Quotulatiousness

August 3, 2024

The Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Big Serge looks at the decisive battle between the “Holy League” (Spain, Venice, Genoa, Savoy, Tuscany, the Papal States and the Order of St. John) against the Ottoman navy in the Ionian Sea in 1571:

“The Battle of Lepanto”
Oil painting by Juan Luna, 1887. From the Senate of Spain collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Lepanto is a very famous battle, and one which means different things to different people. To a devout Roman Catholic like Chesterton, Lepanto takes on the romanticized and chivalrous form of a crusade — a war by the Holy League against the marauding Turk. At the time it was fought, to be sure, this was the way many in the Christian faction thought of their fight. Chesterton, for his part, writes that “the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, and called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross”.

For historians, Lepanto is something like a requiem for the Mediterranean. Placed firmly in the early-modern period, fought between the Catholic powers of the inland sea and the Ottomans, then on the crest of their imperial rise, Lepanto marked a climactic ending to the long period of human history where the Mediterranean was the pivot of the western world. The coasts of Italy, Greece, the Levant, and Egypt — which for millennia had been the aquatic stomping grounds of empire — were treated to one more great battle before the Mediterranean world was permanently eclipsed by the rise of the Atlantic powers like the French and English. For those particular devotees of military history, Lepanto is very famous indeed as the last major European battle in which galleys — warships powered primarily by rowers — played the pivotal role.

There is some truth in all of this. The warring navies at Lepanto fought a sort of battle that the Mediterranean had seen many times before — battle lines of rowed warships clashing at close quarters in close proximity to the coast. A Roman, Greek, or Persian admiral may not have understood the swivel guns, arquebusiers, or religious symbols of the fleets, but from a distance they would have found the long lines of vessels frothing the waters with their oars to be intimately familiar. This was the last time that such a grand scene would unfold on the blue waters of the inner sea; afterwards the waters would more and more belong to sailing ships with broadside cannon.

Lepanto was all of these things: a symbolic religious clash, a final reprise of archaic galley combat, and the denouement of the ancient Mediterranean world. Rarely, however, is it fully understood or appreciated in its most innate terms, which is to say as a military engagement which was well planned and well fought by both sides. When Lepanto is discussed for its military qualities, stripped of its religious and historiographic significance, it is often dismissed as a bloody, unimaginative, and primitive affair — a mindless slugfest (the stereotypical “land battle at sea”) using an archaic sort of ship which had been relegated to obsolescence by the rise of sail and cannon.

Here we wish to give Lepanto, and the men who fought it, their proper due. The continued use of galleys well into the 16th century did not reflect some sort of primitiveness among the Mediterranean powers, but was instead an intelligent and sensible response to the particular conditions of war on that sea. While galleys would, of course, be abandoned eventually in favor of sailing ships, at Lepanto they remained potent weapons systems which fit the needs of the combatants. Far from being a mindless orgy of violence, Lepanto was a battle characterized by intelligent battle plans in which both the Turkish and Christian command sought to maximize their own advantages, and it was a close run and well fought affair. Lepanto was indeed a swan song for a very old form of Mediterranean naval combat, but it was a well conceived and well fought one, and Turkish and Christian fleets alike did justice to this venerable and ancient form of battle.

July 9, 2024

What it was like to visit a Medieval Tavern

Filed under: Britain, Food, France, History, Religion, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Mar 2024

Medieval stew with meat, spices, and verjuice, and thickened with egg yolks

City/Region: England
Time Period: 15th Century

Some medieval taverns may have had what is called a perpetual stew bubbling away. The idea is basically what it sounds like: as stew was taken out, more ingredients would be added in so that the stew kept on stewing. In southern France, there was a perpetual stew that was served from the 15th century (around when this recipe was written) all the way up until WWII, when they couldn’t get the right ingredients.

I have opted to not make this stew perpetual, but it is delicious. The medieval flavor of super tender meat with spices and saffron is so interesting, especially with the added acidity and sweetness from the verjuice.

A note on thickening with egg yolks: if you need to reheat your stew after adding the egg yolks, like I did, they may scramble a bit. The stew is still delicious, it’s just the texture that changes a little and it won’t be quite as thick.

    Vele, Kede, or Henne in bokenade
    Take Vele, Kyde, or Henne, an boyle hem in fayre Water, or ellys in freysshe brothe, and smyte hem in pecys, and pyke hem clene; an than draw the same brothe thorwe a straynoure, an caste there-to Percely, Swag, Ysope, Maces, Clowys, an let boyle tyl the flesshe be y-now; than sette it from the fyre, and alye it up with raw yolkys of eyroun, and caste ther-to pouder Gyngere, Veriows, Safroun, and Salt, and thanne serve it forth for a gode mete.
    — Harleian Manuscript 279, 15th Century

(more…)

June 30, 2024

The medieval salt trade in the Baltic

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the long-awaited third part of his series on salt, Anton Howes discusses how the extremely low salt level of water in the Baltic Sea helped create a vast salt trade dominated by the merchant cities of the Hanseatic League:

The extent of the Hanseatic League in 1400.
Plate 28 of Professor G. Droysen’s Allgemeiner Historischer Handatlas, published by R. Andrée, 1886, via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s difficult to appreciate salt’s historical significance because it’s now so abundant. Societies used to worry about salt supplies — for preparing and preserving food — as a matter of basic survival. Now we use the vast majority of it for making chemicals or chucking on our roads to keep them from getting icy, while many salt-making plants don’t even operate at full capacity. Yet the story of how we came to achieve salt superabundance is a long and complicated one.

In Part I of this series we looked at salt as a kind of general-purpose technology for the improvement of food, as well as a major revenue-raiser for empires — especially when salt-producing coastal areas could dominate salt-less places inland. In Part II we then looked at a couple of places that were all the more interesting for being both coastal and remarkably salt-less: the coast of Bengal and the Baltic Sea. One was to be exploited by the English East India Company, which needlessly propped up a Bengalese salt industry at great human cost. The other, however, was to prove a more contested prize — and ultimately the place that catalysed the emergence of salt superabundance.

