4
This chapter’s purpose is to discuss the everyday lives of upper-class and elite women in the European Middle Ages. We know more about noble women than we do about women of lower social status because upper-class women feature in documents from the period more often. Such documents have allowed historians to look for the places in which women exercised everyday power, controlled property, and exerted influence on their communities. Their power depended on either their birth families or the families into which they married. Some aristocratic women had only a small circle of influence, but other elite women and queens convened royal courts, carried out the duties of lordship, and influenced the larger society and culture around them. When we think about upper-class women in the Middle Ages today, we may be tempted to be distracted by the privileges they enjoyed. However, dynastic demands, fertility, and the responsibilities of ruling could all pose difficult problems for medieval aristocratic women.
Until recently, scholars argued that the early Middle Ages offered more opportunities for noble women to exercise power than the later Middle Ages. They noted that noble women controlled property and took public roles more often and with greater impact before the rise of centralizing state institutions in the twelfth century gradually excluded women from positions of power. Recently, however, scholarship has begun to understand women’s power as a normal part of upper-class rule throughout the Middle Ages. Kings in the Middle Ages relied heavily on their queens, who sometimes represented the most loyal and consistent of political allies (Jestice 2018, 3). Later medieval queens and noblewomen, over whom their husbands and the church had more control, also exercised power over both people and property. Individual aristocratic women could play important roles in their communities by using their personal property and influence to form relationships, but women also ruled directly over territories, controlled armies, and made laws.
MARRIAGES AND CHILDREN
From the time an upper-class girl was born, the most significant question for her family was whom she might marry. Marriages among upper-class people were formed in large part by dynastic and political concerns: young women from noble families were valuable resources for their kin in making alliances and forging relationships. Thus, a young woman entered marriage not only on her own behalf but also as the representative of her lineage and its power and influence. Women brought property, prestige, and political weight into marriages.
Royal marriages in particular, according to commentators of the period, were designed to extend the control of the monarch over other territories and fulfill dynastic expectations. Kings looked for potential brides who had control over specific lands or who offered connections to desirable lineages. Royal brides sometimes came from very far away. The second wife of the German emperor Otto II (955–983) was a Greek princess from Constantinople named Theophanu; his father, Otto I, had been married to an Anglo-Saxon princess, Edgitha. Closer to home, territorial ambitions might provoke marriage negotiations. Anne of Brittany (1477–1514) was married first to Charles VIII of France and then, after his death, to his younger brother Louis XII. Anne’s attraction for the monarchy was her status as the heir to Duke Francis of Brittany, a territory coveted by the French crown (Williams and Echols 1994, 184). Neither Anne nor the two princes were consulted more than perfunctorily about their marriages. Upper-class young people did not expect to choose their own spouses, and love matches were nearly nonexistent.
Young noble girls were sometimes betrothed as small children when politics or family dynastic concerns made it desirable. Some young, betrothed women went to live with their future husbands’ families to learn the language and customs of their new homes. Eleanor, one of the daughters of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, journeyed to Spain in 1170, when she was nine, to grow up at the court of her future husband, the king of Castile. Inviting a young bride to come to her future husband’s home country allowed her to become at home there. It also weakened the family ties to her birth family, making her more dependent on her husband’s family and removing outside influences—advantages that her in-laws might find attractive.
Betrothal at a young age did not necessarily mean that young women would be sexually active young as well, though we have already seen the example of Margaret Beaufort, who was married at twelve and a mother at thirteen. Dynastic pressures and political alliances were the most common motivators for trading young girls between noble houses. If the children were too young for canonical marriage (twelve for girls, fourteen for boys), a betrothal could hold an alliance together until the children were old enough for marriage.
It was not unusual in the Middle Ages for aristocratic women and men to be married multiple times. High rates of death in childbirth meant that upper-class men married younger women repeatedly in search of a fertile relationship. A woman who was widowed, controlled property in her own right, and was still young enough to bear children could experience intense pressure from her family to remarry. Many upper-class women had stories not unlike that of Elizabeth of Clare, Lady deBurgh, who was born in 1295 and had been married and widowed three times before she was twenty-seven. One of three sisters, she spent much of her time dealing with noble infighting and lawsuits over the inheritance she was owed from her father, the earl of Gloucester. She was even briefly imprisoned at the abbey of Barking and at York Castle while fighting against her brothers-in-law for control of her patrimony. It is perhaps not surprising that after her tumultuous early career and third widowhood, Elizabeth of Clare decided to remain unmarried and lived on for more than thirty years, performing good works and eventually endowing a college at Cambridge, Clare College (Labarge 1986, 89–91).
