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Medieval Monday – Death in the Middle Ages

Posted on May 14, 2012 | 5 Comments

I have always taken great offense to the idea that everyone in the Middle Ages died young.  Along with telling me Medieval people were dirty and ignorant, the quickest way to annoy the living daylights out of me is to tell me that hardly anyone in the Middle Ages lived past 40.

IT’S NOT TRUE.

So I started out a couple of weeks ago doing some research, compiling some names and dates of Medieval people along with their causes of death, so that I could do a blog post about life expectancy in the Middle Ages.

Then literally in the middle of that research I received a call telling me that my older brother was diagnosed with cancer.  Everything got put on hold.  I spent more than a week in Ohio with him and his family before I needed to come home.  Two days ago, on Saturday afternoon, my loud, vibrant, larger-than-life brother passed away.  His cancer wasn’t discovered until the very, very end.  He suffered a little for a very short time before passing peacefully out of this life and on to whatever is next.

That got me thinking.

While it is not true that everyone in the Middle Ages died before they reached 40, many people did.  Even I, Medieval Apologist that I am, can’t argue with the statistics.  But I think that people in the modern era looking back at the Middle Ages misunderstand what death was really like in that world.

My brother passed away in a hospital, surrounded by machinery that told an entire staff of nurses all kinds of statistics about his breathing, pulse, and blood pressure.  Had he lived in the Middle Ages his death would have been sudden, surprising, and baffling.  There would have been no MRI to find the tumors or nurses to give him pain meds.  The best doctors of the time might have examined him and determined that he had a fever or an imbalance of the humors or even that he was possessed.  I don’t think the actual cancer would have ever been discovered since autopsies were hardly known and considered a grave sin in the Middle Ages.

So what about all of those people who died in the Middle Ages?  What about the families and friends that were left behind?  What did they think of all this?

My research on life expectancies in the Middle Ages consisted of going on Wikipedia, looking up well-known figures and finding their date of birth and death and scanning the article for a cause of death.  I also followed all links to other people that were mentioned in the articles.  I figured Wikipedia was as good a place as any to do this because the information I was looking for was simple.  I had over 100 people and their dates and causes of death on my list before I stopped.  (I’ll do a full post on life expectancies once I do a little more research)

At least one third of all of the women on that list died in childbirth.  At least one third of the men on that list died of dysentery or other battlefield wounds while on campaign.  Other causes of death included the plague, food poisoning, murder, execution, unknown illness, and my personal favorite “struck down by the hand of God”.  A small number of people lived into their 60s and even 70s with no cause of death listed, leading me to believe they just got old.

From this I conclude that death in the Middle Ages came suddenly for most people.  While any woman going into labor or any man charging into battle would know there was a strong chance they wouldn’t make it out alive, few people had warning that the end was actually near.  Like my brother, they were probably blindsided by the cause of their death.  And because no one knew when death would come for them, life must have been conducted very differently than it is in the modern world.

There was actually a lot written in the 14th century by people who experienced the ultimate in Medieval death: The Black Death.  The shock of the plague left people throughout Europe reeling from the sudden, horrible demise of so many of the people they knew.  Boccaccio and his friends fled from Venice and kept themselves amused (and quarantined) by telling themselves salacious stories that were later written into the Decameron.  The reaction to death in this case was to live it up, to be as hedonistic as possible.  Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.

On the other hand, many people’s reaction to the Black Death was extreme piety.  If this world had nothing to offer but hardship and brutality, then why not cash in all your chips early and devote yourself to God.  Of course, in the case of the flagellates, this meant extreme physical punishment.  Which just underlines how miserable the 14th century was.

But what about the rest of the Middle Ages?  How did people react to death and dying in the prosperous and enlightened 12th century?  Or in the age of Charlemagne?  How did they react with the threat of Viking marauders or civil wars or Muslim invasions?

Well we don’t really know.  But I would posit that because of its sudden swoop and inevitable presence, death wasn’t actually as big of a bugaboo as it is today.  Yeah, you heard me.  If there’s one thing that Medieval people knew that I think modern folks have lost touch with it’s that life is meant to be lived without worrying about death.  Death will come soon enough, so act while you still can.