It’s worth a brief recap of where we left the Baltic. Whereas the ocean is on average 3.5% salt, along the Baltic coast it’s at just 0.3% or lower, which would require about twelve times as much time and fuel to produce a given quantity of salt. Although there are a few salt springs near the coast, they were nowhere near large enough to supply the whole region. So from the thirteenth century the Baltic’s salt largely came from the inland salt springs at Lüneburg, supplied via the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg downstream. These two cities had a common interest against the kingdom of Denmark, which controlled the straits between the North and Baltic seas, and created a coalition of trading cities that came to be known as the Hanseatic League. The League resoundingly defeated the Danes in the 1360s and 1430s so that their trade in salt — and the fish they preserved with it — could remain free.

But Lüneburg salt — and by extension the League itself — was soon to face competition.

Lüneburg could simply not keep up with the growth of Baltic demand, as the region’s population became larger and wealthier. And so more and more salt had to come from farther afield, from the Bay of Biscay off France’s western coast, as well as from Setúbal in Portugal and from southern Spain.1 This “bay salt” — originally referring to just the Bay of Bourgneuf, but then extended to the entire Bay of Biscay, and often to all Atlantic solar-evaporated salt — was made by the sun and the wind slowly evaporated the seawater from a series of shallow coastal pools, with the salt forming in coarse, large-grained pieces that were skimmed off the top. Bay salt, however, inevitably ended up mixed with some of the sand and dirt from the bottoms of the pools in which it was held, while the seawater was never filtered, meaning that the salt was often brown, green, grey or black depending on the skill of the person doing the skimming — only the most skilled could create a bay salt that was white. And it often still contained lots of other chemicals found in seawater, like magnesium chloride and sulphate, calcium carbonate and sulphate, potassium chloride and so on, known as bitterns.2

Bay or “black” salt, made with the heat of the sun, was thus of a lower quality than the white salt boiled and refined from inland salt springs or mined as rock. Its dirt discoloured and adulterated food. Its large grains meant it dissolved slowly and unevenly, slowing the rate at which it started to penetrate and preserve the meat and fish — an especially big problem in warmer climates where flesh spoiled quickly. And its bitterns gave it a bitter, gall taste, affecting the texture of the flesh too. Bay salt, thanks to the bitterns, would “draw forth oil and moisture, leading to dryness and hardness”, as well as consuming “the goodness or nutrimental part of the meat, as moisture, gravy, etc.”3 The resulting meat or fish was often left shrunken and tough, while bitterns also slowed the rate at which salt penetrated them too. Bay-salted meat or fish could often end up rotten inside.

But for all these downsides, bay salt required little labour and no fuel. Its main advantage was that it was extremely cheap — as little as half the price of white Lüneburg salt in the Baltic, despite having to be brought from so much farther away.4 Its taste and colour made it unsuitable for use in butter, cheese, or on the table, which was largely reserved for the more expensive white salts. But bay salt’s downsides in terms of preserving meat and fish could be partially offset by simply applying it in excessive quantities — every three barrels of herring, for example, required about a barrel of bay salt to be properly preserved.5

By 1400, Hanseatic merchants were importing bay salt to the Baltic in large and growing quantities, quickly outgrowing the traditional supplies. No other commodity was as necessary or popular: over 70% of the ships arriving to Reval (modern-day Tallinn in Estonia) in the late fifteenth century carried salt, most of it from France. But Hanseatic ships alone proved insufficient to meet the demand. The Danes, Swedes, and even the Hanseatic towns of the eastern Baltic, having so long been under the thumb of Lübeck’s monopoly over salt from Lüneburg, were increasingly happy to accept bay salt brought by ships from the Low Countries — modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. Indeed, when these interloping Dutch ships were attacked by Lübeck in 1438, most of the rest of the Hanseatic League refused Lübeck’s call to arms. When even the Hanseatic-installed king of Denmark sided with the Dutch as well, Lübeck decided to back down and save face. The 1441 peace treaty allowed the Dutch into the Baltic on equal terms.6 Hanseatic hegemony in the Baltic was officially over.

The Dutch, by the 1440s, had thus gained a share of the carrying trade, exchanging Atlantic bay salt for the Baltic’s grain, timber, and various naval stores like hemp for rope and pitch for caulking. But this was just the beginning.

    1. Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. D. S. Ault and S. H. Steinberg, The Emergence of International Business, 1200-1800 (Macmillan and Co Ltd, 1970), pp.219-220, 253-4.

    2. L. Gittins, “Salt, Salt Making, and the Rise of Cheshire”, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 75, no. 1 (January 2005), pp.139–59; L. G. M. Bass-Becking, “Historical Notes on Salt and Salt-Manufacture”, The Scientific Monthly 32, no. 5 (1931), pp.434–46; A. R. Bridbury, England and the Salt Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1955), pp.46-52. Incidentally, some historians, like Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Clarendon Press, 1989) p.223, note occasional reports of French bay salt having been worse than the Portuguese or Spanish due to its high magnesium content, “which imparted an unattractive, blackish colour”. This must be based on a misunderstanding, however, as the salts would have been identical other than in terms of the amount of dirt taken up with the salt from the pans. At certain points in the seventeenth century the French workers skimming the salt must simply have been relatively careless compared to those of Iberia.

    3. John Collins, Salt and fishery a discourse thereof (1682), pp.17, 54-5, 66-8.

    4. Bridbury, pp.94-7 for estimates.

    5. Karl-Gustaf Hildebrand, “Salt and Cloth in Swedish Economic History”, Scandinavian Economic History Review 2, no. 2 (1 July 1954), pp.81, 86, 91.

    6. For this section see: Dollinger, pp.194-5, 201, 236, 254, 300.

June 28, 2024

Ruling Medieval France

Filed under: Books, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Charlotte Allen reviews House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a period of history I know mainly from the English point of view:

I’m a PhD medievalist, but the history of medieval French royalty was never my specialty, and my ignorance was vast.

I’d assumed, for example, that the French kings of the Middle Ages were mostly fainéants whose writ scarcely ran past the Île-de-France region (encompassing the city of Paris and its environs). The English monarchy across the Channel had been centralised since the days of Alfred the Great (849–899); but the French kings seemed to rule in a more symbolic capacity, being perpetually at the mercy of the powerful dukes and counts of autonomous French regions such as Normandy, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Blois, Toulouse, and Languedoc. These regional rulers were technically royal vassals. But, in actuality, they saw themselves as absolute rulers in their own right, and so had no compunction against turning on the crown when they thought it would further their interests.

