potvin (Louvain, 1878), pp. 447–72). The Burgundian works are discussed by M. Vale, War and Chivalry (London, 1981), pp. 14–32. 32 Oeuvres de Georges Chastellain, ed. K. de Lettenhove, vol. 8 (Paris, 1866), pp. 14–25. The attribution to Chastellain is very uncertain: see Woledge, Bibliographie, no. 83. 33 Jean de Saintré, ed. J. Misrahi and C. A. Knudson, Textes littéraires français (Geneva, 1965); there is a modern English translation, Little John of Saintré, trans. I. Gray (London, 1931).

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Helen Cooper clean. Later, when her pupil-lover is older, she instructs him in how to take on an emprise, a chivalric pas d’armes. Under her direction, Jehan embarks on a dazzling chivalric career, which culminates in a crusade in Prussia in the course of which he somewhat implausibly kills the Grand Turk. Jehan de Saintré is a work in which the giving of advice is very extensive indeed. The process does not happen in a single bout as the hero reaches the threshold, but goes on for years. The work therefore looks at first like the most extensive of the fictions that could be deployed as courtesy-books, and it is indeed frequently described as such by commentators: it contains abundant instruction in prowess and courtesy, in every means of being gracieux. But the full development of the story suggests that something radically different is going on alongside this. By the time Jehan reaches the age of twenty or so, he is having a full-scale affair with the widow; and in such a markedly realistic mode, this leaves a nasty flavour, which gets more distasteful as the story progresses. Jehan eventually decides to undertake a further chivalric emprise on his own initiative, and the lady is furious – any indication of independence from him is a violation of her own possessiveness. She retreats to her estates, where she starts a passionate affair with a local abbot, ignoring all the concerned letters sent her by the queen over her absence from court. When Jehan returns, she refuses to have anything to do with him. The abbot, realizing that Jehan is a rival, forces him to take part in a wrestling match with him, which the abbot wins. Jehan retaliates by tricking the abbot into trying on a suit of armour, then demands a full armed combat, which he, of course, wins. He is about to kill him when all the texts that forbid the killing of clergy pass through his mind, so he settles instead for stabbing the abbot with his long dagger through his cheeks and tongue. The lady has been watching all this, wearing a blue girdle; Jehan removes it from her, since she has no right to wear the colour of faithfulness. Both return, separately, to the court, and Jehan tells the story as a kind of exemplary demande d’amour before the queen and her assembled ladies, including his own, to ask what the faithless mistress deserves. Everybody except the widow condemns the lady of the story vociferously; only she herself, still unidentified to the others, remains silent. When Jehan demands an answer from her, she replies that the knight was discourteous to take the girdle. Jehan immediately takes it from his sleeve and returns it to her, saying that he will not be malgracieux.34 Is Jehan de Saintré a courtesy book? The answer must be yes, in so far as that answer applies to Jehan himself within the narrative; but the story as a whole, and its function in relation to the reader, opposes such a reading. The lady herself is an example of how not to act. She may be very good at giving precepts, but her own actions amount to a denial of her teaching. She is guilty

34 Ed. Misrahi and Knudson, p. 307; trans. Gray, p. 320.

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Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances of all those seven deadly sins against love: she shows pride in her belief that she can control another human being; anger at his independence; avarice in her possessiveness; jealousy of his freedom; sloth in her neglect of duty to the queen; gluttony, in a satiric scene in which she accepts ‘un peu de collacion’ from the abbot, in fact a large feast, even though she is not hungry; and lechery throughout.35 The extensive programme of advice put into her mouth is therefore rendered deeply problematic, and raises questions as to who is being addressed over and behind Jehan himself, what the implied audience is and what kind of message they are supposed to receive. If the notional readers are young men, the message of the whole story would seem to be to beware of women; if they are readers of other romances, to beware of Guinevere figures; if they are themselves in a position to give advice, to follow their own precepts. But the work does in fact give an explicit moral at the end, and it is not any of those, nor is it addressed to Jehan-type figures learning courtesy. Instead, Antoine urges ‘toutes dames et damoiselles, bourgeoises et autres’ (the feminine genders should be noted) to learn by the example of the lady the dangers of druerie, and to avoid affairs – presumably with abbots, though perhaps with young men too: the author does not specify.36 Such diverse uses of the motif of advising the young are not susceptible of any single or easy conclusion. Each usage offers its own moral within the particular story within which it occurs, but even such individual morals may be very hard to untangle, and may not accord with conventional morality when one has untangled them. In perhaps the most famous instance, in the Conte du Graal, the moral would seem to be ‘Do what I mean, not what I say’; the instruction offered makes life in the outside world more, not less, difficult, and moreover it runs counter to Perceval’s own courtly and chivalric intuitions. It is, unquestionably, advice he would be better off without. It is, moreover, useless as surrogate advice to the audience; and the circumstances of its being given, with Perceval’s disobeying his mother’s wishes in leaving at all, signally fails to convey the message that one might expect parents to wish their children to imbibe. The mother is wrong, but none the less the pattern offered, of the young rebelling against their parents, is a very common one. For Perceval the imperatives of chivalry, for Lavine the imperative of love, for Blanquerna the imperative of God, override their duty to their parents. These are not stories one would expect to find used by those in authority – parents, tutors – as instruction for young people in their own charge. The frequency with which the giving of advice is accompanied by rebellion does however indicate why Melior is significant: she is allowed to receive parental advice after her elopement, as a sign of her father’s acceptance of the rightness of her rebellion, and to send her into her new social role with a blessing that confirms the patrilinear succession of good rule. The pressure behind the advice of the 35 Ed. Misrahi and Knudson, p. 252; trans. Gray, p. 270. 36 Ibid.

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Helen Cooper Chevelere Assigne is that the younger generation can recoup the evils and misprisions of the older: the minimal instruction received by Eneas is sufficient to enable his inherent prowess to emerge and triumph, and therefore for him to refound the proper relationship of king and queen, husband and wife, misled ruler and innocent accused, and with that the whole line of succession, in an inversion of authority and experience – child over father, the boy raised in isolation over the practised fighter – as extreme as Pearl or the ceremonies for the Feast of the Innocents. The more extended passages of advice that are not so intricately linked to the progress of the plot may be less problematic. Melusine’s advice to her sons, for instance, remains good advice despite her connections with fairy and her shape-shifting. The more extended and apparently equally detachable advice of Jehan de Saintré is potentially much more compromised by the quality of its giver and her counter-example of bad action. The hindsight offered by the later part of the work does not deprive the advice of all its value (as its reuse in the Livre des faits shows), but it does cleave apart knowledge of good (the instruction) from its practice (the instructor): as Chaucer’s Pardoner notes, one can be vicious and yet tell a moral tale. If the advice to Perceval amounts to ‘Do as I mean, not as I say’, that to Jehan amounts to, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ But if knowledge of good does not have practice as its consequence, then there is little point in giving advice in the first place. What Jehan de Saintré shows most clearly is the degree to which the topos of advice had become self-conscious to the point of being potentially self-destructing. It may be that last point that provides a way into the question asked at the start of this chapter: why should Shakespeare hold up the progress of Hamlet for Polonius’s admirable but utterly familiar advice? It consists of prescripts that the audience will know already, and Polonius is not the man to turn truism back into truth. The adviser himself, counsellor as he is, is moreover by no means exemplary; and the instruction has no obvious effect on its recipient, who goes on to raise a rebellion against the wrong man and get involved in an assassination plot. The advice is likewise useless as a rule for life within the larger context of the play. ‘To thine own self be true’ may be a long-established and unquestioned principle of integrity, but it is increasingly emptied of meaning when it is set against the shattering of Hamlet’s own inner world. ‘In my heart there was a kind of fighting’: which of Hamlet’s various selves is the ‘true’ one, and how should he recognize it? What would being true to it mean, in the circumstances in which he finds himself? Could he, or the audience, recognize if he were to reach any sort of truth to himself? In romance after romance, the hero has to go beyond the advice offered, to identify and follow his own star in a bewildering world. Polonius’s advice provides the threshold from which Hamlet, and Hamlet, starts. It is not just Laertes who is setting out for France; the play is setting out on its own journey into previously uncharted territory. The advice does not so much signpost the way for the protagonist through the challenges to come as mark the point left behind. So where does all that leave the idea of advice being addressed to the audi120

Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances ence or reader, of romance as courtesy book? As models of manners and behaviour, romances should come with a warning attached: Use with care; Keep away from babies and children. For good advice may at best be redundant, and at worst confound the giver and mislead the young recipient inside or outside the text.