Why do I think this?  Because one of the other things I discovered in my research about life expectancy and the causes of people’s deaths in the Middle Ages is that people rarely stood still for death.  Just about every woman whose husband was struck down at an early age remarried within a year.  Every man who lost his wife found another one.  Military campaigns continued, monasteries continued to reform and help their surrounding areas, and educational institutions continued to advance learning.  Furthermore, I think that your average Medieval young person would be able to name so many more friends and loved ones who had died than a modern person would.  Death, sudden as it was, wouldn’t have been a shock.  It would have been as common as birth, marriage, or any other life event.

So while modern people discuss how unfortunate it was that Medieval people died so young, I think that Medieval people would shake their heads over how worked up modern people get about the end of a life.  After all, death is something we all experience at some point and none of us really know when.  Maybe we should approach life more like Boccaccio and his buddies and enjoy every moment that we live and breathe with joyful abandon instead of fighting tooth and nail to stave off the inevitable with drugs and machines and treatments that extend our length of life while lowering its quality.

As my niece told me about her dad, my brother, the doctors said that even if he had been diagnosed six months earlier the outcome would have been the same. But he would have spent those six months in emotional and probably physical agony due to chemotherapy.  My niece said she was kind of glad he spent those six months happy, not knowing anything was wrong.  I think I agree with her.  It was a very Medieval way to go.

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Medieval Monday – Theater in the Middle Ages

Posted on April 16, 2012 | 4 Comments

Theater, like pretty much everything else in the Middle Ages, disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire and was reborn in new forms.  Also like pretty much everything in the Middle Ages, it fell into two factions: Church-approved and not Church-approved.  As you might imagine, these two forms were dramatically different (see what I did there?).  One was loose and disorganized, the other was strictly formal and moralistic.  Neither was anything like what we see on stages today, but strangely enough, it was the evolving combination of the two that lead to what so many people consider to be the height of theater for all time: Shakespeare.

But let’s take a step back.

In Rome the theater was a popular form of entertainment.  It wasn’t terribly original though.  The great Greek dramatists of the Classical era had set the bar high.  Roman theater was a pale copy of the Greek original.  And when Rome collapsed the only part of the theater scene that survived in any recognizable form were the nomadic mines, storytellers, and jugglers.  They continued to travel throughout southern Europe, putting on shows to entertain the masses and occasionally appearing at one court or another.

Make no mistake, these folks didn’t perform plays.  Sure, storytellers gave dramatic representations, epic stories were reenacted, and there was even music involved.  But it certainly wasn’t Shakespeare yet.  Traveling minstrels, troubadours, and jesters were lucky if they could make a living performing for courts and town festivals.  There wasn’t enough money for elaborate settings, costumes, and certainly not anything as grand as a theater.

Theaters may not have existed yet, but stages certainly did.  By the High Middle Ages these traveling bands of actors and musicians were making more and more use of pageant wagons.  Keeping in mind that I’m condensing a LOT of theater history here, over time Medieval players made bigger and better use of these traveling stages.  They were transportable and allowed for slightly more elaborate sets than were available in the Early Middle Ages.  Best of all, they could be set up and taken down relatively quickly.  Especially useful if Church officials were on your tail.

The Church didn’t approve of these secular entertainments.  They had their own form of theater going.  Liturgical Drama of the Middle Ages evolved as a way to teach churchgoer about the Bible and Christian doctrine at a time when most common people couldn’t read.  Liturgical Dramas began as dramatizations of the stories in the Bible.  The Christmas story and Easter story were particularly popular.  Over time, however, the subject matter and text of these dramas became more involved.  It even became political.  But more about that in a second.

The earliest Liturgical Dramas were performed in the churches and cathedrals of Europe.  The scenes were played in each of the archways made by the columns that held the soaring cathedral ceilings up.  Sort of like the Catholic stations of the cross meets a traveling trunk show.  Because remember, in those days there were no pews in cathedrals and people could move around as the drama progressed.

These presentations of religious and moral subjects were tremendously popular in an illiterate culture that lived for festival days.  They were so popular, in fact, that after a while they began to be performed outside of the churches.  Raise your hand if you had to read the play Everyman in high school.  *raises hand*  That, my friends, was the blockbuster hit of 1510.  It was the culmination of a tradition that had been in the making for hundreds of years.  Plays that taught a moral lesson in a dramatic form captured the imagination of the Medieval person.

