PREFACE
Women make up approximately half the population in every human society, but sources to explore their experiences in the distant past are not abundant when compared to sources by and about men. When we think about women in the Middle Ages from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we fill in what we don’t know with our imaginations. Our imaginations provide us with both horrors and fantasies; it’s sometimes hard to separate our fictional views of knights and ladies from our ideas about the real dangers, filth, and hardships of everyday medieval life. This book attempts to clarify what we know and what we do not know about women’s daily lives in the Western European Middle Ages, between approximately 500 and 1500 CE.
It is important to realize that people of the time never called themselves medieval or called their era the Middle Ages. Scholars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries invented the term, which comes from the Latin words medium aevum, “the middle age.” They wanted to distinguish themselves from what they saw as the backward and violent “dark ages” in between the Roman Empire and their own time. This viewpoint has persisted into our own era. Calling something medieval today—a technology, a person, or a point of view—is not a compliment. We imagine medieval women as oppressed and miserable, locked into drudgery, constant pregnancy, and domestic abuse. However, this book will show that women in the Middle Ages, although significantly different from us, had experiences that are familiar to us today: living good lives, working within economic systems, bearing and raising families, and contributing to the larger culture of the period. This book is arranged topically, but the topics are mainly organized chronologically. There is also a timeline of major moments in medieval women’s history and a bibliography of secondary sources. Boldface terms in the text are included in the Glossary at the end of the book.
The introduction provides some basics about the Middle Ages—a quick review of the history, trends, and events of the period. This chapter also discusses some long-standing stereotypes about the Middle Ages, particularly with regard to life span, hygiene, and cultural values. We pick up with two of the issues most pertinent to medieval society’s understanding of women in chapter one, “Marriage and Sexuality.” In chapter two, we explore the medieval understanding of human biology and the difficulties women experienced with conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. Medieval women’s relationships with reproduction dictated or shaped many of the social expectations that they experienced. Chapter three is a discussion of work, both inside and outside the home. Medieval women’s functions inside the economy were much more complex and varied than many people today realize. This chapter also discusses how some daily activities, such as food preparation and housekeeping, shaped how women went through their days. Chapter four explores noble and elite women. We know somewhat more about these women because they are more visible in the sources than women of lower classes. Elite status, however, also came with some difficult challenges and opportunities that allowed some individual women to be prominent in European political life. In chapter five, we discuss women in the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that deployed many kinds of power over medieval people. At the same time, however, women who embraced a religious life had opportunities not extended to other European women, including opportunities to exert power through their reputations as holy people. Chapter six introduces women who violated society’s prescriptions for proper female behavior, including sex workers, heretics, and “witches.” The last chapter, chapter seven, introduces brief biographies of some European women who wrote texts that still survive. This chapter ends with five primary document excerpts of these women’s works.
I would like to acknowledge debts of gratitude to my colleagues in the Department of Art and Art History at Juniata College and my readers, Jim Tuten, Tom Stoddard, Madison Caso, and Mara Revitsky. I dedicate this book to my mother.
This book explores women’s daily experiences in the European Middle Ages, a period that lasted about a thousand years. Scholars generally divide the Middle Ages into three periods: the early Middle Ages, lasting from the year 500 CE to the year 1000; the High Middle Ages, from 1000 to 1300; and the late Middle Ages, 1300 to 1500. These dates are approximate, and we use them chiefly to help us understand a long and complex period. The Middle Ages took shape when the western Roman Empire declined in power and organization, during the period of roughly 200–500 CE. In 476 CE, a Germanic king deposed the Roman emperor in the west, while the Byzantine empire, centered in Constantinople, endured. The map of western Europe was broken up into kingdoms based on various Germanic groups. For convenience’s sake, scholars sometimes use 476 CE as the beginning point for the Middle Ages in the west, but the process was gradual and took several centuries.
The conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries CE—some of purely Roman origin and some involving migrating Germanic tribes—had left the populations of western Europe diminished and Roman control greatly lessened. The three major successors of the Roman Empire in the west were the kingdoms of Gaul, Italy, and Spain, each ruled by a different Germanic ethnic group: Gaul (France) by the Franks, Italy by the Ostrogoths, and Spain by the Visigoths. Over time, each Germanic group succeeded in making political and social connections with the Roman populations of the lands they occupied and gradually converted to Roman Catholic Christianity. The societies they created, just like the Roman societies before them, were centered on agriculture. Royal power was weak. Latin survived as the language of the highly educated, particularly those in the church, and it eventually became the language of Christian religious ritual. Everyday spoken Latin also contributed to the development of what we call Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, and Italian (Tierney 1999, 71–72).