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‘Youth on the Prow’

‘Youth on the Prow’: Three Young Kings in the Late Viking Age Judith Jesch

Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows, While proudly riding o’er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway, That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey. Gray, ‘The Bard’

Youth is not always an advantage, though the appearance of youth may be. Vikings, as fighting-men, should ideally be young and fit. Kings on the other hand, should ideally be older and wiser. But the warrior gains authority from experience, while youthful vigour makes for a more effective ruler. The late Viking Age is generally seen as the period when the Scandinavian countries developed a European style of kingship, under the influence of Christianity and continental political theories.1 But the most notable Scandinavian kings of the eleventh century began their careers as vikings, as roving fighting-men and as the leaders of such men. Having achieved royal power, they often died young, fulfilling the expectations of the proverbial expression that ‘til frægðar skal konung hafa, en ekki til langlífis’ (‘a king is for glory, not for longevity’).2

1

2

P. H. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700–1100 (London, 1982), pp. 6 and 147; C. Krag, Vikingtid og rikssamling 800–1130, Aschehougs Norgeshistorie 2 (Oslo, 1995), pp. 148 and 177. Traditionally ascribed to King Magnús Barelegs, who replied thus whenever his friends accused him of acting rashly. He died on a viking raid in Ulster in 1103, and Snorri notes (Magnúss saga berfœtts, ch. 26) that he had not quite reached thirty: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols, Íslenzk fornrit 26–8 (Reykjavík, 1979), III, 237.

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Judith Jesch

THE YOUNG HERO

In the medieval Scandinavian laws, the age of majority was normally fifteen.3 Yet in some Icelandic sagas, the hero is said to have embarked on his first viking voyage or to have otherwise proved his manhood at the age of twelve. This is particularly true of sagas that romanticize their heroes. Thus, in that quintessential viking saga, Jómsvíkinga saga (ch. 21), Vagn Ákason is given a ship and sixty men each by his father and grandfather, and sets out to join the Jomsvikings with a troop in which no man is older than twenty or younger than eighteen, except Vagn himself who is twelve.4 In the more realistic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (ch. 4), the twelve-year-old hero, who is described as precocious and unruly, asks his father to give him a ship so that he might go out and see the world, but his father is less enamoured of the idea and makes him wait until he is eighteen.5 Elsewhere, the hero is said to have been aged twelve at some other important event in his life. This motif is used a number of times in Laxdœla saga, notably when the twelve-year-old Bolli Bollason avenges the death of his father on his killer Helgi Harðbeinsson (ch. 64). However, the exceptional and therefore heroic quality of those who act as full-grown men at this age is emphasized when, on the same occasion, Bolli prevents his followers from killing Helgi’s son, also aged twelve, calling it a ‘klækisverk’ (‘disgraceful deed’), and by the subordinate role played in the revenge expedition by Bolli’s brother Þorleikr, who is four or five years older than him.6 In such romanticizing sagas, the motif is clearly conventional and does not tell us much about the actual age at which boys were thought to be capable of the deeds of a grown man. The examples given show that twelve-year-old heroes were thought to be exceptional and that most normal males would still have been considered boys at that age. While it is hard to imagine a fully-fledged viking leader aged twelve, war is a young man’s game, and the origins of this romantic conceit can probably be found in some viking leaders not much older than that. Turning from literary heroes to more historical figures, we find three Scandinavian kings in the early eleventh century who were celebrated in contemporary sources for having been particularly young

3

4 5

6

It could vary between fourteen and twenty in certain contexts, see J. U. Jørgensen, ‘Myndighedsalder’, in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder, 22 vols (Copenhagen, 1956–78), XII, 35–7. Jómsvíkinga saga, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson (Reykjavík, 1969), pp. 143–4; see also ch. 22 of The Saga of the Jomsvikings, ed. N. F. Blake (London, 1962), p. 22. Borgfirðinga s›gur, ed. Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 3 (Reykjavík, 1938), p. 59. In fact, only one of the manuscripts of the saga has Gunnlaugr’s age as twelve at this point, the other has him fifteen. The editors consider (p. lvii) it more likely that the earliest version of the saga had the latter, with the age of twelve an independent change by the scribe of the main manuscript. Laxdœla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík, 1934), pp. 192–3.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ on achieving their royal status. Moreover, two of these won that status by their prowess in what we would characterize as viking activity. These three kings are Óláfr Haraldsson, later St Óláfr, king of Norway, Knútr Sveinsson, king of England, Denmark and Norway, and Magnús the Good, son of St Óláfr and king of Norway and Denmark. Their exceptional youth was celebrated, recorded and remembered in contemporary praise poems, composed for these kings, at their courts, by professional poets known as ‘skalds’, who by this period were mainly Icelanders. The poems were performed orally and survive today because they were used as evidence and authority for the Icelandic historiography of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.7 Discussion of the youth or otherwise of these three kings is somewhat hampered by the fact that we do not know for certain the date of birth of any of them. We are on fairly safe ground in asserting that Magnús was born in 1024. The other two were probably much of an age and scholarly opinion seems to agree that they might very well have been born in about 995, and I will assume this date for their births in the following discussion.8 Whatever their date of birth, all three were celebrated and remembered as youthful achievers and it is this tradition I would like to consider in some detail.

Óláfr The literary convention of the twelve-year-old hero on his first viking voyage also makes its appearance in more obviously historical sagas. Both Eiríkr Bloodaxe and Óláfr Tryggvason are said by the authors of kings’ sagas to have been aged twelve when setting out on their first viking voyage.9 In Snorri Sturluson’s prose presentation of the youth of Óláfr Haraldsson (Óláfs saga helga, ch. 4), we are told that Óláfr ‘var þá tólf vetra gamall, er hann steig á herskip fyrsta sinn’ (‘was twelve years old when he boarded a warship for the first time’).10 However, the heroic effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that it is his mother who buys him a ship, gets him an experienced viking, 7

For a discussion of this topic, with references to earlier work, see J. Jesch, ‘Norse historical traditions and the Historia Gruffud vab Kenan: ‘Magnús berfœttr and Haraldr hárfagri’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan: A Collaborative Biography, ed. K. L. Maund (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 117–47 (pp. 127–33). See also J. Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse (Woodbridge, 2001), passim. 8 The birth dates of all three kings are deduced from the imprecise and relative chronologies of the kings’ sagas. For Óláfr and Magnús, see Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, ccxxxvii, and II, cx. However, Krag, Vikingtid, p. 134, is inclined to believe that Óláfr was born somewhat before 995. A. R. Rumble, ‘Introduction: Cnut in context’, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. A. R. Rumble (London, 1994), pp. 1–9 (p. 3) gives Knútr’s date of birth as ‘c.995’. But, depending on how the sources are interpreted, he could have been born at almost any time between 990 and 1000, see M. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Eleventh Century (London, 1993), p. 174. 9 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 134; Oddr Snorrason, Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar, ed. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen, 1932), pp. 28–9. 10 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 4.