Aristocratic women who married were expected to produce children, and they did, sometimes in numbers that surprise us today. Blanche of Castile, queen of France (1188–1252), had twelve children by her husband Louis VIII, eight of whom survived to adulthood; her daughter-in-law Marguerite of Provence (1221–1295) had eleven. When there were few sons, dynastic interests could be complicated. Queen Matilda of Scotland, wife of King Henry I of England (ca. 1080–1118), had only two children; after her son died in a shipwreck in 1120, his sister, also named Matilda, claimed the English throne against her cousin Stephen, and threw England into a civil war that lasted from 1135 until 1154 (Labarge 1986, 49).
Childless queens and aristocratic women were faced with political and personal difficulties, including repudiation by their husbands. Emperor Henry II of Germany (973–1024) surprised his nobles when he refused to annul his marriage to his wife Kunigunde (975–1040) despite her childlessness. Later stories about Kunigunde explained that the emperor and empress had taken a vow of chastity; according to legend, Kunigunde even walked across red-hot plow blades to prove she was not guilty of adultery. Both emperor and empress later were venerated as saints by the Roman Catholic church. When Henry died in 1024, however, the imperial crown went to a new bloodline with the election of Conrad II in 1027—an explanation of why, perhaps, the critics of Kunigunde had wanted Henry to repudiate her.
DOWRY, DOWER, AND INHERITANCE
One way in which we can understand the particular roles and expectations of medieval aristocratic women is to examine their connection to property: whether they owned property in their own right and could freely sell or give it away or whether their property concerns were owned and managed by male relatives. Medieval elite women had much greater power over property than historians once thought, though their control of property was often dictated by the various customs that covered dowry, dower, and inheritance.
As discussed in chapter two, aristocratic families in the High Middle Ages provided dowries that went with their daughters into marriage. Dowry property could be land, but it often also included personal possessions such as furniture and clothing or simply money. This property was the woman’s personal property and, in theory, could not be alienated (bought or sold) without her permission. In some places, the dowry was supplemented by dower property from the groom’s family, which often represented around one-quarter to one-half of the groom’s possessions or future inheritance. Husband and wife often managed these properties together, though in some places and times, the husband was responsible for managing the property for as long as he lived. Dowry and dower property were kept to guarantee the woman’s security if she were widowed. Depending on the local laws and customs surrounding widows, she might then pass to the guardianship of another male relative or be able to administer the property on her own behalf.
Women often passed dowry property and personal belongings to their daughters. It is perhaps not surprising that furniture and other personal property would be passed down through female heirs (what was a son to do with a chest full of dresses?) but landed property also could be passed from mother to daughter, a method by which family land could be maintained down the matrilineal side. The viscounty of Mareuil-sur-Ay, in the Champagne region of France, was passed down through three generations of women in the twelfth century (Evergates 1999, 92). Some historians have noted a pattern in which families passed land to sons but money and movables to daughters. In Salerno, Italy, in the twelfth century, for example, daughters received money in greater amounts than sons, while sons inherited landed property more often than daughters (Bennett and Karras 2013, 334).
Widows could also exercise freedom to control personal property, even in those regions that demanded that women be under guardianship. The Customs of Amalfi, an Italian legal code from the thirteenth century, stated that a married woman had custody of her husband’s property to manage for the children as long as she remained unmarried. “A married woman after the death of her husband is lady and mistress of the property of her husband. . . . That is, if she does not marry nor go to a second marriage” (Bennett and Karras 2013, 335–336). Although the widow in this circumstance had to have approval from a judge to sell any of her husband’s property, she was able to do so if her living expenses required it. Widows in such cases were expected to maintain the living expenses of their husband’s heirs, whether they were her own children or not, from that property.