The Franks, under King Clovis (ca. 466–511), were traditionally the first Germanic people to convert to Roman Catholic Christianity and the first to succeed in a major expansion. Frankish expansion allowed for a kingdom with imperial ambitions. Under the Frankish king Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (ca. 742–814), the Franks entered an important relationship with the popes in Rome that enabled their kings to claim the title of Roman emperor. The time of Charlemagne has sometimes been called the Carolingian Renaissance because of the art and literature that were produced in the period. After Charlemagne’s death, his three grandsons divided the empire into thirds in 843 CE.
From the eighth to tenth centuries, incursions into western Europe by Norsemen from Scandinavia, Magyars from the East, and Muslims from North Africa destabilized many of the kingdoms that had grown up around the descendants of Charlemagne. Although medieval Europe was dominated by Roman Catholic Christianity, Christians were far from alone, especially in southern Europe. Jews were present in Europe from the time of the Roman Empire, and Muslims entered Europe not only through the conquest of Spain in 711 CE but also through the various countries and ports of the Mediterranean Sea. Magyars and Norsemen eventually settled into Hungary and Normandy and converted to Christianity; in Spain and the Mediterranean, Muslim settlements lasted until 1492. The individual kingdoms that made up western Europe continued to develop their own legal and social systems throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, influenced by the ethnic groups that settled in them.
Historians have identified the eleventh century as a period of change, and it marks the transition from the early Middle Ages to the High Middle Ages. Some historians have argued that this transition was traumatic: in the wake of the invasions, they believe that the society of western Europe entered a period of violence and disorganization that only gradually began to lift in the twelfth century. Others have seen more continuity than change and argue that despite the political fragmentation, the period was of a comparable level of violence and organization to the previous period. All acknowledge a gradual increase of state and papal power beginning in the mid-eleventh century and continuing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. King and popes claimed greater control over their territories and tried to exert power over wealthy, independent nobles. In the late thirteenth century, both royal and papal influence were at an all-time high, but the two spheres of power clashed with each other. Both kings and clergy wanted the right to tax their territories and to use their warrior classes to preserve them.
The period between 1050 and 1250 CE has sometimes been described as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Translators of the period, most of whom were clergy of one type or another, translated works from Greek and Arabic into Latin so that European scholars would have access both to the works of Greco-Roman antiquity and the newer philosophical and scientific works produced in the Islamic world. During this time, music, art, and literature developed in ways that reflected these outside influences. In agriculture, new crops and methods allowed for better production of food and, therefore, a rise in crop yield and in population. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries also featured a number of sociological changes, chief among which was the rise of a merchant class. Accompanying the rise of this class were works of literature in vernacular (non-Latin) languages and a rise in literacy, though the literacy rate was still well below 20 percent for the entire period.
The fourteenth century, beginning the late Middle Ages, proved to be another turning point as tension between church and state grew and caused political friction in many different countries. The early fourteenth century also began a period known as the Little Ice Age, when average temperatures in Europe dropped approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (equivalent to 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit). This climate change in the early part of the century contributed to years of famine in which many people died. The chief event of the fourteenth century, however, was the arrival of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, in 1347. The plague is estimated to have killed between one-third and one-half of the population of western Europe between 1347 and 1351. The drop in population led to social changes. Workers, whose services were now in greater demand, agitated for better wages. Around western Europe, serf rebellions and city uprisings brought the beginning of the end of serfdom, while in eastern Europe, serfdom lasted much longer.
Culturally, the mid-fourteenth century was the period in which authors began to write vernacular literature for the moneyed and literate classes and visual artists began working with new media. This change, which occurred first in Italy and then spread to other European countries, has been called the Italian Renaissance. Scholars during the period looked back to Greek and Roman antiquity as great civilizations whose intellectual, political, and artistic innovations had been lost during the Middle Ages—that medium aevum that had stagnated, they believed, for about nine hundred years. The great intellectual writer Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) was the first to refer to the medieval period as the Dark Ages. Writers like Petrarch advocated for humanism, a movement that emphasized the view that human beings could improve their spiritual and intellectual well-being through education and study of the Greco-Roman past. Although it is still common in modern popular culture to see the fourteenth-century Renaissance as a separate, very different period from the Middle Ages, scholars generally perceive there to have been greater continuity than change between the two time periods. That is certainly true for women, whose roles and responsibilities to home and child-rearing were consistent through both periods.
In the fifteenth century, Europeans adjusted to the new world in which plague reoccurred at intervals in different countries and cities. City and royal governments took advantage of the Catholic Church’s internal problems to increase their power and exert that power over their citizens’ daily lives. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, nation-states were grappling with movements that would produce the Protestant Reformation and the political and economic challenges that came with it. The Protestant Reformation and the European colonization of the New World ushered in the era that scholars call the early modern period.