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Judith Jesch Hrani, as a minder and sends him off to Denmark on his first expedition.11 While this prose reference to Óláfr’s precise age may owe a lot to the literary convention, Snorri does have contemporary evidence for the fact that he was young at the time. As is his usual practice, Snorri substantiates his prose account by quoting a stanza from a skaldic praise poem (Óttarr svarti’s ‘H›fuðlausn’, st. 3) which contains the two relevant facts, that Óláfr was young (though his exact age is not given), and that he went to Denmark: Ungr hratztu á vit vengis, vígrakkr konungr, blakki, þú hefr dýrum þrek, dreyra Danmarkar, þik vanðan. Varð nýtligust norðan, nú est ríkr af hv›t slíkri, frák til þess, es fóruð, f›r þín, konungr, g›rva. (Battle-bold king, [you were] young [when] you launched the steed of the lifeblood of the plain [lifeblood of the plain = water; steed of water = ship] to go to Denmark; you have accustomed yourself to glorious strength. Your voyage from the north, king, was most successful; you are now powerful from such prowess; I have heard all about when you journeyed.)12

The stanza is from a poem in praise of Óláfr composed much later in his career by the Icelandic poet Óttarr the Black and is fairly typical of its genre. The poet’s point of view is retrospective: he is looking back at the youth of a king who, by the time of the poem, has accustomed himself to deeds of prowess, and who as a result has become powerful. This current status is indicated by the apostrophizing use of ‘konungr’ (‘king’) in each half of the stanza. The poet also underlines the contrast between then and now by making it clear that he did not know Óláfr in his youth, and that the account of the start of his career is based on hearsay. The king’s current position is described in rather vague terms, ‘vígrakkr’ (‘battle-bold’), ‘dýrum þrek’ (‘glorious strength’), ‘ríkr’ (‘powerful’), and ‘hv›t’ (‘prowess’), but their effect is cumulatively impressive. The stanza has to be considered in the context of the

11 On the literary origins of Hrani, see C. Krag, ‘Rane kongsfostre og Olav Geirstadalv’,

Historisk tidsskrift 78 (1999), 21–47. 12 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 5. As here, I normally cite skaldic stanzas from the

editions of the prose texts in which they were preserved, with my own fairly literal translations. These stanzas are most commonly extracts from longer praise poems which rarely survive as continuous texts, but which have been reconstructed in the corpus edition of skaldic verse, Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, ed. Finnur Jónsson, 4 vols (Copenhagen, 1912–15). I follow this edition for dates and titles of the poems and stanza numbers, and all individual stanzas can also be found in this edition. The problems of and procedures in the reconstruction of skaldic poems, including all those cited here, are discussed at length in Bjarne Fidjestøl, Det norrøne fyrstediktet (Øvre Ervik, 1982).

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‘Youth on the Prow’ longer praise poem from which it is taken: it epitomizes the argument of this poem, which is that King Óláfr’s youthful prowess made him the powerful leader that he is today. By modern standards, the king was hardly old at the time the poem was composed: although we cannot be absolutely certain of either his age or the date of the poem, if, as has been suggested, it was composed in 1023, then Óláfr was still only in his late twenties. Addressing a king who could still be considered young and praising him for his youthful achievements throws his current achievement into high relief.13 Out of the twenty stanzas that survive from Óttarr’s ‘H›fuðlausn’, there are two others that make reference to his youth. The poem begins with a long section dealing with Óláfr’s wars in England. In the stanza (12) which moves the scene of war to the Continent the poet again stresses the king’s youth, as if to keep the extent of this youthful achievement constantly before the audience: Nóðuð ungr at eyða, ógnteitr j›furr, Peitu. Reynduð, ræsir, steinda r›nd á Túskalandi. (Battle-cheerful prince, you succeeded when young in destroying Poitou. Chief, you tested painted shields in Touraine.)14

Again, this stanza emphasizes the contrast between now and then. On the one hand, the two apostrophes to the king, ‘ógnteitr j›furr’ (‘battle-cheerful prince’) and ‘ræsir’ (‘chief’), demonstrate his current powerful status, while the past tense verbs and the adjective ‘ungr’ (‘young’) draw attention to his youthful martial activities on the other. The third and final stage in Óláfr’s career to date is his return to his homeland Norway, to claim its throne from Earl Hákon (st. 15b): Ungr sóttir þú, Þróttar þings mógrennir, hingat, máttit jarl, þaus óttuð áttl›nd, fyr því standa.

13 How young is ‘young’? It is impossible to say in absolute terms what age range the skalds

thought was covered by the adjective ‘ungr’. The evidence that Scandinavians knew medieval theories of the ages of man is limited, see A. Karker, ‘Livsaldre’, Kulturhistorisk leksikon, X, 640–2. Even if they had, ‘anyone who goes to medieval discussions of the ages of man with the intention of ascertaining at what age youth was then thought to end, or old age to begin, will find no easy answers’, J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986), p. 34. Burrow also suggests (p. 124) that vernacular usage was ‘much less systematic’. 14 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 25.

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Judith Jesch (Feeder (?) of the gull of Odin’s assembly [Odin’s assembly = battle; gull of battle = carrion bird], you came here [when] young to ancestral lands you owned; the earl [Hákon] could not prevent that.)15

Again, Óláfr’s achievement is highlighted by the emphasis on his youth. This stanza is the high point of Óttarr’s poem, and this is marked metrically by the full rhyme in all four lines in this half of the stanza (normally the first and third would only need half-rhyme). The first syllable of the fourth line also echoes the rhyming syllables of the previous line, so that the stanza draws attention to itself by going beyond the already complex metrical requirements of skaldic verse. Throughout ‘H›fuðlausn’, Óttarr uses apostrophes to suggest the present, and these contrast with the second-person verb forms in the past tense that he uses for the narrative of Óláfr’s youth. This technique has the effect of linking the poet to his patron, and the poem itself to the past deeds it celebrates. Even in this sycophantic genre, Óttarr waxes more lyrical than most, but he had good reason for this, according to an anecdote recorded in the Icelandic tradition to explain this anxiety to please on the part of the poet. Óttarr’s ‘H›fuðlausn’ (‘Head-Ransom’) is one of a number of poems described thus, including one with the same name composed by Egill in York.16 The purpose of a ‘head-ransom’ poem was to dispel the king’s anger by praising him and thus to enable the poet, literally, to keep his head, receiving his life in lieu of the more usual monetary reward for a praise poem. In this case, the king was apparently angry with Óttarr because he had composed a poem in praise of the Swedish princess Ástríðr, now the Norwegian king’s wife.17 This poem is not preserved, so we do not know why it was unacceptable, but the king at any rate seems to have thought that it implied an affair between the poet and the princess. Clearly Óttarr thought that emphasizing the king’s youthful vigour was one good way of propitiating him.

