Tag Archive | the 14th century sucked

Medieval Monday – Everybody’s Favorite: Taxes

A yes. There it was on Friday. My paycheck, complete with our new tax rate. A big chunk of change less than what I have been getting. Yep, there are only two certainties in life: Death and Taxes.

But I don’t really feel the same soul-consuming ire about taxes that a lot of my fellow Americans are feeling right now. For one, taxes have a purpose. They support the common good. For another, taxes in Europe are much higher than they are in America (and a lot of us would do well to remember that!). But more than anything, taxes nowadays are a whole lot more reliable and accountable than they were in the Middle Ages.

Taxes were a given in the Middle Ages. And no, people didn’t like them much. A chunk of the Robin Hood legend is about rebellion over taxes. Robin Hood had a good point. Taxes in the Middle Ages were not consistent, they were not well-regulated, and in a lot of instances they just plain weren’t fair.

Medieval taxes were a direct result of the feudal system. A lord offered his protection and governance to his people in exchange for their military service and production. Whether that was a king providing a military presence for his barons or an individual lord providing clothing and food and solving disputes in exchange for labor in his fields, the relationship was firmly understood and unbendable.

It was also a little unpredictable. If, for example, a king wanted to raise an army to attack his neighbors one year, suddenly all of these “taxes” would go up. Men would be pulled from their lives and thrust into armor and shuttled off to parts unknown, possibly never to return. The lord would need to pay for his service, so he would demand more revenue from his serfs to pay for it. The serfs would suddenly find themselves in a position of owing more and working harder without warning or recourse. Kind of makes the $20 I was missing out of my paycheck look like a walk in the park.

But it wasn’t just the sudden need for revenue that hit medieval people in their wallets. Every year peasants had to pay taxes to their lords. There was an annual plow tax and a tax to use the lord’s mill. Depending on where you were and when you lived, there were taxes that needed to be paid when people married and taxes to be paid when people died. Not to mention the fact that a large percentage of the produce of the land that peasants cultivated went straight to their lord’s purse and not their own.

In a very real way, if you were a peasant in the Middle Ages, your king owned you. Puts taxes in a new perspective, doesn’t it.

Of course, as with a lot of other things, the system was tweaked in the High Middle Ages. It was an age of prosperity. Economies throughout Europe were healthy and growing. New lands were being reclaimed from the forests and marshes and settled. More revenue! The prosperity extended to everyone. Gradually you ended up with a situation where the defining tax of the day was scutage.

http://www.artilim.com

Scutage was the cash tax that a vassal paid to their lord instead of providing labor. It extended from wealthy peasants paying their lord instead of working their land for them to lords paying the king instead of bundling all of their sons off to fight bloody wars. (Although there was still a heck of a lot of glory in warfare and plenty of nobles volunteering for the job) Somebody at some point probably complained about scuttage. Maybe the fees were getting too high or they didn’t like the causes it was going to support. But the tax was a whole lot better than what happened when it disappeared.

In the fourteenth century, after the economy tanked, famine swept the land, and the Black Death decimated populations, labor was in greater demand than cash. So lords all over the place tried to do away with scutage and to reinstate labor as payment of feudal dues. Well, to make a long story short, it didn’t work. Vassals weren’t having it. Prices and wages were out of control. Economies were turned inside-out. And the Middle Ages ended. It was a whole new world, done in by tax laws.

So what can we learn from this turbulent episode of the Middle Ages as we face our own taxes? Well, for one, it’s not the end of the world to pay your government money. No one likes to do it, but at least they aren’t marching into your house demanding you suit up and fight or go work in the fields 40% of the year. In the modern world we have more of a say in how our taxes work because we can vote for people and laws that would change things. And whether you agree with where it goes or not, our tax money does legitimately help our neighbors. Even though rates may rise and fall, no country could suddenly impose a massive tax on its people that would leave them destitute, not without provoking a major revolution.

And so I sigh and shake my head at my paycheck and recalculate my budget, all the while thinking, “At least I don’t have to pay to use the plow.”

Medieval Monday – What Were They Thinking?

Dec3

Last month my medieval post [at the Seduced by History blog] generated a lot of discussion, and while some of it set me off, other points set me to thinking. One point that was made was that you can’t judge the mindset of medieval people using modern worldviews and values. True. Very true. So, curious as ever, I dove into my collection of history books to piece together a picture of what the mindset of the medieval world really was.