As in the example above, husbands sometimes specified in wills that their wives could enjoy the marital property only so long as they remained unmarried. Dower property was supposed to provide for widowhood without such a restriction. Even so, widowed women sometimes had trouble gaining control of property, especially when they clashed with their husbands’ heirs. Clemence of Burgundy (ca. 1078–1133), wife of Count Robert II of Burgundy, had several children by Robert, who died in 1111. She remained influential throughout the reign of her son Baldwin VII. When Clemence wanted to exert control over her dower property, however, her son balked, not wanting his inheritance to be reduced by his mother’s claims. Clemence demanded that her son turn over the land or face a lawsuit. Bishop Lambert of Arras intervened by sending a letter to Baldwin to urge him to comply with his mother’s wishes. “We ask of your excellency so as not to provoke your mother to rage, but [follow] the command of our Lord who said, ‘Honor your father and your mother.’” Baldwin was forced to agree. Clemence continued her control and influence over Flanders well after Baldwin VII’s death in 1119, retiring to her dower lands toward the end of her life (Nicholas 1999, 118–119).
ROYAL POWER AND REGENCY
In the Middle Ages, noble mothers were expected to oversee their children’s interests while their children were still young. In the Merovingian period in the sixth and seventh centuries, the various Frankish kingdoms were often in conflict with each other, and some Frankish kings had both multiple wives and concubines. The noble women of this period jockeyed for position within the courts and against one another to take advantage of the access to power that such positions could give them. The most notorious of these Frankish queens was Fredegund (d. 597), who began as a servant to Audovera, the wife of King Chilperic I of Neustria (ca. 539–584). She persuaded Chilperic to put aside the queen in her favor and, eventually, to put aside his sons by Audovera in favor of her own children. When Chilperic died in 584, Fredegund took over the administration of Neustria on behalf of her infant son, Clothar, and maintained her power as regent until her death in 597, when Clothar was thirteen years old. The Frankish bishop who wrote about Fredegund, Gregory of Tours, deplored her ruthlessness, which even extended to deliberate assassinations of her political rivals, including Chilperic’s other sons (Wemple 1981, 64–65).
Medieval queens sometimes also took on the office of regent when their husbands were incapacitated or when the monarch was very young. When the Emperor Otto II of Germany (955–983) died at the age of twenty-eight, he left a minor heir, his three-year-old son, Otto III (980–1002). After a brief conflict, Otto III’s mother, Theophanu (ca. 955–990), stepped into the role of regent for her young son. When she died in 990, Otto III was still only nine years old, and the power of the regency was taken by his grandmother, Adelheid (931–999), who managed the German kingdom for her grandson until he came of age in 995. Both Theophanu and Adelheid used their power over the high-ranking nobles and churchmen of the period to maintain their control over the sprawling German empire.
During the era of the Crusades, some queens and noblewomen took on the tasks of governing their lands on behalf of husbands or sons who had gone to fight in the Middle East. Blanche of Castile managed France while her son Louis VIII (1187–1226) was a child and, after he died, on behalf of his younger brother, Louis IX (1214–1270). Blanche’s regency over Louis IX lasted eight years, until he reached his majority. During that time, she personally led armies to bring some of Louis’s most difficult nobles into agreements with the French crown. Afterward, then in her sixties, she ruled France while Louis IX went on Crusade. He was captured and held for ransom by the Egyptian army in 1250, and Blanche was responsible for raising the astronomical sum of four hundred thousand livres tournois to release him. Blanche died in 1252 at the Cistercian abbey of Maubuisson. Guillaume de Nangis, one of the chroniclers of the period, described her: “She was the wisest of all women of her time, and all good things came to the realm of France while she was alive” (Labarge 1986, 52–55).
Despite the considerable evidence for royal women actively exerting power in their own right in the Middle Ages, the literature that these women probably read or had access to was firmly in favor of the submission of women to men. Standards for women’s conduct were different from men’s, and corresponded to a stereotype of a good, gentle, amiable, and ultimately subordinate woman. We will go through and discuss a few.
