Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (22 page)

Killing on the battlefield was honourable; off the field it was not. He abhorred disloyalty, as is made apparent by his reaction to Hastings’ betrayal, and, given the chance, I believe he would have made a better king than Henry who exploited rich and poor alike to bolster his own bulging coffers.

Throughout his life Henry resorted to devious methods. He lied and cheated his way to the throne, and, even once he had won it, his insecurities continued to dog him and his unscrupulous practices continued.

The Tudor regime may have put an end to the tumultuous years of the Wars of the Roses but the dying didn’t stop. In Henry VIII’s reign alone, it has been
estimated
that 72,000 people were executed. In 1485 the honourable ferocity of the Plantagenets was replaced by the deceit of the Tudors who, although they brought security and wealth to Britain, did so dishonourably.

You can probably tell which banner I fight under, but the subject is just as fascinating from the other side. The years surrounding the Battle of Bosworth have got to be the most intriguing in British history. If my rather biased view of the issues has inspired you to read more, there are countless books on the subject, and you will find that historians just cannot remain impartial. There is something about the Wars of the Roses that, even today, forces you to take sides.

Mysteries, Miracles, and Tableaux: Early Theater in England

by Katherine Ashe

T
heater, in England as in ancient Greece, originally was an expression
of religion. Scholars pin the beginning of English theater at about 960 and identify the
Quem Queritis
as the first play. An Easter presentation, it’s an enactment of the Three Marys coming to Jesus’ tomb and finding the Angel. A priest, dressed in white, sat on the church’s altar as three enactors approached: monks or priests dressed as women, or, in a convent, nuns played the Marys.

Here’s the whole text of the play:

“Quem queritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?
—Whom do you seek, O Christians?”

The women respond,
“Ihesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o Coelicola.
—Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O Celestial.”

He replies,
“Non est hic: surrexit sicut preadixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro.
—He is not here: He has risen, as he predicted. Go, announce that he has risen from the tomb.”

That’s the whole thing. The play was soon adapted for Christmas, the seekers coming to Christ’s manger. The great popularity of such enactments led to their proliferation, but in the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III banned the clergy from performing or permitting such enactments within the church building itself.

Church performances merely moved to the porches and outer steps or to freestanding stages in public marketplaces, where they were displayed on feast days and performed by honored members of the parish. Interestingly, women seem to have performed the female roles, although, when professional theater developed in the 16th century, female roles were performed by adolescent boys and women were banned from the stage.

Early on, these theatricals took two forms, scripted enactments and tableaux or “living pictures.” We know of an Adam and Eve in Paradise tableau from its mention in the
Chronica Majora
, which tells us that in January 1236, King Henry III’s wedding procession passed through the play’s Gate of Paradise, complete with nearly naked Adam and Eve greeting him and his bride, and no doubt shivering in the snow. This play apparently was lent to Henry’s festivities by Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

The mouth of Hell was particularly popular, possibly also for its theatrical nudity of both sexes. Somehow the fact that the people don’t move seems to have made nudity in tableaux acceptable.

Separately, the London Guilds began their own forms of theatricals. The guilds, which were religious as well as mercantile and craft organizations, produced plays and tableaux of their patron saints. These, in contrast to the performances belonging to the churches which were called Mystery Plays, have come to be known as Miracle Plays. Less is known about the early development of the tableaux as they had no scripts, and the ledgers that would have recorded their costs probably were lost in the various conflagrations London suffered.

The guilds’ theatricals were mounted on what are now referred to as pageant wagons, which were paraded through city streets during religious festivals. There are abundant illustrations of the later pageant wagons: sometimes quite elaborate vehicles with settings as backdrops for costumed players frozen in poses associated with each guild’s patron saint, or enacting a significant moment in the saint’s life. Occasionally the saint’s “play” was combined with a tableau of the Life of Christ.

Simultaneous to the flowering of the tableaux were the guilds’ Miracle Plays, centered upon the guilds’ various patron saints. To name just a few of the subjects: Saint Eligious had begun his career as a goldsmith and was patron of all metalworkers including blacksmiths. The caterers favored Saint Lawrence—because he died on a grill and always was shown being roasted. Saint Apollonia, who suffered the torture of having her teeth pulled out, was of course the patron of dentists. Violence has been popular in theater for a very long time.

