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Notes from “ A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th
Century “ by Barbara W. Tuchman, Ballantine Books, N.Y. (Paperback), 1978. All
of the following material is quoted directly, consequently I have not used
quotation marks, except where Tuchman does.
Brackets enclose my own insertion of connecting words or clarifying
comments. KA
ON CHAUCER
p. 35 The Parson among the Canterbury pilgrims is as
benign and admirable as the Pardoner is repulsive, always ready to visit on
foot the farthest and poorest house of his parish, undeterred by thunder or
rain.
P. 54 The year began in March - the month, according
to Chaucer, “in which the world began, when God first made man.”
P. 57 ...walking three times to Jeruselam like the
Wife of Bath.
P.111 The blood libel [against Jews] formed the
subject of Chaucer’s tale of a child martyr told by the Prioress and was the
ground on which many Jews were charged, tried and burned at the stake.
P. 161 Rooms were few, servants slept where they
could, privacy was nonexistent...The two Cambridge students in Chaucer’s
Reeve’s Tale were conveniently enabled to enjoy the favors of the Miller’s wife
and daughter because they were put to bed in the same room with the family.
P. 192 Humanity was Geoffrey Chaucer’s subject, and
all of the 14th century society - except the lowest - his scope.
Twenty years old at this time [1360], ... he had accompanied the English army
to France as a member of the household of the King’s second son, Lionel, Duke
of Clarence. While on a foraging party outside Reims, he had been captured by
the French and ransomed by King Edward [of England] for 16 [pounds]
13[shillings] 4 [pence], which compared favorably with the 6 [pounds +] paid in
compensation for Lord Andrew Lutterral’s dead horse and with the 2 [pounds]
paid to ransom the average archer.
P. 194 ... it is impossible not to see young
Enguerrand de Coucy [the central character in Tuchman’s book, who was known by
Chaucer] in the Squire of the Canterbury Tales [see General Prologue].
P.211 “Allas, allas, that ever love was sin!”, cried
the Wife of Bath. What ages of anxiety
and guilt are condensed into that succinct lament, even if the speaker herself
does not seem to have been greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her, the century’s most
forthright celebration of sex was given to a woman.
P. 213 Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that
absorbed major interests. More than any
other, it is the subject on the minds of the Canterbury pilgrims and its
dominant theme is who, as between husband and wife, is boss?
P. 214 The apotheosis of subjection [of women] was
patient Griselda, whose tale of endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her
marital submission so appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in
the mid 14th century, first by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch,
in England by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the Menagier ... In
the end, Chaucer too was ashamed of the story and in his envoy hastened to
advise noble wives “Let noon humilitee your tonge naille...”
P.221 Judging by the diverse spelling of proper names
on either side of the Channel, pronunciation of the
common language must have been close to mutually
unintelligible. Chaucer’s Prioress spoke
French,
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...After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frensh
of Paris was to hir unknowe.
P. 298 ... Chaucer was a successful civil servant
whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent:
in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love, “The Book of the Dutchess”,
not in French appropriate to its subject and audience but in unliterary and
still unstable English ... something in the ambience of his time prompted
Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary,
the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will” ... “The Book of the
Dutchess” was a graceful elegy for Gaunt’s first wife ... Though its choice of
language was considered peculiar, its author lost no favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission
to Italy ... Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic “Troilus
and Criseyde”, adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to
treat of peace with France.
P.311 Artificers at banquets, as described in
Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, could bring bodies of water into the hall, make
boats row up and down, grim lions appear, flowers spring from meadows, grape
vines grow, and a castle seemingly made of stone vanish...
ON THE CHURCH
p. 5 [After the fall of the Roman Empire] Only the
Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success/
p. 27 Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to
legitimize children, of which the majority were those of priests and prelates.
P.32 ... a Church so pervaded by venality and
hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of
the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not dissolve
readily. Christianity was the matrix of
medieval life.
P.118 Priests who survived the plague, declared the
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1350, had become “infected by insatiable avarice,
charging excessive fees and neglecting souls.”