My impressions had been formed by accounts of the 17-year-old Joan of Arc’s having to personally drag the Dauphin (the future King Charles VII) to Reims for his coronation in 1429, and by Shakespeare’s historical plays, which portrayed the French as fops incapable of defending their territory against the robust and brotherly English during the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, the whole point of that war (from the English perspective) was that, by dynastic right, large portions of France’s fractured political landscape actually belonged to England.

The one medieval French royal (by marriage) I did know something about, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204), dumped her French husband, King Louis VII (1120–1180) after he bungled the Second Crusade, a costly and embarrassing adventure on which Eleanor had accompanied him on horseback. (“Never take your wife on a Crusade”, a medievalist friend of mine once sensibly quipped). To top off his disastrous final loss of his Crusader army in 1148 during an ill-considered attack on Damascus — which, although Muslim-ruled, was in fact an ally of Latin-Christian Jerusalem — Louis and Eleanor had failed to produce a son. No sooner was the ink dry on their divorce in 1152 (technically an annulment, since the two were Catholics), than she married Henry Plantagenet, son and heir of the duke of Anjou, who two years later became King Henry II of England. Henry quickly procreated five sons (among fourteen surviving children) with his new bride. Thus began the dynasty that would rule England for more than three centuries.

As everyone who has seen The Lion in Winter knows, Henry II’s relationship with Eleanor was far from tranquil, but two of their sons succeeded him to the English throne: Richard the Lionheart and King John (of Magna Carta fame or infamy, depending on your perspective). Henry was, besides king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, through his great-grandfather, William the Conqueror, and his mother, Matilda, who’d married Henry’s Anjevin father, Geoffrey, after her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, died in 1125.

Eleanor’s grounds for annulling her marriage to Louis had been that he was her fourth cousin, which violated the Catholic Church’s (selectively applied) consanguinity restrictions. But Henry was even closer kin, being her third cousin. The humiliated and (understandably) rankled Louis demanded that Henry, as his feudal vassal, explain why he’d failed to ask permission to marry (let alone marry his boss’s ex). Henry declined to reply, the feudal equivalent of declaring oneself in rebellion. Louis retaliated by invading Normandy — unsuccessfully — and trying to hold onto Eleanor’s Aquitaine on the claim that he’d become its duke by marriage (Henry II was meanwhile making the same claim) before giving up and remarrying himself in 1154.

A colour-coded political map of France during the twelfth century, indicating the early expansion of the Angevin Empire — i.e., the territorial possessions of the House of Plantagenet — from the time of Geoffrey V of Anjou (1113–1151). The Plantagenets would rule in England, and parts of France, till the demise of Richard III of England (1452–1485).

I’d assumed that French kings wouldn’t hold much in the way of real royal power until the time of King Louis XIV (1638–1715), who declared (perhaps apocryphally), L’État, c’est moi, and forced French regional nobles to reside in his over-the-top palace at Versailles (where they’d dissipate their incomes via elaborate court ceremonies instead of making trouble from their provincial power bases).

But the scales have now been knocked from my eyes, thanks to Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a professor of French medieval history at the University of St Andrews. The subtitle of her new book, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France, refers to the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugh Capet (c. 940–996), who took his royal title in 987 A.D. Every French monarch, from Hugh’s reign to the French Revolution and beyond, had Capetian blood running through his veins — including the aforementioned Louis VII, who was a direct descendant of Hugh, and the bookish, dithering King Louis XVI, who was not, but who nevertheless went to the guillotine in 1793 under the derisive sobriquet “Citizen Louis Capet”.

June 1, 2024

QotD: When the chimneys rose in London

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A coal fire also burns much hotter, and with more acidic fumes, than a wood fire. Pots that worked well enough for wood — typically brass, either thin beaten-brass or thicker cast-brass — degrade rapidly over coal, and people increasingly switched to iron, which takes longer to heat but lasts much better. At the beginning of the shift to coal, the only option for pots was wrought iron — nearly pure elemental iron, wrought (archaic past tense of “worked”, as in “what hath God wrought”) with hammer and anvil, a labor-intensive process. But since the advent of the blast furnace in the late fifteenth century, there was a better, cheaper material available: cast iron.1 It was already being used for firebacks, rollers for crushing malt, and so forth, but English foundries were substantially behind those of the continent when it came to casting techniques in brass and were entirely unprepared to make iron pots with any sort of efficiency. The innovator here was Abraham Darby, who in 1707 filed a patent for a dramatically improved method of casting metal for pots — and also, incidentally, used a coal-fired blast furnace to smelt the iron. This turned out to be the key: a charcoal-fueled blast furnace, which is what people had been using up to then, makes white cast iron, a metal too brittle to be cast into nicely curved shapes like a pot. Smelting with coal produces gray cast iron, which includes silicon in the metal’s structure and works much better for casting complicated shapes like, say, parts for a steam engine. Coal-smelted iron would be the key material of the Industrial Revolution, but the economic incentive for its original development was the early modern market for pots, kettles, and grates suitable for cooking over the heat and fumes of a coal fire.2

In Ruth Goodman’s telling, though, the greatest difference between coal and wood fires is the smoke. Smoke isn’t something we think much about these days: on the rare occasions I’m around a fire at all, I’m either outdoors (where the smoke dissipates rapidly except for a pleasant lingering aroma on my jacket) or in front of a fireplace with a good chimney that draws the smoke up and out of the house. However, a chimney also draws about 70% of the fire’s heat — not a problem if you’re in a centrally-heated modern home and enjoying the fire for ✨ambience✨, but a serious issue if it’s the main thing between your family and the Little Ice Age outdoors. Accordingly, premodern English homes didn’t have chimneys: the fire sat in a central hearth in the middle of the room, radiating heat in all directions, and the smoke slowly dissipated out of the unglazed windows and through the thatch of the roof. Goodman describes practical considerations of living with woodsmoke that never occurred to me:

    In the relatively still milieu of an interior space, wood smoke creates a distinct and visible horizon, below which the air is fairly clear and above which asphyxiation is a real possibility. The height of this horizon line is critical to living without a chimney. The exact dynamics vary from building to building and from hour to hour as the weather outside changes. Winds can cause cross-draughts that stir things up; doors and shutters opening and closing can buffet smoke in various directions. … From my experiences managing fires in a multitude of buildings in many different weather conditions, I can attest to the annoyance of a small change in the angle of a propped-open door, the opening of a shutter or the shifting of a piece of furniture that you had placed just so to quiet the air. And as for people standing in doorways, don’t get me started.