As the tableaux were becoming more elaborate, so were the Mystery Plays dealing with scenes from the New Testament. The Coventry cycle consisted of ten plays depicting the life of Christ, one scene showing Christ being judged by Pontius Pilate.

The York Cycle apparently consisted of forty-eight plays. The plays continued as popular entertainment during appropriate church holidays until they were banned in the late 16th century.

By then a variety of Mystery Play had developed that suggests a bawdy forerunner of Shakespeare’s scenes designed to appeal to the “groundlings.” The surviving Second Play of the Shepherds of the Wakefield Cycle serves as an example. Here the central characters are a husband and wife, Mac and Gill, who are thieves. Three shepherds come to Mac’s cottage searching for their stolen lamb. Mac tells them his wife has just given birth and mustn’t be disturbed, but the shepherds find their lamb wrapped up as the “newborn” in Gill’s cradle. After punishing Mac by tossing him in a blanket, the shepherds return to their flocks, and an angel announces to them the birth of the Savior in Bethlehem. To a modern sensibility this takeoff on the Virgin Birth of the Lamb of God is rather stunning, and perhaps explains in part why the Mystery Plays eventually were closed down.

Of Cameleopards and Lions: The Medieval Bestiary

by Rosanne E. Lortz

T
hroughout history, from
Aesop’s Fables
to the Animal Planet network, the human imagination has been capt
ured by the scaly, furry, four-footed, scurrying, slithering, swimming, and winged creatures of the animal world. Not only have the characteristics of animals provided endless fascination, but also the lessons that can be drawn from those characteristics.

The
Physiologos
, a Greek book written in the second or third century A.D., was the first book to take brief descriptions of animals and add to them Christian allegories. This book was translated into most of the European languages and is said to have been the second most popular book in Europe (after the Bible).

In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville wrote an extensive encyclopedia of animals (Book 12 of his
Etymologies
), attempting to describe every animal in the world. Eventually, someone had the bright idea of combining the allegorical interpretation of the
Physiologos
with the detailed descriptions from
Etymologies
. The medieval bestiary was born—part encyclopedia, part self-improvement, part doctrinal treatise, and especially popular in the country of England.

Richard Barber, in his translation of a thirteenth century bestiary, gives this succinct description of the genre:

Bestiaries are a particularly characteristic product of medieval England, and give a unique insight into the medieval mind. Richly illuminated and lavishly produced, they were luxury objects for noble families. Their three-fold purpose was to provide a natural history of birds, beasts, and fishes, to draw moral examples from animal behaviour (the industrious bee, the stubborn ass), and to reveal a mystical meaning—the phoenix, for instance, as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection.

The medievals believed that animals had a wonderful capacity to reveal truths about this world and the world beyond it. The Old Testament book of Proverbs had its own examples of morals learned from animals (e.g. Proverbs 6:6—
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise
), and the book of Job supported the idea that mystical meanings could be gleaned from a study of the natural world:

“But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee;

And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:

Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee:

And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”

—Job 12:7-8

An example of the mystical meanings placed in the bestiaries can be seen in this entry about a lion from a twelfth century bestiary.

Scientists say that Leo
[the Lion]
has three principal characteristics…. The Lion’s third feature is this, that when a lioness gives birth to her cubs, she beings them forth dead and lays them up lifeless for three days—until their father, coming on the third day, breathes in their faces and makes them alive.

Just so did the Father Omnipotent raise Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day. Quoth Jacob: “He shall sleep like a lion, and the lion’s whelp shall be raised.”

T. H. White, the twentieth century English author most famous for his King Arthur series
The Once and Future King
, was deeply interested in bestiaries and published his own translation of one. In the appendix he discussed the worldview that made this kind of literature possible:

In the ages of faith, people believed that the Universe was governed by a controlling mind and was capable of a rational explanation. They believed that everything meant something…. Every possible article in the world, and its name also, concealed a hidden message for the eye of faith.