P.327 “Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta
of Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money”. All Ten Commandments, she said, had been
reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.”
P.333 With one Pope and College of Cardinals in Rome
and another Pope and College in Avignon, the schism was now a terrible fact [in
1379]. It was to become the fourth
scourge - after war, plague, and the Free Companies [groups of former soldiers
in France and England looting and plundering and selling their services to
local warlords] - of a tormented century. [England recognized Pope Urban in
Rome and France Clement in Avignon]
p. 335 When each Pope excommunicated the followers of
the other, who could be sure of salvation?
Since papal revenue was cut in half, the financial effect of the schism
was catastrophic
ON RELIGION IN GENERAL
p. xix [During the Middle Ages, there prevailed the]
insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was
superior to the here and now and ... is one that the modern world does not
share ...
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p.74 [Of a French nobleman who] like Thomas a Becket,
[Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in 1170] wore unwashed clothes crawling
with lice, he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his
wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of
horsehair under his armor and cords wound so tightly around his body that the
knots dug into his flesh.
P.236 Devout or not ll owned and carried Books of
Hours, the characteristic religious possession of the 14th century
noble.
P.237 At the moment of death ... people took no
chances: they confessed, made restitutions, endowed perpetual prayers for their
souls, and often deprived their families by bequests to shrines, chapels,
convents, hermits, and payments for pilgrimages by proxy
p.365 [Re worker’s guilds] Obligatory religious
holidays, which numbered 120 to 150 a year, kept earnings down.
P.445 Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was
frequent and ... easily obtained ... preachers complained that a man might get
rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak ... marriage litigation filled
the courts of the Middle Ages.
ON JOHN WYCLIF [ca 1320 -1384]
p.287 Religious unrest was ... disturbing the public
mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif,
Seen through the telescope of history, he was the most significant Englishman
of his time.
P.289 He [Wyclif] denied “transubstantiation, for
without miraculous power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into
the true body and blood of Christ.”
P.289 He [Wyclif] offered the Bible in English,
translated by his disciples, that it might bring religion to the people in a form
they could understand without the need of the priest and his meaningless Latin
doggerel.
P. 289 In the seventies the movement of dissent called
Lollardy [generally followers of Wyclif’s thought ... was preparing the way
...[for the eventual break with the church]
p.484 Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for
Jan Huss, who was to be burned at the stake in 1415, the Hussite rising opened
the way to the Reformation a hundred years later.
ON THE JEWS
p.109 While Divine punishment was accepted as the
plague’s source, people in their misery still looked for a human agent upon
which to vent their hostility that could not be vented on God. The Jew, as the eternal stranger, was the
most obvious target.
p.110 The doctrine that Jews were doomed to perpetual
servitude as Christ-killers was announced by Pope Innocent in 1205.
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p. 111 Jews were believed to kidnap and torture
Christian children whose blood they drank ... the blood libel took possession
of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany , where the well-poisoning charge
too had originated in the 12th century. [see also under CHAUCER, the
quote from page 111]
p.118 On March 12, 1350, the commune [chartered
bourgeois organizations in towns aiding in keeping order (page 5) ] reminded
citizens of the severe penalty in store for sexual relations between Christian
and Jew: the woman involved would be beheaded or burned alive.
ON WOMEN
p.211 ... women are invariably deceivers: inconstant,
unscrupulous, quarrelsome, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all
of these at once ... Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the
distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.
P.211 Theology being the work of males, original sin
was traced to the female ... of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with
sin has left the greatest train of trouble.
[See also under CHAUCER the quotes from pp 211,213,
& 214; under JEWS, quote from p.118]
ON THE MIDDLE AGES
p.xv [In the 14th century] The year was
considered to begin at Easter and since this could fall any time between March
22 and April 22, a fixed date of March 25 was generally preferred. The change
over to the New Style took place in the 16th century but was not
everywhere accepted until the 18th, which leaves the year to which
events of January, February, and March belong in the 14th century a
running enigma ... Moreover, chroniclers did not date an event by the day of
the month but by the religious calendar - speaking, for example of two days
before the Nativity of the Virgin ...