My bookshelf … and also my cat Torpedo

Of course the first thing I discovered is that it was as drastically different within the different eras of the Middle Ages (commonly divided into Dark Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages) as our modern worldview is from any of those three. A peasant living in the kingdom of the Franks under the rule of Odo the Great in 870 would have had a vastly different view of the world than a nobleman living in the England of Henry II in 1170, and both wouldn’t have recognized the values and thought process of a Venetian living in plague-swept Italy in 1370. Life changed, and values with it, just as fast in the overly long stretch of time that we call the Middle Ages as fast as it changed from 1900 to today.

Okay, but what where those values, world views and thought processes like?

First of all, I just want to point out that that “famous” quote about medieval life being “nasty, brutish, and short” is a misquote. The quote, written in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes, was in reference to warfare, not day to day life. Yet somehow a lot of people have the mistaken idea that those words can be used to describe life in the Middle Ages, particularly the Dark Ages.

The reality of the Dark Ages was probably quite different. According to Charles Van Doren, the people of the Dark Ages most likely didn’t think of their own lives as dark at all. Sure, they were poor and uneducated, their lives were rural and small, and they were disconnected from everyone else in their so-called kingdoms. But Van Doren’s theory is that none of that mattered, because the goal of life in the Dark Ages was not material, it was spiritual.

As he discusses in his book A History of Knowledge, Van Doren points to St. Augustine’s seminal work City of God as the primary intellectual motivator of the Dark Ages. In City of God, written as the barbarian hoards were descending on Rome, St. Augustine says that while the material things of this world might pass away, it is the attainment of a non-material relationship to God that mankind should be striving. This was a huge departure from the materialistic culture of the Roman Empire, but it was one that stuck. After all, what better goal could your average person living anytime from 450 – 1000 have than something they had already attained: worldly poverty and spiritual riches.

Van Doren’s theory is that the centuries that we now call the Dark Ages were not a wasteland of underachievement and ignorance, but rather a time when the average person saw spirituality as worthy of merit, not wealth. And it was a spirituality that bore a closer resemblance to the pagan past than what we think of as Christianity today.

By the year 1050 things were beginning to change. As Norman F. Cantor discusses in his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Europe as it entered the High Middle Ages was a tapestry of vastly different ideals and achievements. In England you had a culture that had been turned upside-down in the past couple of centuries as Viking invasions had rewritten both the laws and customs. The king, Edward the Confessor, was pious but weak and his nobles saw no problem in waging personal wars against each other and their so-called sovereign for territory and position. Further south, in France, you had a noble class, mostly descended from Italian and Rhenish nobility, engaged in similar local wars. The German emperor, Henry III held more real power in his territory because of his connections with Rome, but this was not an era of centralized authority.

This was an era when most people still never traveled outside of twenty miles from the place where they were born. Peasants were far more concerned with the unprecedented productivity of the land that they were experiencing than national politics. The nobility felt this fluidity of fortune and looked for opportunities to seize power wherever they could. It was an age of political maneuvering and small-scale battles.

Strangely enough, it still wasn’t an age when wealth mattered. In fact, in spite of the fact that the economy was booming, money still wasn’t important to the people of the Middle Ages, not even by the twelfth century. In the twelfth century, the heart of the High Middle Ages, status was all-important. Status was gained through military and matrimonial victory. If you were a noble it was all about who you had married and who you conquered in the process. The rulers who made it to the top of the pile, Henry II of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, got where they were through strategic victories on private battlefields and through savvy negotiations in the bedroom. They were able to maintain their empires through the same means.

But something else was going on behind the scenes, as Joseph R. Strayer demonstrates in his book Western Europe in the Middle Ages. (These are all super awesome books, btw) While the emphasis was still on status over wealth, in the High Middle Ages it was also becoming about the individual over the collective. For kings a self-made man was one who battled his way to the throne. For the common man, advancement could come through skill and hard work.

On the continent, in Flanders and Italy in particular, a new phenomenon was underway. It used to be that all people could be classed into one of three categories: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who labored. Now there was a new and increasingly powerful group: the bourgeois. For the first time you had a small but influential class of people whose motto might just have been “show me the money”. These people were increasingly rich. They came from the lower tiers of the nobility, but also from the ranks of the peasantry who had made something of themselves. They built cities, founded churches and religious orders, loaned money to kings, and advised the Church what to do.