Knútr Óláfr’s contemporary and great rival was Knútr, king of England, Denmark and, for a time, Norway. He too was the subject of a praise poem by Óttarr, called the Knútsdrápa (a drápa was considered a particularly fine sort of encomium because it had a refrain). This poem has some similarities with Óttarr’s poem on Óláfr, notably in that its first stanza uses the same image of the young warrior launching ships and thereby his career: 15 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 37. 16 Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ed. Sigurður Nordal, Íslenzk fornrit 2 (Reykjavík, 1933),

pp. 185–92. On the historical context of this poem, see J. Hines, ‘Egill’s H›fuðlausn in time and place’, Saga-Book 24 (1994–7), 83–104. 17 Saga Óláfs konungs hins helga. Den store saga om Olav den hellige, ed. O. A. Johnsen and Jón Helgason (Oslo, 1941), pp. 688–9, 702–6. On Ástríðr and poetry, see J. Jesch, ‘In praise of Ástríðr Óláfsdóttir’, Saga-Book 24 (1994–7), 1–18.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ Hratztu lítt gamall, lýtir l›greiðar, fram skeiðum. Fórat fylkir œri, folksveimaðr, þér heiman. Hilmir, bjóttu ok hættir harðbrynjuð skip kynjum. Reiðr hafðir þú rauðar randir Knútr, fyr landi. (Destroyer of the sea-wagon [ship], you launched ships when not very old. No leader left home younger than you, army-bustler. Chief, you prepared hard-armoured ships and took astounding risks. Knútr, in frenzied mood you surrounded the country with red shields.)18

Again, we are not told his exact age, although here there is a comparative aspect to the king’s youth: it is said that Knútr was younger than anyone else doing the same thing. Does this mean that he started his military career at an even younger age than Óláfr (whatever age that was)? We cannot know, but we can note that the poem reflects the element of competition that was always present between these contemporaries and rivals, until Knútr managed to drive Óláfr from Norway and instigated the battle of Stiklestad in which he died in 1030. Unlike the ‘Head-Ransom’, where Óttarr’s concern was very much to propitiate King Óláfr in the present, in the Knútsdrápa he can afford to luxuriate in the king’s achievement in the past. The poem was composed when Knútr was at the height of his powers, but this status is taken for granted, and the poet concentrates instead on the king’s youthful wars in England.19 Even this first stanza demonstrates how the poetic diction focuses on Knútr’s past military activity rather than on his present power and glory. Thus, he is apostrophized as a ‘lýtir l›greiðar’ (‘ship-destroyer’) and as a ‘folksveimaðr’ (‘army-bustler’), and two words referring to military leadership and rank, ‘fylkir’ (‘leader’) and ‘hilmir’ (‘chief’), are used of him (the latter as an apostrophe). A picture of the king in the midst of battle is conjured up by the adjective ‘harðbrynjaðr’ (‘hard-armoured’), used of his ships, and by the metaphorical description of his war-making, literally he ‘had red shields before the land’. The three words for ship in this stanza, ‘l›greið’, ‘skeið’ and ‘skip’, stress the basis of the king’s naval power.20 We do not know when Knútr first participated in viking raids on England, although we do know that he took command of the fleet on the death of his 18 Danakonunga s›gur, ed. Bjarni Guðnason, Íslenzk fornrit 35 (Reykjavík, 1982), pp. 101–2. 19 On the probable dating of this poem to 1027, see M. Townend, ‘Contextualizing the

Knútsdrápur: skaldic praise-poetry at the court of Cnut’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001), 145–79 (pp. 159–62). 20 See R. Frank, ‘King Cnut in the verse of his skalds’, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. A. R. Rumble (London, 1994), pp. 106–24 (pp. 114–15).

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Judith Jesch father Sveinn in 1014. By then he was probably nineteen years old, so hardly young by the standards of the twelve-year-old Óláfr, at least. However it is quite possible that in the first stanza the poet Óttarr is referring to earlier sorties, which may very well have happened before the death of Sveinn. But even when Knútr finally conquered England in 1016, he was still only about twenty-one, and his youth could be emphasized in a stanza (6) describing some of the battles of that year: Ungr fylkir, léztu Engla allnær Tesu falla. Flóði djúpt of dauðra dík Norðimbra líkum. Svefn braut sv›rtum hrafni sunnarr hv›tuðr Gunnar. Olli sókn enn snjalli Sveins m›gr at Skorsteini. (Young leader, you caused Englishmen to fall very near the Tees. The deep ditch flowed over the bodies of dead Northumbrians. The promoter of battle deprived the black raven of sleep in the south. The brave son of Sveinn instigated battle at Sherston.)21

The chronological reference of ‘ungr fylkir’ (‘young leader’) in this stanza is ambiguous. Syntactically it looks like an apostrophe to the king at the time of the composition and first performance of the poem (when Knútr was about thirty-one years old), as it is followed by a second-person verb in the past tense, making the transition from apostrophe to narrative. (Note that the rest of the verbs in the stanza, and the remaining references to Knútr, are all in the third person). Nevertheless, it seems more likely that in calling the king ‘young’, the poet is thinking of then rather than now, conjuring up his youthful self for the king listening to the poem, as in the first stanza. Both Knútr and Óláfr started their military careers as young men and had rapid success, giving them both the rule of their respective kingdoms at what was a young age by any standards. They are both presented as kings who had to achieve their kingship by their own military efforts. Knútr, of course, had some help from the fact that he was the son of Sveinn Forkbeard (as is made clear in st. 6, quoted above), whereas Óláfr was the son of a nobody who died before he was born and from whom he could expect no help. Óláfr’s own rule ended ignominiously with exile followed by death in battle in an abortive attempt to recapture his kingdom, but his real significance came after his

21 Danakonunga s›gur, p. 109. We also find the emphasis on Knútr’s youth in the Encomium

Emmae, ed. and trans. A. Campbell, introd. S. Keynes, Camden Classic Reprints (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 20–1. This has Þorkell undertaking to fight the battle of Sherston on Knútr’s behalf ‘utpote iuuenem’ (‘inasmuch as he is a youth’). Lawson, Cnut, p. 174, notes that Knútr ‘almost certainly owed much of his success in the fighting of 1015–16 to the experienced warlords Earl Eric of Lade and Earl Thorkell’.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ death when he provided an important starting-point for a new Norwegian ruling dynasty. The new order was already clear when his son eventually came to the throne in a very different manner to that of his father.

Magnús Óláfr had only one son, who was illegitimate, called Magnús. Óláfr’s son is the first Scandinavian recorded as having borne this name, and he was quite consciously named after Charlemagne (i.e. Carolus Magnus, or Karla-Magnús as he was known in Old Norse).22 This may suggest the kinds of thoughts about kingship that were fermenting in Norway at that time, or, if not in Norway, then in the mind of the king’s poet Sigvatr who had the task of naming the sickly infant who was not expected to live. As a small boy (aged about four), Magnús went into exile in Russia with his father in 1028, and stayed there after the king’s return to Norway and death at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030. The sagas tell us that, tired of the Danish rule imposed by Knútr and carried out by his son Sveinn and his mother, the English Ælfgifu, some Norwegian nobles went to Russia to fetch Magnús back to Norway in 1034, when he was still only ten years old. Things went smoothly and Magnús was successfully installed on the throne and accepted by the Norwegians as their king by the following year. Thus, there is no question of Magnús having had to fight to gain his position and, in any case, he was too young to do so. His youth also meant that, according to Snorri at any rate, a decisive point in his return was when his stepmother Ástríðr argued his case at the Swedish assembly and thereby got him valuable support from the Swedes. We get some sense of how unusual it was for a Scandinavian king to be helped to the throne by a woman from the fact that this occasion gave rise to a poem in praise of Ástríðr, the only surviving skaldic praise poem addressed to a woman.23 But it was Magnús’ extreme youth that made her intervention necessary. By this stage, the presentation of a young king as a young warrior launching a ship and thereby his career had become so conventional in skaldic praise poetry that it could be used of Magnús, too, even though it was not entirely appropriate. The first stanza of Arnórr jarlaskáld’s Magnússdrápa illustrates this neatly: Nú hykk rjóðanda reiðu róg›rs, þvít veitk g›rva, þegi seimbrotar, segja seggjum hneitis eggja. Vasa ellifu allra ormsetrs hati vetra,

22 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 210. 23 See Jesch, ‘In praise of Ástríðr’.