P.xvii It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement
of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of
the opposite or a different version.
P.14 [Society was organized into] three estates
established by God, each with a given task for the good of the whole. The clergy were to pray for all men, the
knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.
P.17 The total ranks of the nobility in France
numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to 50,000 families who represented
something over one percent of the population.
P.19 Magnificence in clothes was considered a
prerogative of the nobles [and] forbidden to others ... In England, according
to a law of 1363, a merchant worth 1,000 [pounds] was entitled to the same
dress and meals as a knight worth 500 [pounds] ... double wealth in this case
equaled nobility.
P.21 When the 14th century opened, France
was supreme.
P.53 At dusk, horns were blown or bells rung to sound
curfew or “cover fires”, after which work was prohibited because a workman
could not see to perform creditably.
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p.55 Alchemy, or the search for the philosopher’s
stone that would transmute base metals into gold, was the most popular applied
science.
P.194 French and English chivalry took pride in
treating one another courteously as prisoners, however greedy the ransom ...
P.234 In the blossoming of secular music as an art in
the 14th century, as many as 36 different instruments had come into
use. If no concert or performance was
scheduled after the evening meal, the company entertained each other with song
and conversation, tales of the day’s hunting, “graceful questions” on the
conventions of love, and verbal games.
P.290 The people’s loyalty [to the crown] was severely
tried ... by purveyance - that is, the King’s right when traveling to
commandeer suppliers for a number of miles on either side of the road, and also
for provisioning the army.
P.298 Poets and writers served frequently as
ambassadors because their rhetorical
powers conferred distinction on the elaborate speeches required ...
P.312 ... the
stage mirrored medieval life. Developed
out of liturgical plays performed at the church door, drama had left the church
for the street, where it was produced by guilds ... on wheeled platforms with
different scenes drawn along in succession ...The plays traveled from town to
town attracting all of society as audience ... Every mystery of the Christian
story was made physical and concrete and presented in terms of everyday life -
irreverent, bloody, and bawdy ... The “hin-han” brayed by the actor inside the
donkey’s skin and the turds dropped from a lifted tail evoked howls of delight
even when the donkey bore Jesus ...
P.539 In 1389 ... the Moldavians attempted to stem the
Turks but were defeated by Murad in the decisive battle of Kossovo. [A familiar
place today!]
ON THE PLAGUE
p.96 [In 1348, during the 1st outbreak] The
largest cities of Europe, with populations of about 100,000 were Paris and
Florence, Venice and Genoa. At the next
level, with more than 50,000, were Ghent and Bruges in Flanders, Milan,
Bologna, Rome, Naples, Palermo and Cologne.
London hovered below 50,000, the only city in England except York with
more than 10,000. The plague raged
through them all, killing anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of their
inhabitants. Italy, with a total population
of 10 to 11 million probably suffered the heaviest toll.
P. 119 The plague laid a curse in the century in the
form of its own bacillus. Lodged in the
vectors, it was to break out again six times over the next six decades in
various localities at varying intervals of ten to fifteen years ... leaving
Europe with a population reduced about 40 percent in 1380 and by nearly 50
percent at the end of the century.
P.119 The archives of the Abbey of Ramsey in England
show that thirty years after the plague the acreage sowed in grain was less
than half what it had been before. Five
plows owned by the abbey in 1307 were reduced to one a century later, and
twenty-eight oxen to five.
P.286 Outlawry among the free peasants had increased
because their command of higher wages, as a
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result of depopulation, brought them in constant
conflict with the law ... It was now that
Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity.
MEDICINE AND SANITATION
P.55 Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the
century.
P.106 [Doctors] could set bones, remove bladder
stones, remove cataracts of the eye with a silver needle, and restore a
mutilated face by skin graft from the arm.
They understood epilepsy and apoplexy as spasms of the brain. They used urinalysis and pulse beat for
diagnosis, knew what substances served as laxatives and diuretics, applied a
truss for hernia ... for ills beyond their powers they fell back on the
supernatural or on elaborate compounds of metallic, botanic, and animal
substances.