Granted, it wasn’t quite time for the French Revolution yet, but this is where the seeds were planted. Yes, the Church was the most powerful entity in Medieval Europe, but the Church was staffed with priests who came from very worldly backgrounds and who were more interested in politics than souls. The twelfth century saw the rise of great universities that still exist today. These centers of learning and inquiry were where most of the religious men from this time onwards came from. By the thirteenth century the Church was powered not so much by the kind of spirituality St. Augustine advocated in City of God, but by the logic and proto-scientific inquiry of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

Are you still with me? We’ve gone from being a society content with its own material and intellectual poverty, simple in its spirituality and outlook, to a civilization with a sound economy, growing by leaps and bounds, in which status was king but wealth, individuality, and knowledge were beginning to be the measure of a man. Two very different worlds.

And then it all blew up and fell apart.

Just when life was good, when the immense forests of Europe were being cut down to make enough space for people to live, when peasants were contentedly excused from their feudal duties because they could easily pay scutage instead of providing labor, when monasteries were more like a cross between a university and a country club and universities were teaching metaphysics and methods of reason and deduction that would lead to the scientific method, when rediscovered knowledge began to filter back into the west from the east as trade became more prevalent, it all fell down like a house of cards.

If you want to get a good idea of what happened to set Europe back a couple hundred years in terms of development and standard of living, read Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century. I’ve actually written an entire series of blog posts about the various issues that brought Europe to its knees during this time: famine and climate change, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Papal Schism. So instead of rehashing all of that horrifically fascinating history that made up the Late Middle Ages, I just want to talk about what it did to people’s attitudes.

Basically, it wrecked them. All of the optimism of the High Middle Ages was gone. Europe experienced a collective period of manic-depression. Death could be around any corner, so you should either live it up and not care what happened or punish yourself for your sins and wait for the better life that was to come. Suddenly material things became much more important because there was no telling when you were going to lose them.

When the English invaded France and it looked like they were going to win the Hundred Years War, soldiers looted noble homes and sent “stuff” back to England. The average English home in the early 1400s was outfitted with pilfered French goods. This was a huge change from, say, the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages. Back then you were more likely to suddenly find your English house stocked with Danish goods than to find a Danish house decked out with English stuff. Warfare had changed from conquer and settle to smash and grab.

This is also when the Church became more militant about squashing any opinion, especially scientific ones, that didn’t agree with their bottom line. And yes, that’s the right metaphor. In the 14th century the Church underwent a civil war. Coming out of that there was a feeling that it needed to crack down on differences of opinion in order to maintain the level of political and social control that it had had back in the High Middle Ages when things were good. Why? Because there was big money in being the only spiritual game in town, in selling indulgences and relics. And after the curtain was pulled back by the Papal Schism, giving the average man a glimpse into the corrupt inner workings of the Church, the rumblings that would eventually lead to Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution were already being heard.

So what were people in the Middle Ages thinking? What were those attitudes that we can’t compare to the way people think now? Well, as Strayer suggests, because the vast majority of primary resources that exist about the Middle Ages were written by and about less than 10% of the population, we can only guess what the other 90% of the population was thinking. Granted, we can make educated guesses based on court records, papal decrees, and laws that were enacted. For example, repeated attempts by the clergy in Paris in the 13th century to shut down the many public bathhouses due to an outbreak of syphilis probably doesn’t indicate that the prevailing attitude in the city was one of anti-cleanliness and chastity. The importance of the brewing, spinning, and soap-making guilds, all female-dominated professions, in the High Middle Ages is a strong indicator that women were not expected to exclusively stay at home under the power of their husbands or fathers. The prevalence of court cases in which a woman sued to have a man who had seduced her be forced to legally marry her, and won those cases too, indicates that it was not so much of a man’s world as we might be tempted to think.

And since this post is now twice as long as I intended it to be, I’ll leave it there. The point is that attitudes changed drastically throughout the span that we think of as the Middle Ages. If you’re a writer wondering what the world your characters inhabit might be like, keep in mind that the ever-changing tapestry of medieval thought was just as complicated as the world we live in now, even if the overall worldview was different.

[This post is a repost of the article I wrote for the Seduced by History blog this past weekend. All images are in the public domain in the US, except my bookshelves]

Medieval Monday – Light in the Dark Ages

Nov12

On Friday I wrote about my theories on how the age that we currently live in will be viewed by History. I called it The Age of Know-Nothing Know-It-Alls. And in the comments a few people likened the path we’re on now to the Dark Ages. That got me to thinking. Why? Because, frankly, I’ve never believed the Dark Ages were as dark as your average high school survey of history leads people to believe.

Why do I believe that the Dark Ages weren’t that dark in spite of popular opinion and the word of some scholars? Because of a Medieval History class I took in college at the University of Central Florida. Our prof in that class, Dr. Fetscher, was this great German guy who had as many fascinating personal stories relating to history as he did lessons from textbooks. I’ll never forget the time he told us about visiting a very old monastery and seeing the shelves and shelves of books that had been written and preserved by monks back when there were only three digits in years.