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Judith Jesch hraustr þás herskip glæsti H›rða vinr ór G›rðum. (Now I plan to tell men the deeds of the battle-brisk reddener of the sword’s blades, because I know them in detail; the breakers of gold [= generous men] should be silent. The disburser of the dragon’s bed [= gold] was not fully eleven years old when the bold friend of the Hordalanders prepared a splendid warship from out of Russia.)24

Like his father before him, Magnús’ career starts with the launch of a ship, but, though it is called a ‘herskip’ (‘warship’), it is clear that someone who is only ten years old is not really leading a viking expedition. Instead, the emphasis on the splendour of the ship suggests something more like a triumphal voyage or royal progress. The stanza does not actually assert that Magnús engaged in any fighting, but limits itself instead to hints concealed in a complex warrior kenning applied to him (‘battle-brisk reddener of the sword’s blades’). This opening stanza is thus partly conventional, building on the kind of opening stanzas we have seen Óttarr use, where the hero’s career begins when he goes out on his first military expedition. But if we look at the other references to Magnús in the stanza, it is clearly doing more than just insinuating military deeds which a ten-year-old could hardly have performed. As well as the military kenning, he is called a ‘disburser of gold’ and the ‘friend of the Hordalanders’ (Hordaland being a district in Norway). In skaldic poetry, kings are conventionally associated with both military prowess and generosity, and geographical associations are regularly used to suggest the extent of their power. Thus, this first stanza paints, in these three kennings, an image of the ideal king of Norway: warlike, generous and powerful. Knútr and Óláfr were the authors of the deeds that were celebrated in the poems praising them. Magnús was too young to have achieved anything, so that, in Arnórr’s Magnússdrápa, it is the poem that creates a role for the king. We do not have a date for Arnórr’s poem, but it was very likely an erfidrápa, a posthumous memorial poem with a refrain: the poet is addressing the court (whom he calls ‘generous men’ because it is presumably from them that he expects a payment for his poem), and he is unlikely to have done this unless the subject of the poem were already dead.25 This undoubtedly influenced the somewhat idealized picture he paints of the young king. The political reality is more accurately reflected in stanza 6 of a poem in praise of Kálfr Árnason, one of the Norwegian noblemen who travelled to Russia to bring Magnús back to Norway, by Bjarni Gullbrárskáld:

24 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 3. See also D. Whaley, The Poetry of Arnórr jarlaskáld: An

Edition and Study (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 182–4. Both editors take the ‘herskip’ of line 7 to be plural. 25 Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 29 and 53.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ Hafa léztu unga j›fra erfð, sem til réð hverfa. Satt es, at sitja knátti Sveinn at Danm›rk einni. Kennduð, Kálfr, til landa kappfúsum Magnúsi, olluð ér því, es stillir j›rð of fekk, ór G›rðum. (You allowed the young kings to have their inheritance, as was allotted. It is true, that Sveinn could only preside over Denmark. Kálfr, you showed vigorous Magnús to his country from Russia, you caused the leader to get land.)26

Kálfr is credited not only with putting Magnús back on the throne, but also, somewhat ironically, with putting Knútr’s son Sveinn back in his rightful place, which was in Denmark only. Kálfr’s role is stressed by the use of three second-person verbs, underlined by the poet’s comment ‘it is true’. Since by this time Magnús was dead, it was not quite as tactless as it sounds to point out that the king was made by a kingmaker, especially in a poem in praise of that kingmaker. To return to Arnórr’s poem on Magnús: the introductory stanza is followed by an attractive stanza describing the sea-voyage from Russia to Sweden: Þing bauð út enn ungi eggrjóðandi þjóðum. Fim bar hirð til h›mlu hervæðr ara bræðis. Salt skar húfi héltum hraustr þjóðkonungr austan. Bóru brimlogs rýri brún veðr at Sigtúnum. (The young blade-reddener called his people to battle [or ‘assembled his people’]. The athletic troop of the eagle-feeder [= warrior] carried war-gear to the rowing-positions. The bold king of the nation sliced the salt [sea] from the east with a frosted hull. Sharp winds carried the diminisher of wave’s-fire [wave’s fire = gold; diminisher of gold = generous man] to Sigtuna.)27

This continues the themes of the introductory stanza. References to Magnús’ generosity and military prowess are tucked away in the kennings: ‘brimlogs rýrir’ (‘diminisher of wave’s-fire’), ‘enn ungi eggrjóðandi’ (‘the young blade-reddener’), ‘ara bræðir’ (‘eagle-feeder’); while the active verbs in the stanza create the narrative of the king and his troop getting ready for the

26 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 12. 27 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 4; Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 184–7.

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Judith Jesch voyage and then sailing to Sweden: ‘bauð’ (‘called’), ‘bar’ (‘carried’), ‘skar’ (‘sliced’). This stanza is followed by some that describe how Sveinn, the son of Knútr and Danish regent of Norway, is driven out of the country, and how Magnús challenges him in Denmark, too. This section of the poem then culminates in a stanza (7) describing Magnús’ achievement in ruling both Denmark and Norway at a younger age than anyone before him: Náði siklingr síðan snjallr ok Danm›rk allri, móttr óx drengja dróttins, dýrr Nóregi at stýra. Engr heft annarr þengill áðr svá gnógu láði, bráskat bragnings þroski, barnungr und sik þrungit. (The brave and glorious prince then achieved the rule of Norway and all Denmark, the power of the lord of warriors increased. No other ruler previously has subjugated so much land in childhood [lit. ‘child-young’], the ruler’s flourishing did not fail.)28

The stanza emphasizes both the king’s youth and his ripening into maturity, using a vocabulary of increase and growth: ‘móttr óx’ (power increased’) and ‘þroski’ (‘flourishing, maturity’). Moving from the past-tense verbs describing what Magnús actually achieved, the poet sums up his achievement by stressing that it is still valid in the present (cf. ‘hefr’), for no one else has come to rule two countries while still a child. Magnús became king of Denmark in 1042, when he was about eighteen years old. Although eighteen is still young to be king of two countries, calling him a child is really only appropriate for his accession to Norway. However, the poet had the benefit of hindsight, and this stanza is particularly poignant if we remember that Magnús died before the age of twenty-four. Towards the end of Arnórr’s poem (st. 18), he returns to the theme of the young king who had achieved much before his untimely death: Enn rauð frón á Fjóni, fold sótti gramr dróttar, ráns galt herr frá hónum, hringserks lituðr merki. Minnisk ›ld, hverr annan, jafnþarfr blóum hrafni, ›rt gat hilmir hjarta, herskyldir tøg fylldi. (Once again the stainer of the mail-shirt reddened bright banners on Fyn; the prince of the war-band attacked the land; the army had 28 Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 197–8.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ to pay for their theft [of land] from him. Consider which war-leader [was] equally helpful to the black raven [i.e. by providing it with corpses] by the end of his second decade; the chief had a bold heart.)29