The Church, of course, knew this.  And that’s where everything fell apart – or came together, depending on how you look at it.

I wrote a whole series of blog posts last year about why the 14th century sucked.  Between the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Papal Schism things were looking bleak.  It was around this time that the Church began to use drama as a way of swaying people’s opinions.  Morality plays?  They were a perfect way to spread propaganda about one political-religious cause or another.  The world after the 14th century saw the Church losing its power to secular kings who for the first time saw that they could take more power than the Church was willing to give.  One of the ways the Church reacted was by winning the hearts and minds of common people through religious drama.  So yes, theater has always walked the dangerous line of the political.

When Henry VIII ran into all his trouble with the Church and eventually ditched it to start his own he forbade religious-themed plays from being performed.  Queen Elizabeth I did the same thing in her reign to squelch the furor that the Protestant-Catholic struggles in her sister Queen Mary’s time had caused.  Other kingdoms throughout Europe followed suit.  But theater had become super popular by then and the people wanted more.  What to do?

The answer lay partially in those goofy bands of traveling players with their secular subjects and non-Church-approved delivery and in the rediscovery of the Greek classics at the dawn of the Renaissance.  The void was filled with non-religious material that sought to meld these elements with Humanist thought and ideas.  Think Dante.  The focus shifted away from Biblical ideals and towards the dramatization of human struggle and emotion.  Of which our dear William Shakepeare was the master.

But now we’re way, way beyond Medieval theater and into a whole new world of thoughts and ideas.

So was Medieval theater merely cheap entertainment for nobles and masses or the Church’s way of teaching people how to behave with visual representations?  Well, yeah, kind of.  But it’s important to remember that without the developments of thought and structure of storytelling in the Middle Ages, a genius like Shakespeare wouldn’t have had a hungry audience to play to.

 

[This installment of Medieval Monday is brought to you by the Masters in Theatre from Villanova University that I earned in 2002 and will be paying for until I'm 65.  Glad I could put it to use. ;) ]

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Medieval Monday – One Pope, Two Pope, Red Pope, Blue Pope

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 3 Comments

Today I finish up our look at why, if you ever get a chance to travel back in time, you should NOT visit the 14th century.  We’ve already talked about The Black Death and how it wiped out vast amounts of the population of Europe.  We looked at the Hundred Years War and how that decimated the Medieval nobility.  And last week we took a look at those revolting peasants and the Medieval origins of a lot of populist movements.

That was all seriously traumatic for the people of the Middle Ages.  But at least they still had their pillar of strength, that over-reaching bastion of stability and order that pervaded every aspect of life.  They still had a strong, indomitable Church, right?

Wrong.

The Medieval Church was as much a government and a political force as any kingdom.  More so if you consider that it could reach across borders to issue orders and demand money.  It didn’t matter what country you lived in, in the Middle Ages you answered to God first and foremost.  And since God wasn’t there directly, you answered to his representatives, the clergy, the cardinals, and the Pope.  So naturally the papacy and everyone and thing surrounding it had extraordinary power.

In the High Middle Ages the papacy was incredibly effective.  It was the Pope who had declared the original Crusades.  His wars in the Holy Land were successful, profitable, and supported.  Kings of nations rushed to serve as the Pope’s generals, kings of England, France, and various German states.  This was hardcore power we’re talking about here.  Citizens of various nations may have had their problems with one another, but the Church was still considered the heart of the world.

So of course things got political in a hurry.

At the dawn of the 14th century, France was arguably the most powerful nation in Europe.  I say arguably because France wasn’t really “France” yet.  It was a bunch of affiliated kingdoms that happened to have a central monarchy.  Northern France and Southern France didn’t get along particularly well.  But Southern France and the Papacy were best buddies.  What was more, the situation in Rome was tense and uncomfortable, full of infighting and back-biting amongst the major Roman families with their close ties to the papacy.  The Roman curia, the business end of the papacy, actually moved to Avignon in France to get away from the mess.

Avignon Papal Palace - Nice, eh?