As the Middle Ages progressed, women experienced both consistent and changing experiences, attitudes, and opportunities. Although women’s ability to exert power or authority might have changed in the short term, women’s duties and expectations stayed coupled with their biological functions throughout the period. Performing life’s daily tasks, caring for the family, and bearing and raising children were women’s chores; the few women who did not experience them were either religious women, nuns, and Beguines who were forbidden to marry or women who were rich enough to hire others to perform them. As we will see in this book, however, even the most everyday experiences had some change over time, and women’s roles and responsibilities varied by time period as well as by class, race, and status.
POPULATION, URBAN GROWTH, AND DAILY LIFE
To understand what daily life was like for medieval women, it is helpful to think about what the experiences of larger groups may have been via population statistics. Throughout the High Middle Ages, the populations of most places in Europe, especially towns and cities, rose significantly from their late-antique and early medieval populations. Between the years 1000 and 1400, it is estimated that the population of western Europe, including Scandinavia and Hungary, rose from approximately 25 million to 56 million. The different regions increased at different rates. For example, France increased from 6 million inhabitants in the year 1000 to 19 million in 1430; Italy increased from 5 million to 9.3 million in the same period (Bardet and Dupâquier 1997, 172–73). Scholars have suggested reasons for this long increase, ranging from changes in agricultural techniques to fewer and less-widespread wars, but there is limited evidence to support any single reason. Rather, complex interlocking factors such as warmer temperatures, better nutrition, lower mortality, agricultural success, and political stability seem to have contributed both to the rise in population and increase of trade.
As the western European population rose, it also became more mobile. Towns and cities grew significantly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and trade grew with them. Italy was the most important center of urban growth. It had the highest urban populations overall, including Venice (one hundred and ten thousand), Genoa (one hundred thousand), and Milan (one hundred thousand), although Paris was the largest city in Europe for much of this period. However large the cities and towns grew, the rural areas of Europe still remained: in 1300, only 9.5 percent of the population of western Europe lived in towns or cities (Bardet and Dupâquier 1997, 176).
Larger populations meant greater political weight for middle- and lower-class people. Beginning in the eleventh century, groups of craftspeople and merchants began to claim increasing rights from their noble overlords by leveraging their increased profits in return for concessions. These were recorded in town charters, documents that listed the rights of urban citizens to control their trades and commerce by themselves. Many of these charters stipulated that a serf who came to the city and lived there for a year and a day was freed from servitude. This may have contributed to the rise in urban population, as serfs escaped from servitude to come to towns and cities. Town charters also limited lords’ right to tax and to demand other forms of service from their citizens (Tierney 1999, 278).
Inhabitants of the growing towns and cities organized to make the most of the rights they were granted in the charters. Craftspeople and merchants gathered into guilds, which functioned both as social safety nets and quality control for the products they sold and produced. Townspeople became richer and demanded concessions from their overlords. This, in turn, provoked an age of expansion and growth in trade and technology that lasted throughout the early modern period. We will talk about the roles of women in these developments in chapter three.
Hard Lives for Everyone
Despite the positive changes related to the growth in population, paleopathology (the study of ancient disease) has shown that life for medieval Europeans, male and female, was hard, especially in the early medieval period. For example, among the skeletons buried in the tenth- and eleventh-century cemetery of Raunds Furnells in England, 71 percent of women and 46 percent of men were found to have died before the age of thirty-five. Child mortality was also very high: at the same cemetery, roughly one-quarter of all the skeletons were under age three (Fleming 2006, 38–39). We should not fall into the error of believing that all medieval people died young. Men and women who passed their youth successfully could reach their sixties or seventies. Food supply, disease, and other factors shaped life expectancy across Europe throughout the period. Overall though, death rates were higher than our own and at younger ages.
One way we can understand the hardships that everyday medieval people experienced is by examining their skeletons for signs of disease and malnutrition. Archaeologists analyze bone characteristics that indicate these problems. Horizontal lines in the teeth, known as dental enamel hypoplasia, indicate that the person who owned the teeth had incidents of malnutrition or disease while developing the teeth; on baby (deciduous) teeth, the malnutrition occurred while the child was still in its mother’s womb. Lines on the growth plate of the long bones, which are called Harris lines, also mark interruptions in growth caused by disease or malnutrition. For the study of women, an important indicator is an abnormal growth of bone on the skull (porotic hyperostosis) or in the eye sockets (cribra orbitalia) that are thought to be signs of anemia, or iron deficiency, in childhood. Since women must have adequate iron in their diets to carry children to term, severe anemia in skeletons suggests malnutrition could have had an impact on women’s health and fertility. Some scholars have argued that the increased use of iron cooking pots in the thirteenth century might have improved iron levels and, therefore, affected the population. Another condition sometimes observable in medieval bones is rickets, which is caused by a deficiency in vitamin D and causes the bones to soften, giving the long bones of the legs a curved or bowed appearance. Archaeological digs have shown that bone markers of disease and disability occurred frequently in the medieval population. Although the amount and effects of malnutrition varied by time and place, all these problems affected medieval people’s daily lives (Fleming 2006, 31–33; Steckel et al. 2019, 222–223).