CONDUCT OF AN ARISTOCRATIC LADY: IDEALS
Noblewomen were encouraged to pursue many of the same virtues as women of the lower classes, but there were also virtues specifically advised for aristocratic women. A fourteenth-century French knight, Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, wrote a book for his two daughters to advise them on good behavior that is known as the Book of the Knight of the Tower. The book was copied many times: twenty-one manuscripts are still extant, with numerous early printed copies in German and English, as well as its original French. Like the Book of the Three Virtues by Christine de Pisan and the Ménagier de Paris, this book encourages women to pay attention to the careful maintenance of their souls, as well as giving romantic advice, good housekeeping tips, and a guide to making a respectable marriage.
In his book, Sir Geoffrey told his daughters a story about a young woman whom he rejected for his own wife because she was too flirtatious when they met. He emphasized meekness, chastity, fasting, and prayer. He was particularly hard on women for what he considered frivolous vanity and love of fine clothing: “Such fancy clothing could be compared to the spider who makes his net to take flies” (Barnhouse 2006, 122). He cautioned his daughters not to pluck their eyebrows, not to use cosmetics, and not to treat their hair with anything that would change its color. Beauty, by Geoffrey’s definition, encouraged pride, which led to more sins, several of which he covered explicitly in sections of his book. By his account, the pride and fashionable clothing of women had been one of the factors that had led to the Great Flood in the Old Testament.
Pride and Humility
In the High Middle Ages preachers cautioned their parishioners to avoid seven “deadly sins”: lust, gluttony, avarice (greed), envy, pride, wrath, and sloth (laziness). According to some writers, pride was the worst of the seven deadly sins because it could lead to any of the other sins; a woman who was prideful, the Knight of the Tower suggested, could cause divine justice to come down on her community. Similarly, in Christine de Pisan’s Book of the Three Virtues, written around 1405, Christine admonished a wealthy lady not to give in to pride: “When the princess or high-born lady wakes up from her sleep in the morning and finds herself lying in her bed between soft sheets . . . with ladies and maids-in-waiting around her, intent on catering to her every need . . . temptation may often assail her, singing this song: ‘Dear God! Is there in this world a lady greater than you, or more worthy?’” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1997, 158). Christine advised the princess to meditate on religious subjects in order to resist the temptations that would assail her as she went about her day.
Christine de Pisan’s advice for the upper-class woman also included instructions for practicing prudence and sobriety, two qualities that “are especially necessary for a princess and any noble lady, indeed for any woman who desires honor.” The prudent noblewoman would keep her emotions in check, speak softly and politely, and disassociate herself from anything coarse or vulgar. She would also forgive her husband when he was “perverse, rude and unloving” to her and be obedient and loving to him at all times (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1997, 166). The double standard that allowed upper-class men to have multiple sexual relationships often forced noble wives to accept the mistresses and concubines of their husbands.
Obedience
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), two influential writers of the fourteenth century, both told the story known as “Patient Griselda” in their major works, the Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. In the story, a wealthy count chose a poor woman named Griselda to be his wife but then decided to put her through a series of tests to prove her worthiness. The tests included taking away her children and telling her that he had them executed and commanding her to prepare his household for another bride who would take her place. Griselda bore all of this suffering without complaining, even though the nobles at the court considered her husband to be wicked and cruel. At the end of the story, the husband returned both the children, revealing that the “new bride” he had commanded her to serve was, in fact, their daughter. Griselda and her husband were reunited, and everyone rejoiced that Griselda’s obedience and patience had been rewarded. Reading this story in a modern context is complicated. The count’s actions seem arbitrary and unfair, but many people in the Middle Ages read the story as an allegory. Griselda represented a human soul who was being tested by God rather than by her husband, and the story’s message was the patient bearing of suffering in the face of divine will.
Despite this interpretation, the character of Griselda featured in a number of messages preached to medieval women, and the story was told and retold in numerous languages and contexts. There is even a fourteenth-century purse embroidered with scenes from the story in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The author of the Ménagier de Paris, writing around 1393, encouraged a young wife to emulate Griselda because he believed obedience was the key to having a husband’s love (Greco and Rose 2009, 119). Elite women were also admonished to imitate Griselda in obedience to their husbands in everyday life. Writers who preached to women argued that even if noble women had power and influence, they were to refrain from exerting that power contrary to their husbands’ wishes. How often women refrained from using power, for whatever reason, is impossible to tell.