And then, with the election of Pope Clement V in 1305, they didn’t move back to Rome.  Nope, they were happy to stay in Avignon, thank you very much.  Because Clement V was French and didn’t see any need to enter the lion’s den of Rome and it’s politicking.  But this was a huge problem.  Rome was the Church and had been since the word go.  And to have a pope stick so blatantly to their kingdom of origin turned the whole faith into an expression of politics.  The non-religious consequences of France being in charge of the one organization that spread through every kingdom in Europe was not something most other nations wanted to deal with.  That’s partially why this period of the papacy is referred to as the “Babylonian Captivity”

Of course as I mentioned before, Southern France, where the Pope now lived, didn’t really get along with Northern France.  France itself wasn’t immune to the meddling of the Pope.  In fact, Philip IV of France was one of the biggest opponents of the earliest French Pope.  But the meddling of these French Popes did produce a few good results.  Organization was improved and Papal power strengthened.  I could probably write an entire post about that, but I’ll spare you the details.  The Pope stayed in Avignon for 67 years, taking on a decidedly French flavor and irritating everyone.

Finally, in 1378, Pope Gregory XI decided it was time to pack up and move back to Rome.  (And yes, I’ve just glossed over a heck of a lot of history)  And everything was well and good and they all lived happily ever after, right?

Wrong.

Having moved back to Rome, Gregory XI promptly died.  It was time to elect a new pope.  So all the cardinals gathered together to choose a successor.  They looked at each other and said, “Okay, whatever you do, DO NOT elect another French Pope!”  So they elected and Italian who took on the name Urban VI.  Which was all well and good … until Urban VI went a little bit kooky.  He liked to order people around, not nicely either, and he was prone to bouts of temper.  So much so that the council of cardinals that had elected him really, really regretted their decision.

So what did they do?  They packed up, moved back to Avignon, and elected another pope, Clement VII.

There had been anti-popes before this, men who had been “elected” as pope by various rival factions within the Church.  What made this particular split as serious as it was was that the same body of cardinals had elected both popes.  In a way you couldn’t discredit one of them without discrediting the other.  And that’s sort of what happened.  Everyone knew having two popes was a serious problem and that one of them couldn’t possibly be the “real” Pope, but since no one was willing to back down and canon law didn’t cover the situation the Great Schism continued.

As you might imagine, France and its allies supported Clement VII and his successor in Avignon while England, the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders, and Scandinavia supported Urban VI and his successors.  And once again I’m going to gloss over a lot of history and skip to the end.  Because what was the solution to this problem?  To put together a council that negated the legitimacy of both popes and elect a new one.  Except that neither the Avignon pope nore the Roman pope agreed to step down, so in essence a third pope was created.  Oy vey!

Well, everything was finally sorted out at the Council of Constance in 1414.  The council managed to convince Pope Number Three and the Roman pope to step down, which they did, and excommunicated the Avignon pope when he refused to step down.  They then elected a new Pope, Martin V, who everyone pretty much agreed on, except for a few Frenchies who were ignored at this point because everyone was too tired to deal with the issue anymore.

Confused?  So was much of Christendom.  Whereas once upon a time the Papacy had ruled as the undisputed head of the Church and all things religious in Europe, now people just didn’t know what to think.  Or maybe you should say that people did begin to think.  They began to think about whether the Church, such a power for hundreds of years, really was the be all and end all.  Between the “Babylonian Captivity” and the Great Schism the Church began to lose the political clout it had built up during the Crusades.  England and France were now the major political players of the Western world.

More than political power, the Papacy had lost credibility.  Over the next hundred years, through the 15th century and into the 16th, theologians and leaders alike would begin to question everything that made the Church what it was.  New ideas and new questions arose, were debated and written about.  New ways of thinking spread.  Once it would have been unthinkable to question the Word of God as delivered by Rome, but after the messes of the 14th century cast all sorts of doubt on the infallibility of the Church the way was open for a revolution that would begin with a grumpy old German priest and professor by the name of Martin Luther.

 

Awesome “Pope Fight” image found at buttonsformouse.blogspot.com

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Medieval Monday – Occupy Medieval Europe!

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 4 Comments

As I mentioned last week, if you ever get a chance to travel back in time, DO NOT go to the 14th century!  If you were a noble you would have run into the mess that was the Hundred Years War between England and France.  The “flower of chivalry” was lost in one of the costliest wars in history.  But if you were a peasant you would have run into an entirely different set of problems.  And I’m not just talking about the Black Death here.