Archaeological excavations have also shown that many medieval people suffered from parasite infestations, including fleas and body lice. Some medieval household books include advice on how to remove fleas and lice. A book called Le Ménagier de Paris, written in the late fourteenth century, advised a young wife to catch fleas using a sticky piece of bread placed on the floor, with a candle nearby to attract the insects to the light. It also suggested a white rug might attract the fleas and could then be shaken off outside the house. Anyone who has ever had fleas in their house can easily understand how ineffective these approaches were. Lice, as well, required removal by hand; family members probably groomed each other, while upper-class people were groomed by servants.
Internally, the most common human parasites were whipworm and roundworm, followed by beef, fish, and pork tapeworms. Both whipworm and roundworm are spread through contact with infected human feces, so if medieval households used human waste as fertilizer, they were increasing the chances of spreading parasites among their families and neighbors. Children who were infected with whipworm and roundworm could suffer intestinal problems, weight loss, and anemia. People of all classes seem to have had parasites, however; whipworm and other parasite eggs have been identified in the remains of King Richard III of England (1452–1485), whose body was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester, United Kingdom, in 2013 (Anastasiou 2015, 210–215). The presence of different species of tapeworm likely stemmed from eating undercooked meat from infected animals. These are only a few of the human parasites that can be discovered archaeologically, and there were several others. A high burden of parasites may have contributed to the malnutrition and anemia observed in some medieval-era skeletons.
In some archaeological studies, scholars have noted that adult men seem to have outnumbered adult women in medieval society, sometimes even as high as 115 men per 100 women. This ratio is surprising given that scholars identify a natural ratio of 105–107 males per 100 females in a given population. There are many theories about the cause, ranging from female infanticide to different protection of children depending on their gender. It has been suggested that families may have shared food unequally, with females allotted a smaller share, which might have made them more susceptible to malnutrition or to diseases stemming from malnutrition. Environment may also have played a role—for example, constant exposure to cookfires inside houses with inadequate ventilation might have meant that females were more likely to suffer from respiratory illnesses. All these theories are defensible, particularly when used in combination with each other (Bardsley 2014).
CLASS AND STATUS
The Aristocracy
Medieval society divided people strictly according to the classes in which they were born. In the early Middle Ages, wealth and status coalesced around kings and their war bands, who became accustomed to exchanging military service for land or land tenure. These groups gradually formed into the medieval aristocracy, elites whose power came from the land they occupied and the unfree agricultural workers, or serfs, over whom they ruled. Elite men developed warrior cultures and technologies, such as armor, that enabled them to hold on to power. The mounted warrior, called the knight, chevalier, or knecht, was the dominant military force of the period. Elite women were also a key part of this equation, especially with regard to inheritance and childbearing (we will discuss elite women in chapter five). The social system that resulted from these relationships expanded through the twelfth century as the population rose and more land came under cultivation.
Upper-class women watch as two knights fight in a joust. (John L. Severance Fund/The Cleveland Museum of Art)
Merchants and Townspeople
Changes in agricultural technology and rising populations helped contribute to the development of urban areas, where commerce became the central focus of the new urban society. The rise of a merchant class put pressure on nobles, whose job was theoretically making war, by diverting some of the funds that had previously supported their positions and using them for commerce. Over the course of the late Middle Ages, although the nobility continued to prosper, the supremacy of the mounted knight in battle was challenged, first by the longbow and eventually by the cannon. Equally importantly, the rise of towns and cities allowed urban people to lobby for rights of independence they previously did not have. Some towns secured agreements with noble overlords about their rights and debts that were recorded in documents called town charters. Town charters addressed such topics as taxation, guild membership, and the rights of those who lived in the town, who came to be called burghers or bourgeois—town dwellers. Serfs who escaped from manors to towns could sometimes be declared free of servitude if they stayed in a town for a year and a day. Runaway serfs may also have helped contribute to the populations of urban areas.