P.107 ... the
Mayor of London in 1349, complaining that the streets were “foul with human
faeces and the air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing,
especially in this time of infectious disease.”
P.235 There was much washing of hands both before and
after meals, even though knives and spoons were in use and forks, though rare,
were not unknown ... for the lord’s and lady’s baths, which were frequent, hot
water was brought to a wooden tub in the bedroom.
ON EATING
p.14 For four days they [the English army in France in
1355] had no drink but water, which seemed like starvation in an age that
depended on wine and beer as an essential part of diet.
P.235 Two meals a day were customary for all, with
dinner at 10 A.M. and supper at sundown.
Breakfast was unknown except possibly for a piece if dry bread and a
glass of wine, and even that was a luxury.
P.239 [In 1368, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, (widower and
father at age 29) with Chaucer in his retinue of 457 people and 1,280 horses,
went to Milan to marry the 13 year old daughter of super-rich Galeazzo.] The
stupendous wedding banquet... left all accounts gasping ... Thirty double
courses of meat and fish alternated with the presentation of gifts after each
course. The meats and fish all gilded
... With a paste of powdered egg yoke, saffron and flour sometimes mixed with
real gold leaf.
P.243 Lionel died four months later in Italy ... which
naturally raised cries of poison ... the cause was more likely the delayed
effect of all those gilded meals. [N.B. No wedding.]
ON COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION
P.55 The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful
material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and
wider distribution of literary works.
P.56 A messenger on horseback, without riding at
night, could cover 40 to 50 miles a day and about half as much on foot. In an emergency, given a good horse and good
road (which was rare) and no load, he
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could make 15 miles an hour and, with changes of
horses awaiting him, cover 100 miles a day.
P.57 For a knight to ride in a carriage was against
the principle of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.
P.57 ...
people journeyed over long distances to an astonishing degree - from Paris to
Florence ... London to Prague ... walking to China like Marco Polo or three
times to Jerusalem like the Wife of Bath.
P.170 Intensely susceptible to the spoken word, people
of the time responded to any Mark Antony and would listen for hours to outdoor
sermons of great preachers, which they regarded as a form of public
entertainment.
P.195 [Around 1360] ... the use of French by the upper
class [in England] was beginning to be replaced by the national speech of the
commoners. Before the Black Death,
French had been the language of the court, Parliament, and the law courts. King Edward himself probably did not speak
English with any fluency.
P.325 That so much of Catherine’s talk [Catherine of
Siena, later canonized] was preserved was owed to the astonishing capacity of
medieval scribes to record verbatim the prolix speech of the period. Speech was customarily filled with repetition
to allow time for the listener to absorb what was being said. Information and learning were still largely acquired
through listening to heralds, sermons, orations, and reading aloud, and for
that very reason, scribes, before the age of printing, were far better trained
to take down the spoken word than at any time since.
P.453 ...
scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the
copyist’s delays and errors ... when a writer has given them his work, he never
knows what changes he will find in it ...
ON ENGLAND
p.284 In the historic session called the Good
Parliament [1376] ... discontent came to a head in the first impeachment by
Parliament of ministers of the crown.
P.285 [King Edward was senile and] A fifty year reign
of incessant warring [the 100-year war with France] was coming to a close in a
rising sense of wasted effort and misrule.
P.373 [Peasant’s Revolt in England, 1381] They [the
peasants] seized Canterbury in Kent, south of the Thames, under Wat Tyler, a
demagogue and veteran of the wars and] swept forward to London, covering the
seventy miles in two days ... [distance of the Canterbury pilgrimage?]
ON WEAPONS
P.70 ... the long bow derived from the Welch ... With
a range reaching 300 yards and a rapidity, in skilled hands, of ten to twelve
arrows a minute [compared to two from the crossbow] ...represented a
revolutionary delivery of military force ...Its arrow was three feet long,
about half the length of the ... six foot bow, and at a range of 200 yards it
was not supposed to miss its target.
P.70 [The cannon was invented ca 1325, it was small
and made of iron] shaped like a bottle.
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