For the lower classes the 14th century was a time of drastic changes.  Change is good, yes, especially if you’re a peasant, but it comes at a price.  Attitudes were changing and with them life as the common man knew it.  But not everyone liked the changes.

The century before trouble began was one of prosperity and plenty.  People were doing well.  The weather was good, trade was increasing due to increased contact with the East, and everyone had enough.  The population grew as people could afford to have larger families.  But then the tipping point was reached.  Agrarian technology couldn’t keep up with the increased population.  There were widespread shortages.  These shortages were aggravated by several years of bad weather and poor harvests.  The overall temperature of Europe dropped suddenly by several degrees in the early 1300s (possibly because of a massive volcano that erupted in Indonesia, spitting ash into the sky that blanketed the Earth’s atmosphere for years).  England reported massive floods of Biblical proportion that wiped out crops.  There were also a series of plagues that effected livestock long before the Black Death killed off the human population.  It just wasn’t good.

These were all conditions that effected the common man.  Well, they effected everyone, but the blow fell much harder on the peasants.  Not only could they not feed themselves, they couldn’t feed their lords.  The lords needed not only food but the revenue from their lands so that they could keep up their lifestyle.  A fully outfitted warhorse, for example, cost more than a peasant made in a year.  So when the land wasn’t producing the lords and Parliament taxed the people to make up the difference.  Only the people didn’t have anything to give.  Yes, this is the era in which the Robin Hood legend first came into being.

And then the Black Death swooped in and made everything that much more miserable.  Vast numbers of people died.  Suddenly the equation was changed.  Things were still bad for the nobility.  They were still fighting a costly war, their lands still weren’t producing the amount they needed to keep up their lifestyle, and suddenly they didn’t have the manpower on their lands to make things work.  Entire villages and manors were wiped out or abandoned.  Records of the time in England indicated that hundreds of parishes just ceased to be after the catastrophe.

But if you were a peasant and you survived this was your lucky day.  Labor was in high demand.  If you were a laborer, especially a laborer with a skill, you were suddenly the most popular person in Europe.  Mobility amongst the peasants reached an all-time high.  And I’m talking in both senses of the word.  It’s funny how you can look at the laws that were passed in any given time period and judge what was really going on.  Parliament in England tried time and time again to pass laws limiting the amount of money peasants could earn for various jobs.  They tried but failed.  It is estimated that the wage of the common man tripled in the years after the Black Death.  Landowners were so desperate for workers that they would pay anything.  There were many other laws passed prohibiting peasants from leaving their hereditary estates and court records of the time are filled with cases of laborers being arrested and returned to their lord.

See, in Medieval Europe before the 14th century you, as a peasant, were tied to your land.  The system of serfdom said that you belonged to your lord like any other cow or sheep.  You didn’t have the legal right to move if your lord didn’t want you to.  And you owed your lord labor on his land.  But throughout the High Middle Ages, the 12th and 13th centuries, things had been so good that the rules were relaxed.  People moved a little and as fortunes rose so did the practice of serfs paying a fee to their lords instead of working the land themselves.  This became so common that by the 14th century, when labor was scarce and lords went back to demanding that their serfs stay right where they were and work their land free of charge, well, the newly empowered peasantry were not happy.  Not at all.

The situation worse in England than elsewhere in Europe.  In 1381 it came to a head.  Parliament had voted to issue a poll tax on the people directly.  This was the third such tax within a handful of years, only this one was triple the amount of the previous ones.  Parliament knew no one was going to like it and skipped out to Northampton from London to avoid the inevitable wrath the move would cause.  And it did cause wrath.  All across England peasants revolted, especially in the southern shires.  The south of England was on edge already from French invasions and rumors of French invasions due to the Hundred Years War.  Within a short time the peasants rose up in a full-scale revolt.

The leader of this peasant revolt was a man by the name of Wat Tyler.  Wat Tyler rallied his fellow common man under the idea that all men were created in God’s image and that no one was better than anyone else.  Therefore it was unjust for laborers to be taxed to a greater degree or to serve the upper classes without pay.  And yes, folks, this was the 14th century, not 1776, not 1917.  Wat Tyler gathered his supporters from across England and they marched on London.  Occupy London, 1381.  For three days in July they protested in the streets, raging, rightfully so, that 1% of the population of England controlled 99% of the wealth even though it was the peasants who made that wealth possible.