Peacemaking
In practice, power relationships between couples were often complex. Christine de Pisan admonished the wise princess to be a peacemaker, “thinking of the great evil and infinite cruelties, losses, deaths, and destruction of land and people that result from war whose outcome is often terrible” (Blumenfeld-Koskinski 1997, 163). Christine contrasted the possible outcomes of quarrels between hot-headed princes with the princess’s God-given desire to make peace between her lord and others. Queens of the early Middle Ages often advocated for poor and powerless people before their more martial and less sympathetic husbands. The queen’s role as a purveyor of mercy continued throughout the medieval period. In a famous example, Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England (ca. 1314–1369), saved the lives of several merchants from Calais. The chronicler Jean Froissart wrote that despite being heavily pregnant, Philippa fell on her knees and begged her husband, Edward III, not to execute the men, who had offered themselves as hostages for the safety of the city. Watching his pregnant wife kneel at his feet overcame King Edward: Philippa convinced him, and she was given custody of the six men, whom she fed, clothed, and then released (Brereton 1978, 109). Her pregnancy made Philippa’s intercession particularly powerful. Having fulfilled her requirement to bear a child, she could exercise influence over her husband and his decisions.
Some noblewomen took more active roles in peacemaking. Matilda of Canossa, countess of Tuscany (1046–1115), was a key figure in the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy, in which Emperor Henry IV pitted himself against Pope Gregory VII in a struggle over church authority. Matilda, who supported the papacy in the conflict, arranged for the pope and king to meet at her castle of Canossa in 1073 as a way of ending the conflict before it turned to all-out war. When their agreement fell apart, however, she also became a major player in the ensuing war, even leading troops of her own.
Piety
Every book of advice for noblewomen recommended religious devotion as central to a good and praiseworthy life. In the early Middle Ages, several Merovingian queens were venerated as saints for their piety and for their efforts to convert their non-Christian husbands. Queen Clothilde (ca. 474–545 CE), according to her biographer, “softened the hearts of a pagan and ferocious people, namely the Franks,” including her husband Clovis, through her works of piety. It took a battlefield miracle to convince Clovis that Clothilde’s god was worthy of his worship; however, when he called on Jesus during a battle, his enemies turned and ran the opposite direction (McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley 1992, 47). Clothilde’s biography, written in the Carolingian era (eighth to ninth centuries), portrays her piety as a key facet of her public persona and of her personal power.
Women also chose to forego social position to adopt religious lifestyles. One aristocratic woman, Delphine of Glandèves (1284–1358), pursued a religious life while married to Elzéar, Count of Ariano (1285–1323). Married when they were thirteen and fifteen, respectively, the young couple took vows of chastity. Both spouses were deeply influenced by the Franciscan order (see the next chapter) and wished to live a life of poverty, but their aristocratic lineages demanded that they remain both wealthy and married. After her husband died, Delphine did everything she could to give away her substantial personal property, and took a vow of poverty that led her to recruit her sisters and ladies-in-waiting for a new monastery (Vauchez 1993, 76–77). She understood her own life, which had to be a public one because of her rank, as an opportunity to save the souls of the faithful.
The private devotions of upper-class women in the high and late Middle Ages provoked the production of books of hours, books of prayers that were designed to be read at specific intervals throughout the day. Such books often appear in illustrations of women, including the Virgin Mary, whom artists often portrayed as reading when the angel Gabriel arrived for the Annunciation. Aristocratic women patronized artists who copied and illustrated prayer books. Prayer books were passed down through families, and they were also given as wedding gifts to upper-class brides. Some of these works were heavily and expensively decorated, and some even had portraits of the people who commissioned them. In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, painted in the early fifteenth century, Catherine kneels before the Virgin and Child in the margin of a page covered with her coat of arms, vines and branches, angels, and an owl. Some books of hours designed for particular queens had imagery that associated the queen’s prayers with her fertility; since fertility was required of every queen, even prayer had an orientation toward childbearing.
