Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (26 page)

The crusades also introduced Europeans to new fabrics – silks, satins, damasks, brocades, and velvets – and to new bright colours and elaborate weaves. And as trade increased, and the variety of coloured cloths grew, women began making strong statements about who they were by what they wore. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the stylish look was long and slim, the tightness of the cut emphasizing a boyish body-shape – in fact, boys were often referred to as ‘damsels', a word that was used to describe the young Richard II.

DAMSELS ON TOP

By the late fourteenth century many women were in positions of considerable power, and courtly society in England had become increasingly sophisticated and – naturally – feminized. Richard II certainly held jousts, as his predecessors had, but they were more of an entertainment than a training for war, and they were followed by music and dancing. The emphasis at court was on the arts: on poetry, music, fashion and haute cuisine. It was enough to turn the stomach of one rednecked chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, who wrote: ‘The King surrounds himself with “Knights of Venus” more valiant in the bedchamber than on the battlefield.'

Women also took on important roles in government; and Richard II's queen, Anne of Bohemia, was seen as a crucial restraining hand on the implacable justice of the king. As the Virgin Mary interceded with God on behalf of mankind, so it was thought right and proper for the queen to intercede with the king on behalf of his erring subjects. After the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 the official rolls included many pardons like this one:

Richard travelled everywhere with his beloved Queen Anne, and there is no doubt that there was a genuine affection between them. She was intellectual and liberal. For instance, she owned a copy of the Wyclif Bible, the first translation of the Bible into English, and perhaps through her it was circulated in her native Bohemia. It seems likely that she had a powerful influence over her husband and perhaps, although we do not know this, was instrumental in raising the profile of women in his court. Richard was certainly the first king to create a woman duchess in her own right: Margaret Marshall in 1397.

THE DAMSEL AS BUSINESSWOMAN

Women's roles were changing over a much wider swathe of society than just the high nobility. The Black Death, oddly enough, contributed significantly to this: it created such a shortage of people that women had to take on tasks in many spheres that had previously been restricted to men. They were increasingly able to support themselves as traders (a statute of 1363 lifted the ban on women being limited to one trade or craft)
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and seem to have been able to exercise more choice over whom they married.

The best-known female businesswoman was the extraordinary Margery Kempe, born in Lynn in Norfolk in 1373, who wrote what is often described as the first English autobiography:
The Book of Margery Kempe.
Her father, John de Brunham, was a prominent merchant, five times mayor of Lynn, and the book describes how Margery grew up accustomed to affluence.

She describes herself as a fashion victim. She wore gold threads on her head, and her hoods with long ribbons were fashionably slashed. Her cloaks were also modishly slashed, and underlaid with various colours between the slashes. When her husband finally refused to fund her extravagant lifestyle she decided to find the money for herself. Since women were now legally able to operate as sole traders, she didn't need her husband's permission, and could keep any profits she made for herself. So she set herself up as a brewer . . . intending to be ‘the greatest in the town of Lynne'. But alas it was not to be.

The beer simply would not ferment properly for her.

But Margery wasn't to be beaten. She bought two horses and a mill, and set herself up as a corn-grinder. But that, too, was a disaster. It was said that the very horses that turned the mill started to go backwards instead of forwards. Then the miller ran away. ‘And then it was noised about the town of Lynn that neither man nor beast would work for her . . .'

Margery took this as a sign from God that she wasn't cut out for commerce and looked around for another career. She relaunched herself as a visionary and professional hysteric.

Full-time professional religious weeping may not sound like an obvious money-spinner, but there is no doubt that Margery was head and shoulders above the competition. She was, in fact, a world-championship-class weeper. Show her a crucifix and she would faint; and if she thought she was in the presence of God she would start to scream uncontrollably. She wept in public. She wept through sermons. She wept at meals – loudly and incessantly. A holy woman told Margery her weeping was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but most people thought it was just a damned nuisance. After meeting her the archbishop of York is reported to have given his staff five shillings to get her as far away from him as possible.

And when she went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem her fellow-pilgrims just couldn't stand the way she wept and lamented during dinner. They asked her politely to stop, but she couldn't do it. Before they were a quarter of the way to the Holy Land, they dumped her and told her to go on alone.

Margery clearly wasn't your average businesswoman, but at least she finally regained her position in Lynn and even became a member of the guild. The role of women had obviously changed a very great deal.

Writers and thinkers began to re-examine the traditional male attitude that the role of women was merely to be their servants; and to question the Church's teaching that this was an inevitable consequence of the fact that women were naturally corrupters of men, and were morally and intellectually weak and unfit to participate in public life. Women even began to question this out loud:

No matter which way I looked at it and no matter how much I turned the matter over in my mind, I could find no evidence from my own experience to bear out such a negative view of female nature and habits. Even so, given that I could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex, I had to accept their unfavourable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possible have lied on so many different occasions
 . . .

CHRISTINE DE PISAN
,
The Book of the City of Ladies

Christine de Pisan, who wrote this nicely ironic piece in about 1404, had serious trouble with the learned attitude to women and wanted to do something about it. She had grown up in Paris, where her father was a scholar and physician at the royal court, and married a royal secretary. When she was 25 everything went wrong. Her husband died, leaving her with three children and her mother to care for. Her father, who had lost his position, had died two years earlier.

To supplement her income she began to write lyric poems. There were plenty of men who made a living this way, finding patrons who would accept their work as gifts and reward them. Christine had decided to break into this male market. She became accepted as a poet at the French court and began to receive commissions. At the same time, she read widely and she began to join in the intellectual life of Paris.