The Church
The people who made up the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in the Middle Ages were largely drawn from the aristocracy and were shaped by, and helped shape, many of the aristocracy’s beliefs and values. At the head of the church was the pope, an elected official who ruled—or tried to rule—over church institutions all over Europe. Below the pope was a large hierarchy of functionaries who administered the church and, below that, monks, nuns, and the parish priests who ministered to populations of ordinary people. Because of its elite origin and the command that every Christian should contribute to it regularly, the church was extremely wealthy in the Middle Ages. This wealth sometimes provoked criticism from those who believed in voluntary poverty as a way of pleasing God. The church also clashed with powerful kings and nobles who resented its power over their subjects. In the fourteenth century—which was already hard because of its famines and disease—political factions inside the church caused French-supported popes to move the papacy from Rome to the city of Avignon, near the border of France. The infighting that caused this schism deeply harmed the church in Europe. Ordinary people found themselves on either side of a disagreement they did not understand and had no part in. Worse, the disagreement was at its height just as the bubonic plague hit Europe, killing tens of millions of people and leaving the population stunned by the disaster. Confidence in the church dropped, and it began to lose some of its influence over everyday people.
Commoners
Common people, of course, made up the bulk of Europe’s population throughout the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, as much as 98 percent of the population lived by farming, either for themselves or for overlords. It has been estimated that 75 percent of these were serfs, whose labor belonged to the owner of the land they lived on. The poorest commoners struggled under a backbreaking system of labor that did not allow them more than subsistence. As the centuries passed, technology, such as better ploughs and a wider selection of crops, enabled some lower-class people to live a little better; as crop yields increased, fewer people needed to farm to keep the population fed. These changes left room for the growth of a middle and artisan class who lived by buying, selling, and producing goods for sale. As this group of people became wealthier, they demanded increasing power and influence from their governments and from the nobility. We will discuss this change further in chapter four.
Slavery
We should never forget that in addition to serfs, medieval Europe had chattel slaves—people who could be sold as property at any time by their owners. Slavery was present throughout the medieval period, whether as a result of warfare (very common in Rome and in the early Middle Ages) or as a feature of the increasingly complex trade in slaves that began around the Mediterranean in the ninth and tenth centuries and expanded into a thriving trade by the early fourteenth century. Scholars in the twentieth century noted that by the eleventh century, most Roman-style male slaves had become legally attached to the land and had become serfs. They incorrectly surmised that this was also true for women and children, but the pattern did not always hold. The enslavement of conquered enemies’ women and children was a given in the early Middle Ages. Later on, a systematic trade in enslaved people developed as a result of demand from the Muslim world and trade between northern European peoples and the Levant. By the fifteenth century, enslaved people coming from many places, including the Black Sea, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, could be easily bought in most Mediterranean cities. A high percentage of these people was female. Enslaved women were considered the sexual property of their masters and, in some locations, their children could be acknowledged as heirs by their fathers if there were no heirs born to a married couple. In other places, the children of enslaved women were also considered slaves, no matter who had fathered them. The sources for enslaved people are complex, and scholars have only recently begun to talk seriously about medieval slavery. When we think about the lives of everyday medieval women, we need to remember these enslaved people and their experiences (Barker 2021, 2; Rio 2017, 22–24).
RACE AND IDENTITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
In the twenty-first-century United States, we consider skin color as part of identity, and we often talk about race in bifurcated terms: Black and white—although brown as a category has gained in recent years. We have to understand our own assumptions about what race means while we look at sources from the past. People in the Middle Ages thought about race partly as a function of language and religious affiliation, so an enslaved person in a document might be labeled a Saracen (a medieval word for an Arab Muslim), a Christian, or a Jew, or might be distinguished by his or her area of origin or language group—a Tatar, an Egyptian, and so forth. When free people described themselves, they were likely to refer to their families and places of origin, whether to an individual location such as an estate or a broader category, such as a town or kingdom.
It would be wrong, however, to say that people in the Middle Ages did not see color or that they did not make distinctions based on skin tone. They did. They used skin color as a way to distinguish ethnic groups, particularly in the context of slavery. Skin color was also used as a proxy for moral, physical, and religious virtue. The full development of the idea that “white” and “black” skin were easy ways to indicate the moral character of a person seems to have taken place in the thirteenth century. It is probably not an accident that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were also the period of the first Crusades, when Europeans who did not live in the Mediterranean or the Levant had contact with darker-skinned people for the first time. For Europeans of this era, “whiteness” became equivocated with Christianity, while “blackness” was associated with non-Christian religions, especially with Islam. Some romances written in the later Middle Ages even had characters who began with black skin that suddenly turned white when they converted to Christianity. Writers also connected pale skin with female beauty; a peasant woman who was suntanned from her work in the fields was never going to be beautiful to upper-class people, who could afford to keep their skin pale by staying indoors (Heng 2018). Although ideas about race based on skin color did not operate in exactly the same way in the Middle Ages as they have later in history, ideas about race were still present and significant.