For modern readers, it often seems that these “hidden messages” or mystical meanings take precedence over reality. (A lion’s offspring are born dead and come to life after three days—you’re joking, right?) Many of the fantastic animals described in the bestiary also stretch the imagination to the point that one could consider the medievals insanely gullible or outright liars.

T.H. White, however, was not deterred by the seemingly false or the sublimely fantastic.
“It can hardly be repeated too often that the bestiary is a serious scientific work.”
Many of the bizarre claims were honest mistakes made by naturalists from earlier centuries and repeated by others who drew on their work. Many of the animals that we would immediately classify as “mythical” return to the realm of reality upon closer examination. White noted that:

A Cameleopard…is a genuine animal, and by no means a bad attempt to describe an unseen creature which was as big as a camel while being spotted like a leopard, i.e. a giraffe...the real pleasure comes with identifying the existing creature, not with laughing at a supposedly imaginary one.

In the passage quoted above, White expressed something very important, both for the study of bestiaries and for the study of the past in general. Instead of immediately dismissing the medievals as unintelligent or laughable, he extended them the courtesy of assuming them sensible and found a pleasure in puzzling out what they meant. By reading the bestiary on its own terms, White—an agnostic himself—was finally able to conclude that:

The Bestiary is a compassionate book. It has its bugaboos, of course, but these are only there to thrill us. It loves dogs, which never was usual in the East from which it originated; it is polite to bees, and even praises them for being communists…the horse moves it, as Sidney’s heart was moved, ‘more than with a trumpet’; above all, it has a reverence for the wonders of life, and praises the Creator of them: in whom, in those days, it was still possible absolutely to believe.

Food for Thought: Medieval Feasts

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

B
y the final fading years of the English late Medieval period, just before the Tudor onslaught, the huge gap between rich and poor
which had existed since 1066 had started to wane with the emergence of a new Middle Class, the expansion of trade, the regrowth of the population, and the development of new businesses.

But the initial narrowing of the poverty gap with the virtual end of the so-called feudal system really came about as a result of the Black Death (1348-1353 and onwards) when labour became harder to purchase and the working man discovered his real value. Another of those somewhat uncomfortable situations where great disaster brings great benefit in its wake!

Where food was concerned, however, the gap was still distinctive and no one was going to get excited about being invited to dinner at the local crofter’s cottage. But a medieval feast—now that was a different matter.

For the majority, dinner was traditionally eaten at midday or some time earlier. Especially for those who rose at first light and took no breakfast, then dinner could be taken as early as 9 in the morning. Breakfast was not entirely unknown of course—breaking the fast of a long English evening and a long cold night was sensible, but it was unlikely to involve much more than bread and ale, or possibly porridge.

Farm labourers took food with them as they tramped out to the fields, something cold wrapped in their shirts or hats. This was, for instance, the origin of the Cornish pasty. Many took a little ale and bread after early morning Mass, but many others took nothing at all.

There were two qualities of bread—cheat for the poor and manchet for those who could pay for better. Manchet was baked with white flour and was considered more refined. Bread rolls were the most common (as loaves were more likely to be made of sugar at that time!), bought ready made from the bakers where a baker’s dozen really did mean thirteen.

Cheat, on the other hand, was made with dark flour, either rye or a mixture of oats and barley, less refined in taste but more filling. Those with only rudimentary kitchens in their own homes often utilised communal ovens in cook houses or the village square.

Supper was likely eaten shortly before sundown, but the hour would depend on the working habits of the family. For the poor, this would likely comprise bread and cheese, a vegetable pottage, or what had been left over from dinner. For the wealthy, supper could be anything from a light snack to a full scale feast. Eating well was a proof of status, and, in any case, a rich man was likely to have a huge household to feed.

Thanks to the imagination of many and a few old films, there still appears to be a misunderstanding of medieval table habits. In fact, they were likely to be far more strictly tidy than our own modern more casual practises. The use of clean linen, including a very large starched napkin placed across the left shoulder, was essential.