By now, the praise of the king as a warrior is not hidden away in the kennings, but is brought out into the open. In a series of active verbs, we are told that Magnús attacked the land, reddened banners with blood, and exacted what he wanted from the enemy army. In the poem as a whole, Magnús’ achievement is not only to rule two countries at a young age, but also quite literally to grow into the royal role that is sketched out for him at the beginning. The potential warrior becomes an actual warrior, and the poet suggests this change by switching from the nominal to the verbal, by moving from the noun-filled kennings which suggest what Magnús’ role ought to be to the verbal constructions which show him actually performing that role. This playing of an active role not only showed that the king was powerful, in control and able to overcome all opposition, but it also very importantly provided the poet with the material for his praise poem. As a genre, the skaldic praise poems did not really have a vocabulary for the celebration of more abstract achievements of a political or moral nature. What they did have was a lot of ways of talking about war and warriors. The poet is thus grateful if the king being praised has provided him with the right kind of material for his poem. Arnórr makes his relief plain in another poem in praise of Magnús, known as Hrynhenda from its innovative metre. This poem was composed while the king was still alive, and is addressed to him. As usual, Arnórr stresses his patron’s youth when acquiring Norway in a stanza (8) which follows on from several which describe his voyage from the east: Eignask namt þú óðal þegna allan Norég, gotna spjalli. Manngi ryðr þér mildingr annarr Mœra gramr til landa œri. (Good friend of men, you managed to come into possession of the ancestral lands of the aristocracy, all of Norway. No other sovereign cleared his way to countries younger than you, prince of the people of Møre.)30

But after this, there is a further sequence of stanzas describing his war-making in Denmark and the Baltic, introduced by a stanza (9) which begins with the adverb ‘síðan’ (‘afterwards’), emphasizing that this is a new phase in the king’s life. This sequence leads into a stanza (14a) which explains the symbiotic relationship between the king and poet:

29 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 63; Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 215–18. 30 Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 158–9.

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Judith Jesch Hefnir, fenguð yrkisefni, Óleifs. Gervik slíkt at mólum. Hlakkar lætr þú hræl›g drekka hauka. Nú mun kvæði aukask. (Óláfr’s avenger, you provided the stuff of poetry. I turn it into language. You cause the hawks of Hl›kk [= a valkyrie; her hawks = eagles or ravens] to drink the liquid of corpses [= blood]. Now the ode will increase.)31

By his deeds the king provides the ‘yrkisefni’ (‘the stuff of poetry’) for his skald: the more the king feeds the ravens, the more matter there is for the poem.

NEW STYLES OF KINGSHIP

It has been suggested that the emphasis on Magnús’ youth in these poems was precisely because child kings were unusual, if not unprecedented, in Scandinavia and it was felt necessary to legitimate this new political phenomenon.32 No doubt this legitimation began at his accession and was done in ways that we can no longer reconstruct. However, the posthumous Magnússdrápa shows that this process of justification which had begun during the reign of Magnús the Good continued after his death. In this process we can see the changing nature of kingship in Scandinavia, as it moves from a ‘viking’ model in which kings’ sons fight their way to the top, to a more ‘medieval’ model with a growing emphasis on dynastic, ecclesiastical and national concerns.33 The cult of St Óláfr was launched and actively promoted during Magnús’ reign, and it is hard to say which benefited more: the church from its association with political power, or the monarchy from the increasing legitimacy it derived from its association with a saint. It is clear that part of the process of justifying the accession of the child king, Magnús, involved promoting the cult of his saintly father. There is a parallel here to the career of the English king Æthelred II, known as ‘the Unready’. His age at accession is also uncertain, but he was probably not less than ten and certainly ‘not more than twelve years old when he became king’ in 978.34 Scholars are inclined to absolve him of the blame for the murder of his half-brother Edward the Martyr precisely because of his 31 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 64; Whaley, Arnórr, pp. 171–3. 32 S. Hellberg, ‘Kring tillkomsten av Glœlognskviða’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 99 (1984), 14–48

(pp. 20–21). In England, on the other hand, tenth-century kings were often very young at their accession, see C. Hart, ‘Athelstan “Half King” and his family’, Anglo-Saxon England 2 (1973), 115–44 (p. 129). 33 The latter model is summarized by S. Bagge, Society and Politics in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 129–35. 34 S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘The Unready’ 978–1016: A Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980), p. 174.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ youth at the time. As well as his youth at accession, Æthelred shares with Magnús the role of promoter of his predecessor’s cult. Susan Ridyard has shown how the ‘first sign of royal interest in Edward’s relics came right at the beginning of Æthelred’s reign’.35 She emphasizes the political relevance of Edward’s cult to his successor and follows Keynes in assuming that Æthelred was not implicated in Edward’s murder, so that he could profit from the cult of ‘a royal saint so closely related to him’.36 It has been noted that Æthelred’s youth presented ‘opportunities for the ealdormen and bishops to direct national policy’.37 Indeed, in discussing what he calls ‘the period of youthful indiscretions’, Keynes seems to want to extend Æthelred’s youth right through to the age of twenty-seven, seeing it as a ‘period . . . in which the adolescent King Æthelred was apparently manipulated by a group of men in their own interests’.38 We can see a similar unfortunate influence of, or even interference by, advisers in the reign of the young king Magnús. One of the most famous poems by Sigvatr, who had composed prolifically for Óláfr, was the Bers›glisvísur, or ‘Plain-Speaking Verses’, that he addressed to Óláfr’s son Magnús. As Magnús’ godfather, and one who had known him from birth, Sigvatr never shrank from criticising his protegé, or from making unfavourable comparisons with his saintly father. In Bers›glisvísur (st. 6) the criticism is strongly worded, yet indulgent in an avuncular sort of way, for Magnús was still only about fourteen at the time. The poet puts the errors of the king’s ways down in part to his youth and inexperience, and in part to bad advice: Ungr, vask með þér, þengill, þat haust es komt austan. Einn, stillir, mátt alla j›rð hegna, svá fregnisk. Himin þóttisk þá heiðan hafa, es landa krafðir, lofðungs burr, ok lifðir, landfolk tekit h›ndum. (Young ruler, I was with you that autumn when you came from the east. You alone, governor, are able to defend all the land, as is known. The populace thought they had caught bright heaven in their hands when you demanded the country, king’s son, and lived.)39

35 S. J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East

Anglian Cults (Cambridge, 1988), p. 164. 36 Keynes, Diplomas, p. 171; Ridyard, Royal Saints, p. 165. 37 Hart, ‘Athelstan “Half King” ’, p. 129. 38 Keynes, Diplomas, p. 186. Keynes apparently agrees with Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae

XI.ii.4, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), in defining adolescentia as extending up to the age of twenty-eight. 39 Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, IB, 236.

137

Judith Jesch This stanza shows the poet more in sorrow than in anger. He recalls the promise of Magnús’ youth and uses an extraordinary image of the people’s joy at his accession. As his father’s son, Magnús links heaven and earth, God and Norway. Yet he commits crimes against that people and that land, as Sigvatr makes clear in another stanza (11): Hverr eggjar þik h›ggva, hjaldrgegnir, bú þegna? Ofrausn es þat j›fri innan lands at vinna. Engr hafði svá ungum áðr bragningi ráðit. Rón hykk rekkum þínum, reiðr es herr, konungr, leiðask. (Who urges you, battle-participant, to destroy the property of the gentry? It is arrogance for a king to do that within his borders. No one has previously advised a young ruler to do this. I think your warriors are tired of robbery, king, the army is angry.)40

Here the poet wonders what causes the king to attack ‘bú þegna’ (the property of his own landed gentry) and comes to the conclusion that someone must be urging him on, that the young king is prompted by bad advice. In this poem, Sigvatr is trying to educate the king in the difference between appropriate and inappropriate belligerent behaviour. That which is necessary to defend his country (as in st. 6, above), is appropriate, but similar behaviour against his own subjects is not. To underline his point, the poet threatens to take himself off to the court of H›rða-Knútr, reminding Magnús that he had worked for both their fathers when he himself was young (st. 17): Sigvats hugr mun hittask H›rða-Knútr í garði, mildr nema mj›k vel skaldi Magnús konungr fagni; fórk með feðrum þeira (fekk mér ungum tunga golls), vask enn með ›llu óskeggjaðr þá, beggja. (Sigvatr’s affection will be found in the court of H›rða-Knútr unless gracious King Magnús is very friendly to the poet; I was with both their fathers and my tongue got me gold when young, I was still quite beardless then.)