DAILY LIFE FOR UPPER-CLASS WOMEN
The Castle
Early castles were principally fortresses, used for defense against attackers, and the great age for castles of this type was the eleventh century. In these castles, everyone slept in one large room, with the best places near the fire kept for the highest-ranking people. By the thirteenth century, however, castles had developed into large stone keeps that featured separate living quarters for the nobles who owned them, their families, and their servants. Such castles frequently had a great hall or chamber, which was used for daily living, dining, and other activities; some servants slept there at night in case they were needed. The noble family had private bedchambers of their own—husbands and wives usually had their own bedrooms—with fireplaces for warmth and privies for convenience. Aristocratic women sometimes had a room with plentiful windows called a solar, a place to work on appropriate projects and to receive guests.
The great hall was the center for meals and daily activities. It usually contained trestle tables that could be moved around to accommodate large or small groups of people for the two meals of the day, dinner at noon and supper around seven o’clock, depending on the season. It also functioned as an office for the nobleman and his wife, and an aristocratic lady might spend most of her day there. The great hall, as well as the bedchambers, could be plastered and brightly painted as a symbol of status, and sometimes woven tapestries were hung on the walls. From this vantage point, the aristocratic woman could supervise all the activities of the household that were her responsibility (Singman 1999, 150–151).
Care of the Aristocratic Household
In the later Middle Ages, documents give us a chance to see much more of the duties and activities of medieval aristocratic women. Much of a medieval elite woman’s day could be spent attending to the administration of a property that might be very large and that included servants, artisans, cultivated land, and extensive farms and outbuildings. Feeding, clothing, and organizing all the people on a large estate was a full-time job. Elizabeth Berkeley, countess of Warwick (d. 1422), had fifty people in her employ whom she fed, clothed, and administered, and in one year spent the astonishing sum of £511 6s. 8d. on provisions to feed them (the equivalent of $797,000 in 2022 dollars) (Leyser 1995, 166). Women who were not so wealthy had similar duties toward their households. The Ménagier de Paris contains a long section on managing servants, cautioning the young wife to keep close watch on her servants to ensure their good behavior and even to do background checks if there were doubts about their honesty. The text encouraged her to guard the chastity of her female servants and instructed her to be “master, overseer, ruler and chief administrator” of her household (Bayard 2001, 93).
Elite women also handled the education of the children of the household. Households might have many children, those of servants along with the noble family, about whom the lady of the household might have to make decisions. As discussed in chapter two, upper-class children were often raised by nurses, and noble women interacted with their children only on more formal occasions. Queen Margaret of Scotland (1045–1093 CE) received praise from her biographer about her care for her children. He wrote that Margaret encouraged the steward of her household to strike her children when they were disobedient. As a result, her biographer wrote, “they happily and peacefully got on with each other, and the young ones always respected their older siblings” (Skinner and van Houts 2011, 192). In our modern society we no longer advocate hitting children, but medieval parents applied the proverb “Spare the rod and spoil the child” (Proverbs 13:24) literally.
Early religious education was also within a noblewoman’s purview; Margaret of Scotland was particularly enthusiastic about increasing her children’s knowledge of scripture. Many illustrations from books of hours show images of Saint Anne teaching her daughter, the Virgin Mary, to read. Although male children above age eight were no longer in the nursery, elite mothers might continue to be concerned about their religious beliefs. One of the most touching examples of this concern comes from the ninth century, when Dhuoda, a Frankish noblewoman, dictated a book for her son William to exhort him to take care of his soul. William, aged about seventeen at the time (about 841–843 CE), had not seen his mother for years, because his father had taken him away from her and had ordered her to stay in a city away from him. William had then been traded to Charles the Bald (823–877 CE) as a hostage, and Dhuoda wrote that she hoped her book would stand in for her motherly advice. She addressed William and his little brother, born in 841, who had also been taken from her, to advise them to put their trust in God. “May he make you successful in all your undertakings, and after the end of this life may he bring you rejoicing to heaven among his saints” (Amt 2010, 112). Dhuoda ended her book by asking her sons and anyone who read her book to offer prayers for her soul. (Read more about Dhuoda in chapter seven.)