As you can imagine, it didn’t end well for Wat Tyler.  He was personally run-through by the Mayor of London.  The men who had come to London to support him were either killed or severely punished.  However, the end result would have made Wat proud.  The poll tax was dropped and the House of Commons was spurred to support legislation that would require the crown to live off of its own income instead of taxing the peasants any time they needed money.  It was a long way from modern equality, but it was a start.

The Death of Wat Tyler

On a grander scale, this was the end of the feudal system.  The hierarchy of the Middle Ages could no longer be strictly enforced.  Sure, there were laws and taxes and a lot of lords who were mighty upset about the state of things and it would take time to completely abolish serfdom, but the lower classes had seen how much power they had and would never again truly submit to the old order.

Of course the peasantry wasn’t the only segment of Medieval Society undergoing radical change in the 14th century.  Next week I’ll talk about the craziness that happened to the Church, how the seat of Papal authority was suddenly not Rome, and the days when there was not one, not two, but three Popes all claiming to be THE ONE.

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Medieval Monday – Reasons Why the 14th Century Sucked, Part One

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 15 Comments

If anyone ever gives you a chance to go back in time to any time period anywhere, do not, I repeat DO NOT go back to 14th century Europe!  Europe in the 14th century was a total disaster.  I talked about the Black Death in last week’s Medieval Monday post, but that was just a drop in the bucket of the crappiness of the 14th century.

Actually, things weren’t that bad at the dawn of the century.  In fact, they were pretty good.  The 12th and 13th centuries in Europe were fantastic places to be.  But some of the things that made life so good going into the 14th century were what eventually brought on its downfall.

Let’s talk about peasants again, shall we?  Anyone who has been reading my Medieval Monday posts knows that I am an advocate for the peasantry.  As the 14th century dawned life was as good for the common man as it had been in hundreds of years.  Economic prosperity meant that there was a lot of upward mobility amongst the lower classes.  Some peasants were wealthy.  They could go into trades or become freeman farmers.  And in many cases the tradition of paying cash to the local lord instead of giving free labor as the feudal system of earlier years prescribed had become ingrained.  And that’s very important to remember for next week!

Meanwhile, the nobility was also prospering.  They had a lot of money and a lot of children.  The noble lifestyle had always involved a lot of expensive pomp and circumstance and as incomes rose so did lavishness.  And you can’t put too fine a point on the huge population growth of rich and poor entering into this wild century.

And then BOOM!  The bottom fell out.  Years of famine brought on by a climate shift and agrarian technology that couldn’t keep up with the increased population weakened Europe.  Then the Black Death swept in and killed a staggering amount of people.  Those that were left over were depressed and prone towards extremes of one kind of another.  And maybe that would have sucked enough on its own, but three things made life all that much more sucky.  The suck can be broken down into the demise of everything that made the three pillars of Medieval Society - the nobility, the peasantry, and the Church – what they were.

This week, the nobility…

The Hundred Years War:

Here’s what went down.  Did anyone see Braveheart? *raises hand*  Remember the French princess Isabella who supposedly ended up pregnant by William Wallace?  That never happened, by the way.  William Wallace was dead before Isabella ever stepped foot in England.  But she was the daughter of the great French king Philip the Fair.  Isabella’s brother, Charles IV of France, died childless.  Meanwhile, back in England, Isabella’s lover, Mortimer, and his baron buddies had deposed and killed her gay husband, Edward II (I tell you, the stories of the English monarchy are better than fiction any day) and Isabella and Mortimer were ruling England as regents until Edward III came of age.  When the French barons noticed this little drama they kind of freaked and quickly passed a law that said no women nor her sons could ever inherit the throne of France ever, ever, ever!  So if you ever wondered why there was never a Queen of France when there were plenty of Queens of England, blame Isabella.