She had strong opinions about what she read, and decided it was necessary to challenge the way men were writing about women. She was as alarmed by popular romances as she was by the works of ‘learned men'. In particular, she objected to the most celebrated romance of the age, Jean de Meun's poem
The Romance of the Rose.
She published ‘Cupid's Letter', deploring his attitude towards women and what she called his bad influence on many contemporary men which encouraged them to be shallow seducers and revel in their conquests.

When a royal secretary wrote saying that she was a presumptuous woman, daring to attack a man of ‘high understanding', she hit back and didn't pull her punches:

. . . since you are angry at me without reason, you attack me harshly with, ‘Oh outrageous presumption! Oh excessively foolish pride! Oh opinion uttered too quickly and thoughtlessly by the mouth of a woman! A woman who condemns a man of high understanding and dedicated study . . .'

THE MALE BACKLASH

However, this age of semi-emancipation was not going to last. As what we call ‘the Middle Ages' merged seamlessly into what we call ‘the Renaissance' Europe seems to have been dominated by tyrannies and a new wave of militarism and barbarism. Perhaps as a corollary, many men resented and feared women playing prominent roles in society. The restraining hand of the queen as mediatrix was no longer seen as a political ideal. Men sought to push women back into the background.

As the economy recovered from the Black Death during the second half of the fourteenth century, a male backlash had begun to be tangible. In 1400 an ordinance from York declared that ‘henceforth no woman of whatever status or condition shall be put among us to weave . . . unless they have been taught the craft'. As women could not join guilds, that meant never. Other similar rules began to appear.

But, as usual, men found that the handiest weapon against women was religion and the clearest example of this came with the strange history of Joan of Arc. In 1429 Christine de Pisan wrote a poem of sheer delight as this remarkable woman led an army of national liberation through France (that was certainly how Christine saw it). But two years later Joan was in an English prison.

She had gone into battle wearing male costume; she kept it on in prison, the pants and tunic ‘firmly laced and tied together', apparently as a defence against being raped by the soldiers guarding her. Although there were efforts to charge her with witchcraft and heresy these collapsed, and she was convicted for the crime of cross-dressing and nothing else. She had finally consented to wear a dress, but her jailers had taken it away and thrown her the old, forbidden male clothing. She eventually put it on, and was promptly declared to be a ‘relapsed heretic' and condemned to death.

The fire in which Joan burned was just the beginning of a long process of changing not just the position of women, but the very perception of a woman's nature. There was also a striking change in how noblewomen dressed. Instead of showing off a slim, boyish figure, fifteenth-century fashion was concerned with occupying space and moving sedately. A new kind of dress, a ‘houppeland', with a deep V-neck, baggy sleeves and an enormous skirt seriously restricted women's movements. Noblemen also wore houppelands as their bagginess was a demonstration of wealth and extravagance, but the male version was nothing like such an impediment.

Women had started to wear clothes that reduced them to rather helpless ornaments.

THE DRAGON BECOMES FEMALE

One extraordinary insight into the psychological background of these developments is provided by Dr Samantha Riches's study of dragon pictures.
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The story of St George and the dragon had been around since the twelfth century. It was said that this terrible beast had ravaged all the countryside around a town. It had such bad breath that it caused pestilence whenever it approached the town, so the people gave it two sheep every day to satisfy its hunger; and when they eventually ran out of sheep they decided to offer it human victims, chosen by drawing lots. Eventually the chosen victim was the king's daughter. So the maiden, dressed as a bride, was led out and left to wait for the monster. St George happened to find her, bravely attacked the dragon and defeated it.

This tale became very popular in the fifteenth century. But something sinister was appearing in the story.

Dr Riches looked at late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century pictures depicting the tale and realized that in many of them dragons had female genitalia. This portrayal of the dragon as female and sexual is probably connected to fears about women's sexuality during this time. The ‘damsel' in the pictures is ‘saved' by St George, who symbolizes chastity, from the dragon who symbolizes her own uncontrolled sexuality. Women's sexuality was being associated with a monster, suggesting that this sexuality was seen as evil and threatening. St George was the patron saint of towns, and in towns that were actively legislating against women traders this view seems entirely possible.

What began in towns ended by dominating the country. When religious dissent developed it was the craftsmen and tradesmen of the towns who led it, and urban Protestantism would eventually take over England. Built into that Protestantism was a view of woman as the helpmeet, the obedient domestic creature who would now have to vow at her wedding to love, honour and OBEY. Women were not to be encouraged to play queenly roles, as John Knox made clear in 1558 in his
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, an attack on the very idea of women at the head of states. (‘Regiment' meaning ‘government'.)

Things changed so much that in the eighteenth century the great English legal commentator Sir William Blackstone wrote:

The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage . . . for this reason a man cannot grant anything to his wife or enter into any covenant with her: for the grant would be to presuppose her separate existence, and to covenant with her would be only to covenant with himself.

All this was further compounded through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, by a belief that women were ornamental and men active, and then that women really had very little sex drive – that was a man thing. It would have been too frightening for a husband to leave his wife at home while he went off to work if she was actually thought to be randier than him. In fact, less than 100 years ago any woman who was ‘excessively' interested in sex was deemed to be sick or mad, and in need of treatment. A large proportion of the women in mental asylums were there because they had had illegitimate babies; or simply because they enjoyed sex more than was thought proper.