EVERYDAY CONCERNS
Money
In the early Middle Ages, money was rare in many rural areas, and payment for goods was often made in kind: trading one kind of product for another. Taxes and rents were also paid this way. Money became more common in the High Middle Ages when trade became an important part of local economies. European money took denominations inherited from Roman currency: silver pounds, silver shillings, and copper pennies (or livres, sous, and deniers in French). Twelve pennies made a shilling, and twenty shillings made a pound or livre (libra in Latin: this is the origin of the symbol for an English pound, £). Most commerce took place in shillings and pence. Coins became more complex along with growing economies. In England in the late thirteenth century, the obol or half-penny (at first, literally one half of a copper penny snipped with metal shears) and the farthing (one-quarter of a copper penny) provided much of the purchasing power in the purses of everyday people. One-pound coins also appeared in the thirteenth century, when rising trade made a larger coin more useful. Florence and Genoa, both major trading centers, were the first cities to issue gold coins to make trading in larger sums easier.
Coinage varied in size and design from place to place, as royal courts sought to control coin production, mints, and mines for precious metals. This caused the value of coins to fluctuate. For example, English pounds (“pounds sterling”) were made of purer silver than the French livres, and so their value was higher. Merchants carried small scales to keep track of the relative weight of the coins they received. When royal courts sought to produce more money by adding inferior metals to coins, a practice called debasing, the value of those coins was less than if they were pure metal (Singman 1999, 65–67). Nowadays, the value of a coin is based on its face value, but in the Middle Ages, the value of coins could be debated in the course of a transaction.
Clothing
In the early Middle Ages, linen and wool provided most of the fiber for clothing. Linen, which is a cloth produced from the fiber of the flax plant, was soft, light, and easily washable, while wool was heavier and harder to clean and was more often reserved for outer garments. By the thirteenth century, wool had become a major export of the British Isles and the care and breeding of sheep had become a vital national industry. Cotton cloth was introduced into Europe through Muslim Sicily in the 1100s, after which Italy gradually developed a trade in cotton cloth. Cotton had been known to the Romans via trade from India, and the Mediterranean world valued cotton not only for its softness but its light weight. By the late Middle Ages, many Europeans had access to cotton fabric or to fustian, a combination of linen and cotton. Silk, too, made its way to the Roman empire but was only available in Europe by import until the twelfth century. Italian weavers then learned the secret of raising silkworms, spinning their thread and producing the cloth. Luxury fabrics were far more available in the later Middle Ages than they had been previously, and their use provoked not only economic competition but restrictive laws.
Linen undergarments were the foundation garments of both men and women during the Middle Ages. Men generally wore braies, or breeches, which were loose-fitting linen underwear to which they tied hose to cover their legs. In the early Middle Ages, men sometimes wrapped their lower limbs with cloth or leather. A linen shirt and then a wool tunic went on top. The tunic could be simple for a poor man or very elaborate for an upper-class man. Peasants generally wore hoods, while upper-class men wore elaborate hats that changed with the fashion. Most people probably had, at most, two or three sets of undergarments and perhaps a single tunic or two tunics to choose from. Undergarments were changed weekly, while outer garments were brushed. Soaking a garment in urine (discussed below) was one method of removing stains, but medieval people also used soap made from a combination of lye and animal fat cooked together.
Women’s clothes were somewhat different from men’s in that they do not seem to have normally worn braies, and their linen shirts and tunics were much longer, reaching near the ground. For this reason, their knitted stockings were shorter than men’s and reached only to the knee. For menstruation, they probably wore something akin to braies, though there are no sources that explain the way everyday medieval women coped with menstruation (Singman 1999, 44–46). (We will talk more about the medieval view of the female body in chapter two.) Women also seem to have worn breastbands, which functioned much like bras, and there are a few examples of fifteenth-century linen undergarments from medieval Austria that approximate bras more directly (Nutz 2013). Married women almost always kept their heads covered with veils or wimples and, in general, wearing one’s hair long and loose was a symbol of youth. (We will discuss fashionable clothing for upper-class women in chapter four.)
After children began to walk, their clothing was similar to their parents’. Newborns were generally swaddled in linen bands for the first two or three months of life. The practice was thought to keep the child’s limbs safe and make them grow straight. As in our own era, children often began to walk between 14 and 18 months old. Archaeological samples have shown that children who were ready to walk wore long, loose gowns and shoes; some infants’ shoes from York were equipped with drawstrings to make putting them on easier. They sometimes toddled on wooden walking frames with wheels. Older children wore more complex clothing, similar to the clothing of adults: underwear of linen, hose, and top garments that were long for girls and shorter for boys. Some children’s outfits included belts with buckles and head coverings like caps and linen veils. They also appeared to have carried eating knives when they were old enough and to have worn belt pouches to serve as containers for small items. Pockets did not become widespread in clothing until the early modern period (Gilchrist 2012, 79–81).