: © Serban Enache | Dreamstime.com

That episode from Dr. Fetscher’s life left enough of an impression that I have always looked at the history of the Dark Ages, the years between the Fall of Rome (476) and the year 1000 with a healthy amount of skepticism. And recently, as I was reading A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren, I was struck by Van Doren’s question, “Did the people of the Dark Ages feel the same way about their lives as we do? Or did they see a light that we no longer see?” Modern people look back at that age of decentralization with its lack of trade, education, and the arts and judge it harshly. But how did the people who lived through it see their lives?

Of course, since people living in Europe between 500 and 1000 didn’t have Facebook to post about their every emotion as they had it, it’s pretty hard to tell what they thought of things. But Van Doren makes a really good case based on the evidence that we do have of the time period. His theory is that your average citizen was probably content with their lot because they didn’t have the same goals as the people of the Roman Empire had or that we have in the modern world. (Goals which, by the way, are eerily similar)

Van Doren points out that the Fall of the Roman Empire was not the first nor the last time that a vast civilization collapsed. Before Rome, the great civilization of China experienced a similar sacking and collapse by the same folks who sacked Rome, the Huns. Yet their civilization recovered within a few generations. In the mid-14th century Europe was decimated by the Black Death. It entered an economic and personal decline that makes our Great Depression look silly. And yet Europe had recovered and moved on within 150 years. Modern man recovered from the Great Depression and devastation of war on either side of it within a few decades. Time and time again civilizations have taken a massive hit and recovered within a reasonable amount of time.

So why did it take 500 years for mankind to get over the Fall of Rome? The natural resources available were the same as before and after. The collective IQs of Europe probably didn’t dip to the point where not a single man or woman born in those 500 years could figure out how to farm better or govern better or travel further. The challenges people faced weren’t any more insurmountable than those of the native people that created the Roman Empire from scattered tribes in the first place. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it certainly didn’t take 500 years. So what was it then?

Van Doren’s answer is St. Augustine. Yep. St. Augustine and Christianity.

Wait a minute, you say. Isn’t Christianity ultimately the force that pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages? Wasn’t it Charlemagne’s efforts to Christianize the barbarians of Europe and connect people throughout Europe under the banner of a single faith that caused people to come together and swear allegiance to a single ruler?

Of course it was! Ah, but what was early Christianity saying to people between 500 and 1000 AD? Because let me tell you, it wasn’t the same message that you can hear in any given church today.

: “The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Benozzo Gozzoli

In his seminal work, The City of God, St. Augustine makes a sharp distinction between the City of Man, with its focus on wealth, luxury, entertainment, and the flesh, and the City of God, which is spiritual, humble, pure, and holy. St. Augustine was writing at a time when all that had been Rome was crumbling as barbarian invasion after barbarian invasion shook the foundations of what the people of Europe believed. His message was that all of the chaos around them was just the City of Man being destroyed. The City of God, he said, could now shine through. And the City of God was not concerned with material things.

I think Van Doren might be on to something when he asserts that the reason why the Dark Ages lasted so long and the reason that the people who lived in those years might have been content to live that way was because the overwhelming message that they were hearing, that they had heard since Christianity came to prominence, was that poverty was good. Self-sacrifice was the way to heaven. Riches, the City of Man, would lead to hell. It is also no surprise that so many ascetic orders of monks came into being during this time.

This was an entirely different mindset than what we assume to be true about life in the modern world. I don’t think modern people can comprehend a life where success was achieved by having as little stake in the world as possible. But if the humble life of a servant of God was the pinnacle of success, if your average person who had been brought low at the Fall of Rome was made to believe that their new reality was a better reality, if less was suddenly more, than it’s no wonder that it took so long to change.

Perhaps, as Van Doren asserts, the people of Europe of the Dark Ages didn’t think they needed to change. Perhaps they were fulfilled not by having houses and riches, trade and travel, but by living deep in the contemporary belief that a life dedicated to something not of this world, dedicated to God, was a better measure of success. It was certainly easier to achieve that kind of success than worldly success.

I like Van Doren’s theory. I’m not 100% convinced, but it does seem highly plausible to me. After all, the values and goals of different eras of history are as changeable as the weather. But what do you think?

Medieval Monday – Death in the Middle Ages

May14

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.

Medieval Monday – Theater in the Middle Ages

Apr16

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. ]