One obvious adaptation was to live life low to the ground. On a warm day the smoke horizon might be relatively high, but on a cold damp one (of which, you may be aware, England has quite a lot) smoke hovers low enough that even sitting in a tall chair might well put your head right up into it. Far better to sit on a low stool, or, better yet, a nice soft insulating layer of rushes on the floor.

Chimneys did exist before the transition to coal, but given the cost of masonry and the additional fuel expenses, they were typically found only in the very wealthiest homes. Everyone else lived with a central hearth and if they could afford it added smoke management systems to their homes piecemeal. Among the available solutions were the reredos (a short half-height wall against which the fire was built and which would counteract drafts from doorways), the smoke hood (rather like our modern cooktop vent hood but without the fan, allowing some of the smoke to rise out of the living space without creating a draw on the heat), or the smoke bay (a method of constructing an upstairs room over only part of the downstairs that still allowed smoke to rise and dissipate through the roof). Wood smoke management was mostly a question of avoiding too great a concentration in places you wanted your face to be. The switch to coal changed this, though, because coal smoke is frankly foul stuff. It hangs lower than wood smoke, in part because it cools faster, and it’s full of sulfur compounds that combine with the water in your eyes and lungs to create a mild sulfuric acid; when your eyes water from the irritation, the stinging only gets worse. Burning coal in an unvented central hearth would have been painful and choking. If you already had one of the interim smoke management techniques of the wood-burning period — especially the smoke hood — you would have found adopting coal more appealing, but really, if you burned coal, you wanted a chimney. You probably already wanted a chimney, though; they had been a status symbol for centuries.

And indeed, chimneys went up all over London; their main disadvantage, aside from the cost of a major home renovation, had been the way they drew away the heat along with the smoke, but a coal fire’s greater energy output made that less of an issue. The other downside of the chimney’s draw, though, is the draft it creates at ground level. Again, this isn’t terribly noticeable today because most of us don’t spend a lot of time sitting in front of the fireplace (or indeed, sitting on the floor at all, unless we have small children), but pay attention next time you’re by an indoor wood fire and you will notice a flow of cold air for the first inch or two off the ground. All of a sudden, instead of putting your mattress directly on the drafty floor, you wanted a bedstead to lift it up — and a nice tall chair to sit on, and a table to pull your chair up to as well. There were further practical differences, too: because a chimney has to be built into a wall, it can’t heat as large an area as a central fire. This incentivized smaller rooms, which were further enabled by the fact that a coal fire can burn much longer without tending than a wood fire. A gentleman doesn’t have much use for small study where he can retreat to be alone with his books and papers if a servant is popping in every ten minutes to stir up the fire, but if the coals in the grate will burn for an hour or two untended he can have some real privacy. The premodern wood-burning home was a large open space where many members of the household, both masters and servants, went about their daily tasks; the coal-burning home gradually became a collection of smaller, furniture-filled spaces that individuals or small groups used for specific purposes. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the word “hall”, which transitions from referring to something like Heorot to being a mere corridor between rooms.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

    1. Brief ferrous metallurgy digression: aside from the rare, relatively pure iron found in meteors, all iron found in nature is in the form of ores like haematite, where the iron bound up with oxygen and other impurities like silicon and phosphorus (“slag”). Getting the iron out of the ore requires adding carbon (for the oxygen to bond with) and heat (to fuel the chemical reaction): Fe2O3 + C + slag → Fe + CO2 + slag. Before the adoption of the blast furnace, European iron came from bloomeries: basically a chimney full of fuel hot enough to cause a reduction reaction when ore is added to the top, removing the oxygen from the ore but leaving behind a mass of mixed iron and slag called a bloom. The bloom would then be heated and beaten and heated and beaten — the hot metal sticks together while the slag crumbles and breaks off — to leave behind a lump of nearly pure iron. (If you managed the temperature of your bloomery just right you could incorporate some of the carbon into the iron itself, producing steel, but this was difficult to manage and carbon was usually added to the iron afterwards to make things like armor and swords.) In a blast furnace, by contrast, the fuel and ore were mixed together and powerful blasts of air were forced through as the material moved down the furnace and the molten iron dripped out the bottom. From there it could be poured directly into molds and cast into the desired shape. This is obviously much faster and easier! But cast iron has much more carbon, which makes it very hard, lowers its melting point, and leaves it extremely brittle — you would never want a cast iron sword. (The behavior of various ferrous metals is determined by the way the non-metal atoms, especially carbon, interrupt the crystal structure of the iron. Wrought iron has less than .08% carbon by weight, modern “low carbon” steel between .05% and .3%, “high carbon” steel about 1.7%, and cast iron more than 3%.)

    2. The sales of those cooking implements went on to provide the capital for further innovation: Darby’s son and grandson, two more Abrahams, also played important roles in the Industrial Revolution.

May 13, 2024

Archaeological Publishing – the unpalatable truth

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Classical and Ancient Civilization
Published May 11, 2024

Some anecdotes about publishing archaeological sites

April 22, 2024

QotD: Before England could rely on the “wooden walls” of the Royal Navy

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… given this general lack of geographical knowledge, try to imagine embarking on a voyage of discovery. To an extent, you might rely on the skill and experience of your mariners. For England in the mid-sixteenth century, however, these would not have been all that useful. It’s strange to think of England as not having been a nation of seafarers, but this was very much the case. Its merchants in 1550 might hop across the channel to Calais or Antwerp, or else hug the coastline down to Bordeaux or Spain. A handful had ventured further, to the eastern Mediterranean, but that was about it. Few, if any, had experience of sailing the open ocean. Even trade across the North Sea or to the Baltic was largely unknown – it was dominated by the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. Nor would England have had much to draw upon in the way of more military, naval experience. The seas for England were a traditional highway for invaders, not a defensive moat. After all, it had a land border with Scotland to the north, as well as a land border with France to the south, around the major trading port of Calais. Rather than relying on the “wooden walls” of its ships, as it would in the decades to come, the two bulwarks in 1550 were the major land forts at Calais and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.

March 10, 2024

Viking longships and textiles

Filed under: Europe, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Virginia Postrel reposts an article she originally wrote for the New York Times in 2021, discussing the importance of textiles in history:

The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is the world’s largest reconstruction of a Viking Age longship. The original ship was built at Dublin ca. 1042. It was used as a warship in Irish waters until 1060, when it ended its days as a naval barricade to protect the harbour of Roskilde, Denmark. This image shows Sea Stallion arriving in Dublin on 14 August, 2007.
Photo by William Murphy via Wikimedia Commons.

Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga Vikings emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.

One of the central characters in Vikings is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.

In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.

Ignoring textiles writes women’s work out of history. And as the British archaeologist and historian Mary Harlow has warned, it blinds scholars to some of the most important economic, political and organizational challenges facing premodern societies. Textiles are vital to both private and public life. They’re clothes and home furnishings, tents and bandages, sacks and sails. Textiles were among the earliest goods traded over long distances. The Roman Army consumed tons of cloth. To keep their soldiers clothed, Chinese emperors required textiles as taxes.

“Building a fleet required longterm planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce,” Dr. Harlow wrote in a 2016 article. “The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.” Spinning and weaving the wool for a single toga, she calculates, would have taken a Roman matron 1,000 to 1,200 hours.

Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.

Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied. “The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.

Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined. But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment. “In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.”

January 25, 2024

The Bathtub Hoax and debunked medieval myths

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman spends a bit of time debunking some bogus but widely believed historical myths:

“Image” by Lauren Knowlton is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The first is a false story that teaches a true lesson — the U.S. did treat Amerinds unjustly in a variety of contexts, although the massive die off as a result of the spread of Old World diseases was a natural result of contact, not deliberate biological warfare. The second lets moderns feel superior to their ignorant ancestors; most people like feeling superior to someone.

Another example of that, deliberately created by a master, is H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, an entirely fictitious history of the bathtub published in 1917:

    The article claimed that the bathtub had been invented by Lord John Russell of England in 1828, and that Cincinnatian Adam Thompson became acquainted with it during business trips there in the 1830s. Thompson allegedly went back to Cincinnati and took the first bath in the United States on December 20, 1842. The invention purportedly aroused great controversy in Cincinnati, with detractors claiming that its expensive nature was undemocratic and local doctors claiming it was dangerous. This debate was said to have spread across the nation, with an ordinance banning bathing between November and March supposedly narrowly failing in Philadelphia and a similar ordinance allegedly being effective in Boston between 1845 and 1862. … Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was claimed to have campaigned for the bathtub against remaining medical opposition in Boston; the American Medical Association supposedly granted sanction to the practice in 1850, followed by practitioners of homeopathy in 1853.

    According to the article, then-Vice President Millard Fillmore visited the Thompson bathtub in March 1850 and having bathed in it became a proponent of bathtubs. Upon his accession to the presidency in July of that year, Fillmore was said to have ordered the construction of a bathtub in the White House, which allegedly refueled the controversy of providing the president with indulgences not enjoyed by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, the effect of the bathtub’s installation was said to have obliterated any remaining opposition, such that it was said that every hotel in New York had a bathtub by 1860. (Wikipedia)

Writing more than thirty years later, Mencken claimed to have been unable to kill the story despite multiple retractions. A google search for [Millard Fillmore bathtub] demonstrates that it is still alive. Among other hits:

    The first bathtub placed in the White House is widely believed to have had been installed in 1851 by President Millard Fillmore (1850-53). (The White House Bathrooms & Kitchen)

Medieval

The desire of moderns to feel superior to their ancestors, helps explain a variety of false beliefs about the Middle Ages including the myth, discussed in detail in an earlier post, that medieval cooking was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

Other examples:

Medieval witch hunts: Contrary to popular belief, large scale persecution of witches started well after the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval church viewed the belief that Satan could give magical powers to witches, on which the later prosecutions were largely based, as heretical. The Spanish Inquisition, conventionally blamed for witchcraft prosecutions, treated witchcraft accusations as a distraction from the serious business of identifying secret Jews and Muslims, dealt with such accusations by applying serious standards of evidence to them.

Chastity Belts: Supposedly worn by the ladies of knights off on crusade. The earliest known evidence of the idea of a chastity belt is well after the end of the crusades, a 15th century drawing, and while there is literary evidence for their occasional use after that no surviving examples are known to be from before the 19th century.

Ius Prima Noctae aka Droit de Seigneur was the supposed right of a medieval lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night. Versions of the institution are asserted in a variety of sources going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but while it is hard to prove that it never existed in the European middle ages it was clearly never the norm.

The Divine Right of Kings: Various rulers through history have claimed divine sanction for their rule but “The Divine Right of Kings” is a doctrine that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the rise of absolute monarchy — Henry VIII in England, Louis XIV in France. Medieval rulers were absolute in neither theory or practice. The feudal relation was one of mutual obligation, in its simplest form protection by the superior in exchange for set obligations of support by the inferior. In practice the decentralized control of military power under feudalism presented difficulties for a ruler who wished to overrule the desires of his nobility, as King John discovered.

Some fictional history functions in multiple versions designed to support different causes. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has been variously blamed on Julius Caesar, Christian mobs rioting against pagans, and the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, the Caliph Umar having supposedly said that anything in the library that was true was already in the Koran and anything not in the Koran was false. There is no good evidence for any of the stories. The library existed in classical antiquity, no longer exists today, but it is not known how it was destroyed and it may have just gradually declined.

January 3, 2024

Highlights of Diocletian’s Palace in Split

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 6 Oct 2023

A Roman historian’s tour of the Palace of Diocletian in Split, Croatia.

Chapters
0:00 Diocletian and his palace
0:59 Overview and layout
2:37 South facade
3:07 East facade
3:39 Porta Aurea
4:09 Peristyle
4:48 Temple of Jupiter
5:49 Reception rooms (vestibule and substructures)
6:23 Mausoleum of Diocletian / Cathedral

January 1, 2024

QotD: The Panto

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the worst things my parents ever did was force me to go to the panto. It was Angela’s Ashes levels of misery memoir fodder.

What made it worse was that I was about 14; I’d almost managed to get through childhood without experiencing this strange British tradition and then, just at the age when you’re most vulnerable to cringe, I got dragged in. Anyway, I think I’m over it now.

Pantomime is one of those very British things that makes me feel a strange sense of alienation from my countrymen, like celebrating the NHS or twee. I’m glad that other people enjoy it, and that it brings a lot of work to actors and to theatres during the Christmas period. I just personally don’t get it.