When the people of the Middle Ages had opportunity to amass wealth, they displayed it through ostentatious displays of clothing—the equivalent, perhaps, of wearing expensive brand-name clothing today. Lower-class people stuck to similar fashions and garments over long periods of time. Clothing was neither easy enough to produce nor cheap enough to replace to be disposable. It was passed down in wills and resold by secondhand clothiers. After the bubonic plague outbreak of 1347–1351 and the rise of the merchant economy of the late Middle Ages, upper-class fashion changed much more rapidly and middle-class people were able to afford to dress more like the nobility. Not surprisingly, the nobility then began to enact sumptuary laws to curb noble spending and forbid commoners from wearing expensive, fashionable clothing and furs. (We will discuss fashionable clothing more in chapter four.)
Personal Hygiene: Bathing
Popular culture always portrays the world of the Middle Ages as dirty, and it is true that people in the Middle Ages did not bathe as often as we do in the twenty-first century (whether our standard of cleanliness should be the standard of perfection is a different question). But medieval people did bathe and wash themselves more often than is commonly believed. As in biblical times, washing a guest’s feet was a frequent gesture of hospitality, and everyone washed their hands at medieval dining tables. In rural areas, those who lived near a water source could bathe and wash clothes outside in warm weather. The opportunity to bathe in cold weather was shaped by class: only upper-class people could afford servants to prepare indoor tubs filled with hot water for a winter bath.
Medieval towns and cities, however, often had public bathhouses where people could bathe in large tubs for a small amount of money. A few bathhouses originally built by the Romans continued serving customers into the medieval period. In the High Middle Ages, European communities built more and more public baths in different municipalities, sometimes as gifts of charity for the benefit of the poor. Bathhouses were also run privately for profit. Some bathhouses had good reputations and promised sex segregation and physical safety for women while in the bath. Other bathhouses had less strict sex segregation and were portrayed in literature and religious sermons as places for seduction and adultery. Some places actually were both bathhouses and houses of prostitution. (We will talk more about sex work in chapter six.)
Literary works often linked bathing and sex, particularly adulterous sex. The Old Testament story of David and Bathsheba was a frequent illustration in medieval Bibles, showing Bathsheba bathing outside while King David peeked at her. In “Equitan,” one of the short narratives in The Lais of Marie de France (twelfth century), the title character conspired with his married lover to kill her husband by putting him into a bath of boiling water. The plan did not work; Equitan accidentally jumped into the bathtub and died, and the husband threw his adulterous wife into the fatal bath headfirst. In Flamenca, a thirteenth-century southern French romance, the wife of an abusive husband contrived to meet her lover by visiting the mineral baths. Bathing thus became an opportunity for unfaithfulness (Perez 2017). Nervous husbands of upper-class women may well have taken note of the dangers of visiting the bathhouse.
Mixed-sex bathing seems to have been the rule in Roman communities. Muslim rulers newly arrived to Spain in the eighth century were scandalized by the custom. They responded by strictly segregating bathhouses by sex and religious identity: particular days of the week were reserved for Christian men, women (of all faiths), Jews, and Muslims. The mixing of women from different faith traditions worried some medieval authors, who believed that too much contact between women would cause them to convert or even to conduct same-sex relationships. Elsewhere in Europe, Jews were not permitted to use public bathhouses at all, but were required to provide their own facilities. Custom varied around Europe as to how often and under what circumstances women visited bathhouses and whether they needed permission to do so.
King David spies upon Bathsheba while she bathes. (The New York Public Library)
One persistent myth about the Middle Ages is that the water was too dirty to drink. Medieval people drank, cooked with, and bathed in water. They understood that standing, brackish water was inferior to clear water and especially to running water, and they knew that pollution by human and animal waste was bad for health. Medical recipes from the Middle Ages often specified the kind of water that should be used in making up a medicinal bath, drink, or poultice. Health manuals and physicians prescribed bathing to keep healthy, particularly when the water was steeped with appropriate herbs. They also advised about the temperature of the water used. Paintings of people in baths—sometimes sex-segregated, often not—appeared in many medieval advice manuals on good health. The popular notion that the Middle Ages was full of people who never bathed is an error.
Personal Hygiene: Toilet Habits
All animals, including humans, produce waste, and we often imagine that the people of the Middle Ages did not manage their sanitation well. We can learn the most about actual medieval waste management and behavior from later medieval records, when towns and cities became so large that sanitation became a governmental concern. Archaeology has also provided evidence for the management of waste in medieval society. In general, the evidence shows that the world of the Middle Ages was dirty by our standards, but less dirty than today’s popular culture would have us believe.