But because the purpose of the poem is political, aiming to bend the king’s behaviour in a particular direction, it can and indeed must end on a positive note

40 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 29.

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‘Youth on the Prow’ despite the criticisms. The poet bows out with a ringing endorsement of Magnús: ‘with you gracious king, I wish to live and die’. According to Snorri, the poem worked and the king behaved well after this, issuing a law-code, and eventually becoming so popular and beloved by the people that posterity knew him as Magnús the Good.41

VIKINGS AND KINGS

Although a full-blown medieval style of kingship did not emerge in Norway until the thirteenth century, we can see its beginnings in the reign of Magnús, especially if we contrast the poetic treatment of his youth with those of his two viking predecessors, his father Óláfr and their arch-rival Knútr. Óláfr was mostly a traditional viking, his conquest of Norway was never very complete, nor his rule there very effective, and his significance was mainly posthumous. Knútr, too, started out as a viking, but he had the advantages of a father who cleared the way for him, and a ready-made kingdom to step into in England. Like his predecessor, Æthelred, Knútr promoted the cult of Edward the Martyr in order to stress the continuity of his regime and to enhance the prestige of his kingship. This side of Knútr’s activities is not well reflected in the skaldic poetry which generally has little to tell of his rule in England. But in the poetry composed about and for Magnús, we can see the developing concept of kingship in Scandinavia more or less as it happens. Being a successful viking was no longer a sufficient, perhaps not even a necessary, qualification for becoming a king, but belonging to the right dynasty and having the support of the church and the aristocracy were necessary. With the aid of the Christian church, a saintly father, a vigorous nobility and a wise old poet, the Norwegians were able to disprove the lament of the Ecclesiast (10.16): ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.’

41 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 31.

139

INDEX Adam 90 Adelaxia, domina 82 Adrian 53 Ælfgifu 131 Æthelred II, king 136–37 Aetherius 22 Agnes, St 52 Alcuin of York 15 Alexander III, pope 74 Allen, Rosamund 68 Andrew, St 58 Andrews, Frances 9 Anicia 14 Anjou, René of 117 Anonimalle Chronicle 8, 64, 66 Anstrudis, St 20 Apollonia, St 58 and n Aquinas, Thomas 26n Ariès, Philippe 1–3, 7, 25 Arnórr jarlaskald, Magnússdrápa 131, 133–35 Arthur, king 102, 108 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury 4–6 Ástríðr, princess 128, 131 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 11 Ausonius Decimus Magnus 14 Babyngton, Katherine 50 Bailey, Peter 48–49 Ball, John 67, 70 and n Bar, Marie, duchess of 116 Barantyne, Mary 55 Baret, John 56 Barron, Caroline 7n Bassett, Anne 54 Bassett, Mary 54 Bede, Venerable 15, 21, 23 Benedict Biscop 15 Benedict of Nursia, St 21 Bere, John le 93 Bere, Margaret le 93 Beronger, Joan 91 Beronger, John 91 Berry, Jean, duke of 116 Bertilak 108 Bjarni Gullbrárskáld 132 Black Prince, the 64

Blanquerna 110–11, 119 Bokenham, Osbern, 56, 59; Legendys of Hooly Wummen 49; ‘Life of Mary Magdalene’ 50, 56; ‘Life of St Agatha’ 50, 52, 57; ‘Life of St Agnes’ 52, 56 ; ‘Life of St Anne’ 50, 56; ‘Life of St Cecilia’ 53n; ‘Life of St Christina’ 51, 52, 56; ‘Life of St Dorothy’ 50, 52, 53n, 56; ‘Life of St Elizabeth’ 50, 56; ‘Life of St Faith’ 53n, 56; ‘Life of St Katherine’ 50, 53, 56 and n; ‘Life of St Lucy’ 52; ‘Life of St Margaret’ 50–51, 55–56; ‘Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins’ 53n, 56 Bolingbroke, Henry 4 Bolli Bollason 124 Borrinus, Isabellina 76 Borrinus, Leo 76 Borrinus, Petra 76 Borrinus, Varenza 76 Boswell, John 76, 78 Bourchier, Isabelle, countess of Eu 50, 55 Bours, Madame de 54 Brews, Margery 57–58 Brews, Sir Thomas 57–58 Brinton, Thomas, bishop of Rochester 67n Brut, Walter 63n Burgundy, duke of (Philip III) 117 Burley, Sir Simon 65 and n Burri, Marchisius 76 Caesarius of Arles 21 Cambridge, Edmund Langley, first earl of 66 Cambridge, Richard of Conisbrough, second earl of 55 Capgrave, John 59; ‘Life of St Katherine of Alexandria’ 49, 53 Carus-Wilson, E. M. 86 Cassianus of Imola, St 18 Caxton, William 104, 110; Blanchardin and Eglantine 104; Book of Good Manners, The 104 Cecilia, St 58 Celestine III, pope 73 Charlemagne 131

141

Index Chaucer, Geoffrey 85; Pardoner 120; Prioress 85; ‘Prioress’s Tale’ 103; Squire 5; Wife of Bath 85 Chevelere Assigne 107–8, 120 Childebert I 23 Childebert II 22 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal 106–9, 114, 116, 119 Christina of Markyate 57–58 Christina, St 51 Clark, P. 87–88 Clopton, John 56 Cooper, Helen 9 Crawford, Sally 7n, 13 Cuthbert, St 19 Dale, M. K. 86 Dalton, Alice 88 Dante Alighieri 14 de la Pole family 98 Delany, Sheila 50 Denston, Katherine 50, 56–57 Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist 102 Dolzebellina 76 Dorothy, St 52 Duffy, Eamon 46 Duns Scotus, John 26n Dyer, C. 92–93 Earle, P. 87 Edmund, St, king 6 and n Edward III, king 64 Edward the Confessor, St, king 6 and n Edward the Martyr, king 136, 139 Egill 128 Eiríkr Bloodaxe 125 Ekwall, E. 86 Eneas 112, 120 Enyas (Elyas, Helyas) 108 Eshton, John 88 Fabricius 52 Felice 51 Felix, Life of Guthlac 15, 19 Fentrice, Lucy de 94 and n Fentrice, William de 94 and n Flegge, Agatha 50, 57 Flegge, Joan 57 Flegge, Sir John 57 Flora de Castello 80–81 Floris and Blanchefleur 115 Froissart, Jean 70, 117 Fructuosus, St, bishop of Braga 15, 21 Galen 23 Gallus, St, bishop of Clermont 19 Gareth 103 Gaunt, Simon 48