For those who don’t know about the ins and outs of our island culture, panto is a sort of farcical theatre featuring lots of sexual innuendo and contemporary pop culture references; I think when I watched it there must have been one or two ex-Neighbours stars because they all finished by singing the theme tune.

A key part of this British institution is drag, with men playing the roles of Widow Twankey and the Ugly Sisters. Drag is quite an established tradition in England, such a part of popular entertainment that there is even a photograph of British soldiers in dresses fighting in the Second World War.

Pantomime is thought to have evolved from the medieval Feast of Fools, a day of the year (around the Christmas/New Year period) when social norms would be inverted; laymen would be elected bishops, lords would serve their retainers drinks, and men and women would even swap roles. Social norms could be temporarily broken, which continues today in the often risqué humour incongruously aimed at family audiences (hilariously portrayed in the Les Dennis episode of Extras.)

This kind of drag is obviously humourous, the aim being for the men to look as ridiculous as possible; think of the ungainly Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Doctor. It is very different to the later pop culture gender fluidity pioneered by David Bowie in which males might be presented as beautifully feminine, even alluring; that was aimed at challenging and disturbing the audience, while panto is aimed at amusing and reassuring. Indeed, the whole point of spending a day inverting social norms is that, by doing so, you are implicitly accepting and defending those social norms.

This form of drag is obviously quite different to the more modern drag queen, a form of entertainment that can be far more explicit and which has in the 21st century become yet another one-of-those-talking-points, chiefly because people seem so keen on letting children watch it.

Ed West, “The last conservative moral panic”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-08.

December 29, 2023

The Christianization of England

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West‘s Christmas Day post recounted the beginnings of organized Christianity in England, thanks to the efforts of Roman missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I:

“Saint Augustine and the Saxons”
Illustration by Joseph Martin Kronheim from Pictures of English History, 1868 via Wikimedia Commons.

The story begins in sixth century Rome, once a city of a million people but now shrunk to a desolate town of a few thousand, no longer the capital of a great empire of even enjoying basic plumbing — a few decades earlier its aqueducts had been destroyed in the recent wars between the Goths and Byzantines, a final blow to the great city of antiquity. Under Pope Gregory I, the Church had effectively taken over what was left of the town, establishing it as the western headquarters of Christianity.

Rome was just one of five major Christian centres. Constantinople, the capital of the surviving eastern Roman Empire, was by this point far larger, and also claimed leadership of the Christian world — eventually the two would split in the Great Schism, but this was many centuries away. The other three great Christian centres — Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch — would soon fall to Islam, a turn of events that would strengthen Rome’s spiritual position. And it was this Roman version of Christianity which came to shape the Anglo-Saxon world.

Gregory was a great reformer who is viewed by some historians as a sort of bridge between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the founder of a new and reborn Rome, now a spiritual rather than a military empire. He is also the subject of the one great stories of early English history.

One day during the 570s, several years before he became pontiff, Gregory was walking around the marketplace when he spotted a pair of blond-haired pagan slave boys for sale. Thinking it tragic that such innocent-looking children should be ignorant of the Lord, he asked a trader where they came from, and was told they were “Anglii”, Angles. Gregory, who was fond of a pun, replied “Non Angli, sed Angeli” (not Angles, but angels), a bit of wordplay that still works fourteen centuries later. Not content with this, he asked what region they came from and was told “Deira” (today’s Yorkshire). “No,” he said, warming to the theme and presumably laughing to himself, “de ira” — they are blessed.

Impressed with his own punning, Gregory decided that the Angles and Saxons should be shown the true way. A further embellishment has the Pope punning on the name of the king of Deira, Elle, by saying he’d sing “hallelujah” if they were converted, but it seems dubious; in fact, the Anglo-Saxons were very fond of wordplay, which features a great deal in their surviving literature and without spoiling the story, we probably need to be slightly sceptical about whether Gregory actually said any of this.

The Pope ordered an abbot called Augustine to go to Kent to convert the heathens. We can only imagine how Augustine, having enjoyed a relatively nice life at a Benedictine monastery in Rome, must have felt about his new posting to some cold, faraway island, and he initially gave up halfway through his trip, leaving his entourage in southern Gaul while he went back to Rome to beg Gregory to call the thing off.

Yet he continued, and the island must have seemed like an unimaginably grim posting for the priest. Still, in the misery-ridden squalor that was sixth-century Britain, Kent was perhaps as good as it gets, in large part due to its links to the continent.

Gaul had been overrun by the Franks in the fifth century, but had essentially maintained Roman institutions and culture; the Frankish king Clovis had converted to Catholicism a century before, following relentless pressure from his wife, and then as now people in Britain tended to ape the fashions of those across the water.

The barbarians of Britain were grouped into tribes led by chieftains, the word for their warlords, cyning, eventually evolving into its modern usage of “king”. There were initially at least twelve small kingdoms, and various smaller tribal groupings, although by Augustine’s time a series of hostile takeovers had reduced this to eight — Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex (the West Country and Thames Valley), East Anglia, Mercia (the Midlands), Bernicia (the far North), and Deira (Yorkshire).

In 597, when the Italian delegation finally finished their long trip, Kent was ruled by King Ethelbert, supposedly a great-grandson of the semi-mythical Hengest. The king of Kent was married to a strong-willed Frankish princess called Bertha, and luckily for Augustine, Bertha was a Christian. She had only agreed to marry Ethelbert on condition that she was allowed to practise her religion, and to keep her own personal bishop.

Bertha persuaded her husband to talk to the missionary, but the king was perhaps paranoid that the Italian would try to bamboozle him with witchcraft, only agreeing to meet him under an oak tree, which to the early English had magical properties that could overpower the foreigner’s sorcery. (Oak trees had a strong association with religion and mysticism throughout Europe, being seen as the king of the trees and associated with Woden, Zeus, Jupiter, and all the other alpha male gods.)

Eventually, and persuaded by his wife, Ethelbert allowed Augustine to baptise 10,000 Kentish men on Christmas Day, 597, according to the chronicles. This is probably a wild exaggeration; 10,000 is often used as a figure in medieval history, and usually just means “quite a lot of people”.

December 18, 2023

QotD: A short history of the (long) Fifth Century

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The chaotic nature of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire makes a short recounting of its history difficult but a sense of chronology and how this all played out is going to be necessary so I will try to just hit the highlights.