The Romans were accomplished sanitation engineers. Roman public areas in the Imperial period (first to fifth centuries CE) had public toilets, which were many-seated and often built either over running water or over a channel through which water was flushed to remove waste. As in bathhouses, the Romans seemed not to have been concerned about privacy when they needed to urinate or defecate, for there were no dividers between toilet seats and no separate accommodations for the sexes. These factors may have made public toilets all-male locations. It is probable that men used public toilets a great deal more than women and that modest upper-class women did not use them at all.
When they needed to urinate or defecate, most of the people of the early Middle Ages did what humans had always done: they simply went outside. Only the most expensive of rural villas had indoor toilets, which emptied either into water or into a cesspit. Otherwise, people who stayed inside used chamber pots largish clay vessels that held urine and feces and had to be emptied outside. Human waste could be used as fertilizer on gardens and was added to animal waste for that purpose. A given household might have a trench or hole for waste on its property that could be dug out for fertilizing. Dried animal dung could also be burned as fuel, especially important for those medieval peasants who were not allowed to gather firewood in their lords’ forests. Feces represented a valuable resource.
Urine also had its own particular uses in the ancient and medieval world: it was used in the fulling of cloth and to clean garments, which were soaked in urine and then rinsed in water. The slight acidity of urine made it helpful for removing grease and stains. Some blacksmiths also seem to have used urine to quench tools and weapons they forged. The German monk and artist Theophilus Presbyter (ca. 1070–1125) even specified that the best urine for quenching steel was that of a small, red-haired boy, which he believed would result in a harder, more durable blade (Hawthorne and Smith 2012, 220). Fullers and artisans deliberately collected human urine for these purposes.
In the town or city, the situation was different. Urban areas did not have the space or resources to provide a latrine for every household or to manage the waste of the many animals—horses, oxen, dogs, cats—present in the city. Municipal governments did their best to provide facilities, especially in the late Middle Ages. Richard Whittington (d. 1423), who had been lord mayor of London, left behind enough funding to build a public latrine with sixty-four seats for men and sixty-four seats for women, divided from one another. London regulations provided rules against dumping waste onto the street, and the city paid for public latrines to be dug out periodically. Still, the level of waste contamination in London and other medieval cities must have been considerable. The court records of this period often cite complaints against people who defecated in the street, dumped their chamber pots out their windows, or befouled local waterways by building toilets out above them (Bayless 2012, 29–34). In Paris, householders could place their chamber pots outside the door, where ouvriers des basse oeuvres, or workers in low tasks, collected the waste in carts and carried it to public dumps outside the city walls. In twelfth-century Essex, England, a stream called the Shit Brook washed waste from the city into the river Exe (Bayless 2012, 37).
By the thirteenth century, indoor latrines that emptied into cesspits became the standard for new construction among the well-off. The name for these facilities was privy—from the French privé meaning private. French and English speakers also used the term garderobe as a euphemism for an indoor toilet. The concept of privacy itself began with the will to separate one’s self or one’s family from the outer world. Medieval people believed that the world was dangerous and immoral and also smelly and contaminated. They associated bad hygiene with sin and even with demonic power. Those who could attend to their toilet habits privately, therefore, perceived themselves to be not only cleaner but also morally superior.
Medieval people rich and poor still loved sexy, scatological humor. French poems called fabliaux, comic tales that used sexual adventures and toilet habits for humorous effect, survive from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. In one memorable tale, “The Knight who Conjured Voices,” a poor knight and his squire came upon an enchanted fountain where they found three fairy women bathing. The squire stole their clothes to sell, but the knight insisted that the clothes be returned. Then the grateful fairies each gave the knight a magic gift. The first gift was simply that he would be welcomed, fed, and lodged wherever he went. The other two set up the bawdy theme for the main plot. The second fairy said the knight, when he wanted to hear the truth, could order any vagina—belonging to either a woman or a female animal—to speak to him. If, for some reason, the vagina could not answer, the third fairy gave him the same power over anuses. Not surprisingly, the knight then came to a wealthy manor where he won a lucrative bet against the lady of the manor by ordering her vagina and anus to speak (Hellman and O’Gorman 1965, 105–121). The story is a takeoff on more standard tales of knightly honor and chivalry, taking advantage of the giggles associated with taboo body parts and functions. Medieval people loved a good, raunchy laugh.
CONCLUSION
This book is an introduction to the everyday lives of medieval European women: how they ate and slept, what their work was like, and what factors shaped their experiences. We often have to contend with the problem that upper-class women are the easiest to access because they lived in the part of society that kept written records. The poorer and more marginalized women of medieval Europe require us to be more creative in selecting the sources that can reveal them, such as archaeology, court records, recipe books, songs, and stories. In the chapters that follow, we will take advantage of these kinds of sources to explore the experiences of women in medieval Europe.