142

Gawain 108 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 51 Geoffrey, son of Melusine 116 Ghent, Henry of 63n Giddens, Anthony 63 Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, first duke of 4 Glover, Christiana 88 Godfrey of Bouillon 114 Goldberg, P. J. P. 9 Goldin, Simha 7 Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, The 85 Goody, Esther 94n Gornemant 106–07 Gratian (Johannes Gratianus) 26n Gravdal, Kathryn 48 Gregory IX, pope 73 Gregory of Tours 7, 11–12, 15–17 and n, 18–23 Gregory the Great 15, 23 Grundmann, Herbert 77 Guidotus, son of Arguinus de Osenago 82 Guinevere 117, 119 Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu 124 and n Guntram 22 Guthlac, St 15, 19 Guy of Warwick 51 Hales, Sir Robert 71 Halsall, Guy 7n, 13 Havighurst, Robert 13 Hay, Sir Gilbert 109 Heffernan, Thomas 48 Helgu Harðbeinsson 124 Helyas, Knight of the Swan 114 Henry VIII, king 6 Hercules 102 Hereford, earl of 66 Hereford, Humphrey de Bohun, sixth earl of 113 Hereford, John Trefnant, bishop of 63n Hilton, Rodney 97 Holbein, Hans, the younger 6 Holland, John 5 H›rða-Knútr 138 Horn, king 102 Hornby, Thomas de 94 How the Good Man Taught His Son 104 How the Good Wijf Tau
te Hir Dau
tir 95, 97, 104 Howard, Katherine 50, 56 Hrani 126 Hunt, Isabel 50 Hunt, John 50

Index Iacobus of Milan 80–81 Innes-Parker, Catherine 48 Innocent III, pope 29, 74, 75 Isaac Bar-Yehudah, rabbi 40–41 Isaac ben Moses, rabbi, Or Zarua 40 Isabella 90 Isidore of Seville 15, 20 James, Edward 7 Jean d’Arras, Melusine 114–16 Jesch, Judith 9 Jesus 23 Johannes of Verona 80–81 John 90 John the Baptist 5 Jómsvíkinga saga 124 Joseph, husband of the BVM 23 Justinian, Digest 16 Kaddish, the 41 Kálfr Árnason 132–33 ‘Katherine Group’ 50 Katherine, St 53 Kay 103 Kempe, Margery 85 Keynes, Simon 137 Knútr Sveinsson, king 9, 125 and n, 128–29, 130 and n, 131–32, 139 Lady of the Lake, the 102, 108, 117 Laertes 101–2, 116, 120 Lancaster, John of Gaunt, first duke of 5, 66 Lancelot 103, 109, 117 Langland, William, Piers Plowman 4 Lavine 112, 119 Laxdœla saga 124 Lewis, Katherine J. 48 Lisle, Lady 54 Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing 116–17 Llull, Ramon, The Book of the Order of Chivalry 109, 110–11, 116 Lucius III, pope 74 Lydgate, John 59; ‘Legend of St Margaret’ 49, 50–51, 55 Madia 77–78, 82 Magi, the 6 Magnús Barelegs, king 123n Magnús the Good, king 9, 125, 131–39 Malory, Sir Thomas 103, 106 March, Edmund Mortimer, third earl of 65 March, Lady (Anne Stafford) 55 Margaret, St 50, 58 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 23 Martin of Tours, St 17–18

Martinela, granddaughter of Tomardus de Tomardis 82 Mary, Blessed Virgin 53, 103 Matthew of Vendôme 51 Maximus of Riez, St 17 Maximus, abbot of Chinon 19 McClure, P. 86 Meir ben Barukch of Rothenburg 29 Melior 112, 114, 119 Melusine (English version) 115 and n Mishna, the 35, 37 Mortimer, Anne, countess of Cambridge 55 Mortimer, Anne, lady March 50, 55 Mortimer, Edmund, fifth earl of March 4, 55 Mowbray, Thomas, first duke of Norfolk 4 Myrc, John, Instructions for Parish Priests 95 Natana 110–12 Nicetius, bishop of Lyons 18, 20–21 Óláfr Haraldsson (St Óláfr), king 9, 125–30, 132, 136–37, 139 Óláfr Tryggvason 125 Olibrius 50 Oosterwijk, Sophie 7n Óttarr the Black 126–28; Knútsdrapa 129, 130–31 Pactus Legis Salicae 12 Pappula, St 22 Paschasius 52 Paston, John III 57, 58 Pastorella 102 Patroclus, St 22, 23 Patten, J. 88 Paul the Deacon 21 Paula 16 Pearl 8, 61–71 Penn, S. A. C. 92–93 Perceval 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 116, 119 Perenzoni, Ubertus 82 Peter, St 52 Phillips, Kim 8 Plumpton, Dorothy 55 Polonius 101, 105, 120 Polvale family 77–78, 82 Polvale, Ambrosinus 77, 82 Polvale, Belfiore 77 Polvale, Contisia 82 Polvale, Paxinus 77, 82 Poos, L. 86–90, 92, 94–96 Pratt, William 104 Prose Lancelot 108

143

Index Prudentius, Aurelius Clemens 18 Rachel 26 Radegund, queen 19 Rashi 37–38 Ratis Raving 104 Richard II (Richard of Bordeaux), king 4–6, 8, 61–62, 64, 66–71 Richard III, king 110 Richard the Redeles 5 Ridyard, Susan 137 Robert de Blois, Beaudous 111–12 Roman d’Eneas 112 Rottenherring family 98 Sale, Antoine de, Petit Jean de Saintré 117–20 Salih, Sarah 48 Schaar, John 61 Schepherde, Roger 90 Schephyrd, John 94n Screffington, Elizabeth de 93 Screffington, John de 93 Scroll of Esther (the Megillah) 39 Sefer Hasidim 32–34 Sefer Kolbo 39 Sefer Or Zarua 29 Session, William 92 Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages 14 Shakespeare, William 115n, 120; Hamlet 101, 120 Shrewsbury, John Talbot, first earl of 116 Sigvatr 131, 137–38 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 108 Sir Percyvell of Gales 106 Smith, Richard 7n Smyth, John 91 Smyth, William 91 Snorri Sturluson 125–26, 131, 139 Solomon ben Isaac 29 Souden, D. 87 Spaçamensa, domina Marca (Martha) 79, 80–81, 84 Spuret, Margery 93 Stada 77–78, 82 Stonor Elizabeth (Isabel) 55 Strohm, Paul 59, 63n, 69

144

Sudbury, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury 71 Suffolk, Elizabeth of York, second duchess of 55 Suzo Bagutanus 74 Sveinn Forkbeard, king 130 Sveinn Knutsson, king 131, 133–34 Swanson, Jenny 7n Swynhird, Clement 91 Talmud, the 27, 29–30, 35–38, 40 Ta-Shma, I. 27 Tasioulas, Jackie 7n Þorkell 130n Þorleikr 124 Tomardis, Filipina de 79, 82 Tomardis, Guardinus de 79, 82 Tomardis, Tomardus de 78–79, 82 Tomardis, Tutabella de 78 Tor 109 Torah, the 34, 40 Tosafists, the 37–38, 40 Turnus 112 Tyler, Wat 70–71 Ugo 80–81 Urian 115 Vagn Ákason 124 Venantius Fortunatus 19 Vere, John de 56n Vere, Lady Elizabeth de 50, 56 Vere, Robert de 5 Vitalis 80, 84 Voaden, Rosalynn 7, 8 Walsingham, Thomas 70–71 Warwick, Thomas Beauchamp, twelfth earl of 4 Wernher der Gartenære, Helmbrecht 109 Westminster, Monk of, Westminster Chronicle 8, 65n William of Palerne 102, 112–14 Winstead, Karen A. 50, 53n, 57 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 48, 57 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal 109 Wyclif, John 62, 63n Yacob ben Neir Tam, rabbi 39, 41 Zanebellina 76 Zanoni, Luigi 75–77, 79

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