First, its important to understand that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was not the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries (all AD, to be clear). From 235 to 284, Rome had suffered a seemingly endless series of civil wars, waged against the backdrop of worsening security situations on the Rhine/Danube frontier and a peer conflict in the east against the Sassanid Empire. These wars clearly caused trade and economic disruptions as well as security problems and so the Roman Empire that emerges from the crisis under the rule of Diocletian (r. 284-305), while still powerful and rich by ancient standards, was not as powerful or as rich as in the first two centuries and also had substantially more difficult security problems. And the Romans subsequently are never quite able to shake the habit of regular civil wars.

One of Diocletian’s solutions to this problem was to attempt to split the job of running the empire between multiple emperors; Diocletian wanted a four emperor system (the “tetrarchy” or “rule of four”) but what stuck among his successors, particular Constantine (r. 306-337) and his family (who ruled till 363), was an east-west administrative divide, with one emperor in the east and one in the west, both in theory cooperating with each other ruling a single coherent empire. While this was supposed to be a purely administrative divide, in practice, as time went on, the two halves increasing had to make do with their own revenues, armies and administration; this proved catastrophic for the western half, which had less of all of these things (if you are wondering why the East didn’t ride to the rescue, the answer is that great power conflict with the Sassanids). In any event, with the death of Theodosius I in 395, the division of the empire became permanent; never again would one man rule both halves.

We’re going to focus here almost entirely on the western half of the empire […]

The situation on the Rhine/Danube frontier was complex. The peoples on the other side of the frontier were not strangers to Roman power; indeed they had been trading, interacting and occasionally raiding and fighting over the borders for some time. That was actually part of the Roman security problem: familiarity had begun to erode the Roman qualitative advantage which had allowed smaller professional Roman armies to consistently win fights on the frontier. The Germanic peoples on the other side had begun to adopt large political organizations (kingdoms, not tribes) and gained familiarity with Roman tactics and weapons. At the same time, population movements (particularly by the Huns) further east in Europe and on the Eurasian Steppe began creating pressure to push these “barbarians” into the empire. This was not necessarily a bad thing: the Romans, after conflict and plague in the late second and third centuries, needed troops and they needed farmers and these “barbarians” could supply both. But […] the Romans make a catastrophic mistake here: instead of reviving the Roman tradition of incorporation, they insisted on effectively permanent apartness for the new arrivals, even when they came – as most would – with initial Roman approval.

This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the “decline and fall” and thus the start of our “long fifth century”. The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as “allies” – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated.

In the aftermath of the defeat, the Goths moved to settle in the Balkans and it would subsequently prove impossible for the Romans to move them out. Part of the reason for that was that the Romans themselves were hardly unified. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here except to note that usurpers and assassinations among the Roman elite are common in this period, which generally prevented any kind of unified Roman response. In particular, it leads Roman leaders (both generals and emperors) desperate for troops, often to fight civil wars against each other, to rely heavily on Gothic (and later other “barbarian”) war leaders. Those leaders, often the kings of their own peoples, were not generally looking to burn the empire down, but were looking to create a place for themselves in it and so understandably tended to militate for their own independence and recognition.

Indeed, it was in the context of these sorts of internal squabbles that Rome is first sacked, in 410 by the Visigothic leader Alaric. Alaric was not some wild-eyed barbarian freshly piled over the frontier, but a Roman commander who had joined the Roman army in 392 and probably rose to become king of the Visigoths as well in 395. Alaric had spent much of the decade before 410 alternately feuding with and working under Stilicho, a Romanized Vandal, who had been a key officer under the emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) and a major power-player after his death because he controlled Honorius, the young emperor in the West. Honorius’ decision to arrest and execute Stilicho in 408 seems to have precipitated Alaric’s move against Rome. Alaric’s aim was not to destroy Rome, but to get control of Honorius, in particular to get supplies and recognition from him.

That pattern: Roman emperors, generals and foederati kings – all notionally members of the Roman Empire – feuding, was the pattern that would steadily disassemble the Roman Empire in the west. Successful efforts to reassert the direct control of the emperors on foederati territory naturally created resentment among the foederati leaders but also dangerous rivalries in the imperial court; thus Flavius Aetius, a Roman general, after stopping Attila and assembling a coalition of Visigoths, Franks, Saxons and Burgundians, was assassinated by his own emperor, Valentinian III in 454, who was in turn promptly assassinated by Aetius’ supporters, leading to another crippling succession dispute in which the foederati leaders emerged as crucial power-brokers. Majorian (r. 457-461) looked during his reign like he might be able to reverse this fragmentation, but his efforts at reform offended the senatorial aristocracy in Rome, who then supported the foederati leader Ricimer (half-Seubic, half-Visigoth but also quite Romanized) in killing Majorian and putting the weak Libius Severus (r. 461-465) on the throne. The final act of all of this comes in 476 when another of these “barbarian” leaders, Odoacer, deposed the latest and weakest Roman emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus (generally called Romulus Augustulus – the “little” Augustus) and what was left of the Roman Empire in the west ceased to exist in practice (Odoacer offered to submit to the authority of the Roman Emperor in the East, though one doubts his real sincerity). Augustulus seems to have taken it fairly well – he retired to an estate in Campania originally built by the late Republican Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus and lived out his life there in leisure.

The point I want to draw out in all of this is that it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroyed from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed (as we’ll see next time) there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.

December 14, 2023

QotD: The rise of castles in early Medieval Europe

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While fortifications obviously had existed a long time, when we talk about castles, what we really mean is a kind of fortified private residence which also served as a military base. This form of fortification really only becomes prominent (as distinct from older walled towns and cities) in 9th century, in part because the collapse of central authority (due in turn to the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire) led to local notables fortifying their private residences. This process was, unsurprisingly, particularly rapid and pronounced in the borderlands of the various Carolingian splinter kingdoms (where there were peer threats from the other splinters) and in areas substantially exposed to Scandinavian (read: Viking) raiding. And so functionally, a castle is a fortified house, though of course large castles could encompass many other functions. In particular, the breakdown of central authority meant that these local aristocrats also represented much of the local government and administration, which they ran not through a civil bureaucracy but through their own households and so in consequence their house (broadly construed) was also the local administrative center.