Pissed off about this, Edward III, who kind of really was the legitimate heir to the French throne if women counted, gathered an army and decided to kick some French ass to get the throne he thought he deserved.  And so, intermittently from 1337 to 1453, France and England were at war.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that.  There’s also an economic angle having to do with the textile industry, the Middle Ages’ biggest cash cow.  Flemish cloth manufacturers were loyal to the French but dependent on English wool for their livelihood.  So when the Edward III laid claim to the French throne the Flemish merchants supported him.  This sent the all-important textile industry into a panic.  War was needed to settle the issue so that life could get back to normal.

Needless to say, the war caused problems.  First, it was expensive.  On the English side, for example, it was expensive to the tune of about five million pounds.  In Medieval currency that’s … a whole freakin’ lot.  The English started out winning the war.  This meant that as they fought they captured cities and territories and pillaged them and brought the spoils home.  English noble households were outfitted with pilfered French goods for the whole middle to late half of the 14th century.  But the spoils of war didn’t off-set the costs of the fight.  And while military victories are great, paying for them isn’t.  The nobles of England, and indeed the entire country, went slowly bankrupt.  Since most of the fighting happened in France, in addition to the everyday costs of war, entire regions were being wiped out due to the fighting, including the farmland that supported the nation.

The “flower of knighthood” on both sides was slaughtered.  This era is known as the last gasp of Medieval Chivalry.  Sure, it was great to get your armor on, go out and fight the enemy, but military technology was improving.  The English longbow could mow down a field of French soldiers in minutes.  Armor meant that if you fell you couldn’t get up.  A lot of knights drown in mud on the battlefield.  In some cases swarms of French peasants brutalized and defeated squadrons of English knights.  This was also the introduction of a new form of war weaponry known as the cannon.  And while gunpowder-based weaponry was anything but accurate, it was loud and destructive.  It caused mass panic and confusion on the battlefield.  Basically, a lot of men died.  Which left a lot of women in positions of authority that they wouldn’t have been in otherwise, arguably a good thing.

In fact, it was a woman, Joan of Arc, who ended the war.

Joan of Arc was a teenage French peasant.  Her family was one of the ones who had prospered so much and done so well during previous decades and centuries that they were considered well-off.  They were also a religious family.  When Joan began to hear voices telling her to go convince the Dauphin to stop at nothing to be crowned King of France, naturally she went and found the Dauphin and delivered her message.  The miracle in a way is that she actually managed to make her way to an audience with Charles and that he actually listened to her.  And then she went on to lead an army at the age of 17 with no experience.

What the heck, you ask?  How did something like that ever happen?

It happened because France was desperate for a hero(ine).  France spent most of the Hundred Years War losing.  French land was devastated.  Lingering Black Death Blues didn’t help the situation.  Nor did the papal situation (which I’ll go into in much, much more detail in a week or two).  So when this charismatic teenager came along promising French glory, people believed her.  People followed her.  It’s amazing what people as a nation can do when they’re in a funk and one charismatic person comes along.  At the risk of making a night-and-day sort of analogy, just look at Germany after World War I.  The country had been brought so low that all it took was one tiny spark in the form of a charismatic leader to change the course of its history.  Early 15th century France: Joan of Arc, Early 20th century Germany: Adolf Hitler.  ‘Nuff said.

Anyhow, France rallied and won the war.  Ahem, they “won” the war.  Because while the English were kicked out and pushed back across the Channel, both sides had lost a ton of money and men.

But there were some startlingly good results from this Hundred Year Mess.  Medieval nations really weren’t nations.  Regionalism was rampant.  All across Europe the system of Feudalism had divided lands into manors, fiefs, and kingdoms which were loosely clumped together in allegiance to kings and emperors.  You can see it in what is now Germany with all the little kingdoms that made up the Holy Roman Empire and surrounding territories.  They didn’t unify until well into the “modern” era.  England was a more rural society, but they were also an island.  France was more like Germany, split into dozens of smaller kingdoms with regional customs, dialects, and currencies, many of which didn’t get along.  But the Hundred Years War gave France a sense of FRANCE.  Joan of Arc fought for and spoke about a unified France.  This was the beginning of a nationalism that would propel both England and France into being the key players in later years.

But there were two other things going on simultaneous to this mega-war.  Next week I’ll fill you in on the massive social shifts involving the ever-blurring line between noble and peasant that signaled the end of the Middle Ages….

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