Now, we can engage here in a bit of a relatable thought experiment: how extensively do your fortify your house (or apartment)? I’ll bet the answer is actually not “none” – chances are your front door locks and your windows are designed to be difficult to open from the outside. But how extensive those protections are vary by a number of factors: homes in high crime areas might be made more resistant (multiple deadbolts, solid exterior doors rather than fancy glass-pane doors, possibly even barred windows at ground level). Lots of neighbors can lower the level of threat for a break-in, as can raw obscurity (as in a house well out into the country). Houses with lots of very valuable things in them might invest in fancy security systems, or at least thief deterring signs announcing fancy security systems. And of course the owner’s ability to actually afford more security is a factor. In short, home defenses respond to local conditions aiming not for absolute security, but for a balance of security and cost: in safe places, home owners “consume” that security by investing less heavily in it, while homeowners who feel less safety invest more in achieving that balance, in as much as their resources allow. And so the amount of security for a house is not a universal standard but a complicated function of the local danger, the resources available and the individual home owner’s risk tolerance. Crucially, almost no one aims for absolute home security.

And I go through this thought process because in their own way the same concerns dictate how castles – or indeed, any fortification – is constructed, albeit of course a fortified house that aims to hold off small armies rather than thieves is going to have quite a bit more in the way of defenses than your average house. No fortification is ever designed to be absolutely impenetrable (or perhaps most correctly put, no wise fortress designer ever aims at absolute impenetrability; surely some foolish ones have tried). This is a fundamental mistake in assessing fortifications that gets made very often: concluding that because no fortification can be built to withstand every assault, that fortification itself is useless; but withstanding every assault is not the goal. The goal is not to absolutely prohibit every attack but merely to raise the cost of an attack above either a potential enemy’s willingness to invest (so they don’t bother) or above their ability to afford (so the attack is attempted and fails) and because all of this is very expensive the aim is often a sort of minimum acceptable margin of security against an “expected threat” (which might, mind you, still be a lot of security, especially if the “expected threat” is very high). This is true of the castle itself, if for no other reason than that resources are scarce and there are always other concerns competing for them, but also for every component of its defenses: individual towers, gates and walls are not designed to be impenetrable, merely difficult enough.

This is particularly true in castle design because the individuals building these castles often faced fairly sharp limitations in the resources at their disposal. Castles as a style of fortification emerge in a context of political fragmentation, in particular the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, which left even the notional large kingdoms (like the kingdom of France) internally fragmented. Castles were largely being built not by kings but by counts and dukes who held substantial landholdings but nothing like the resources of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious, much less the Romans or Assyrians. Moreover, the long economic and demographic upswing of the Middle Ages was only just beginning to gain momentum; the great cities of the Roman world had shrunk away and the total level of economic production declined, so the sum resources available to these rulers were lower. Finally, the loss of the late Roman bureaucracy (replaced by these fragmented realms running on an economic system best termed “manorialism”) meant that the political authorities (the nobility) often couldn’t even get a hold of a very large portion of the available economic production they did have. Consequently, castle construction is all about producing what security you can with as little labor, money and resources as possible (this is always true of any fortification, mind you, merely that in this period the resource constraints are much tighter).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.

November 29, 2023

Alfred the Great

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West‘s new book is about the only English king to be known as “the Great”:

There are no portraits of King Alfred from his time period, so representations like this 1905 stained glass window in Bristol Cathedral are all we have to visually represent him.
Photo by Charles Eamer Kempe via Wikimedia Commons.

History was once the story of heroes, and there is no greater figure in England’s history than the man who saved, and helped create, the nation itself. As I’ve written before, Alfred the Great is more than just a historical figure to me. I have an almost Victorian reverence for his memory.

Alfred is the subject of my short book Saxons versus Vikings, which was published in the US in 2017 as the first part of a young adult history of medieval England. The UK edition is published today, available on Amazon or through the publishers. (use the code SV20 on the publisher’s site, valid until 30 November, which gives 20% off). It’s very much a beginner’s introduction, aimed at conveying the message that history is just one long black comedy.

The book charts the story of Alfred and his equally impressive grandson Athelstan, who went on to unify England in 927. In the centuries that followed Athelstan may have been considered the greater king, something we can sort of guess at by the fact that Ethelred the Unready named his first son Athelstan, and only his eighth Alfred, and royal naming patterns tend to reflect the prestige of previous monarchs.

Yet while Athelstan’s star faded in the medieval period, Alfred’s rose, and so by the fifteenth century the feeble-minded Henry VI was trying to have him made a saint. This didn’t happen, but Alfred is today the only English king to be styled “the Great”, and it was a word attached to him from quite an early stage. Even in the twelfth century the gossipy chronicler Matthew Paris is using the epithet, and says it’s in common use.

However, much of what is recorded of him only became known in Tudor times, partly by accident. Henry VIII’s break from Rome was to have a huge influence on our understanding of history, chiefly because so many of England’s records were stored in monasteries.

Before the development of universities, these had been the main intellectual centres in Christendom, indeed from where universities would grow. Now, along with relics, huge amounts of them would be lost, destroyed, sold … or preserved.

It was lucky that Matthew Parker, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury with a keen interest in history, had a particularly keen interest in Alfred. It was Parker who published Asser’s Life of Alfred in 1574, having found the manuscript after the dissolution of the monasteries, a book that found itself in the Ashburnham collection amassed by Sir Robert Cotton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Sadly, the original Life was burned in a famous fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster on October 23, 1731. Boys from nearby Westminster School had gone into the blaze alongside the owner and his son to rescue manuscripts, but much was lost, among them the only surviving manuscript of the Life of Alfred, as well as that of Beowulf. In fact the majority of recorded Anglo-Saxon history had gone up in smoke in minutes.

A copy of Beowulf had also been made, although the poem only became widely known in the nineteenth century after being translated into modern English. The fire also destroyed the oldest copy of the Burghal Hidage, a unique document listing towns of Saxon England and provisions for defence made during the reign of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder. An eighth-century illuminated gospel book from Northumbria was also lost.

So it is lucky that Parker had had The Life of Alfred printed, even if he had made alterations in his copy that to historians are infuriating because they cannot be sure if they are authentic. He probably added the story about the cakes, for instance, although this had come from a different Anglo-Saxon source.

We also know that Archbishop Parker was a bit confused, or possibly just lying; he claimed Alfred had founded his old university, Oxford, which was clearly untrue, and he was probably trying to make his alma mater sound grander than Cambridge. Oxford graduates down the years have been known to do this on one or two occasions.

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