LEISURE TIME
Medieval aristocratic women who spent most of their time managing their households seldom had the opportunity to spend much time at their leisure. However, the sources show us that aristocrats passed their time in games and pastimes when they had an opportunity to do so. The romance The Castellan of Coucy, written ca. 1285 by a writer named Jakèmes, described the after-dinner pastimes of a group of aristocrats: hunting, chess, and backgammon. Playing and gambling with dice spanned all ranks of society, and betting was common for board games as well. Chess and backgammon, in various forms, were very popular among the aristocrats of the middle ages (Gies and Gies 1990, 64). Playing cards, which originated in China, came to Europe in the fourteenth century. There were also games specific to medieval society that are rare today, such as Fox and Geese, a board game in which one piece, representing a fox, tries to jump (and therefore eat) a number of pieces representing geese, while the geese try to capture the fox by surrounding it.
Hunting was an aristocrat’s hobby par excellence, and many noble households kept packs of hunting dogs. Although medieval women could and did ride after hounds, the most popular method of hunting for women was falconry. Numerous medieval manuscripts depict women mounted on horseback and carrying small birds of prey, often merlins or peregrine falcons. Since unmarried women and men could ride and hunt together, some medieval romances depicted falconry as an occasion when flirtation and courtly drama could take place. Hunting birds were expensive and difficult to train, so hunting in this way also emphasized wealth and status (Gies and Gies 1990, 69).
Literature
Aristocratic women were often patrons of artists and writers. Beginning in the twelfth century in France, poets and singers—men called troubadours, and women trobairitz—began to write poetry containing stories about and advice for lovers. The term for this love, which frequently occurred out of wedlock among people of high rank, was amour courtois or “courtly love.” Two of the most notable of the patrons of such literature were Marie, Countess of Champagne (1145–1198), daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Louis VII of France, and Eleanor of Aquitaine herself (1122–1204). While we do not know details of the lives of many of these writers, their passionate poetry entertained noble courts with songs about love and loss between lovers who were not married or who were married to other people. Andreas Capellanus, a writer in the twelfth century, set down (probably in satire) a series of rules for this kind of love. “Love gets its name (amor) from the word for hook (amus), which means ‘to capture’ or ‘to be captured,’ for he who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook” (Larrington 1995, 61). Once captured, the lover would experience all the symptoms of the “illness” of love: sighing, paleness, and a belief that separation would kill him or her. The poems extolled both the joys of being in love and the pain of losing love. Although some of the poems by trobairitz writers were highly stylized, many were frankly sexual in nature and make clear that relationships outside of marriage were a part of the romantic culture of the time, at least in literature. We will look more at some of these female authors in chapter seven.
A man and woman enjoy a game of chess. (Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund. The Cleveland Museum of Art.)
Popular stories called romances, beginning in the twelfth century, entertained noble audiences with stories about noble knights and the beautiful ladies who fell in love with them because of their prowess at fighting. The authors of romances, especially Marie de France (twelfth century) and Chrétien de Troyes (d. ca. 1180), set many of their stories at the fictional court of King Arthur, whose royal court provided many examples of couples who could be fitted into stories of courtly love and loss. In such stories, the central plot often revolved around a love affair and a grand adventure, with many trials for the hero and descriptions of the fine clothes and luxuries of King Arthur’s court. Romances also described the standard of beauty. A beautiful woman was always fair and blond; her eyes were bright and either gray or blue; her lips were red; and she had a slender figure with small breasts but large hips (Phillips 2003, 45). Female saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages, including the Virgin Mary, were even portrayed in art using this ideal. When we think of the Middle Ages today, many of the fanciful images we imagine—knights, dragons, and beautiful ladies—are products of this kind of literature.
The character of the adulterous queen is a frequent presence in romance literature, as in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere or of Tristan and Isolde. Romance writers using several languages adapted these two stories in the twelfth century. Despite the risk that such adultery posed—adultery by the queen could result in a baby not sired by the king—medieval romances emphasized the love triangle created by the relationship rather than its dangers, and the adulterous queens in the stories rarely had children. The queens were, at the same time, deeply flawed people caught in sin and noble victims of a perfect, all-consuming passion. It is not likely that such literature represented reality but, rather, portrayed a fictionalized version of love and splendor that caught the imaginations of its noble audience.
Fashion and Beauty
The beautiful ladies of romances always had long, uncovered hair, but loose hair was the model only for young unmarried girls. In the early Middle Ages upper-class married women braided or coiled their hair and wore it covered with a linen veil. In the twelfth century, a married woman concealed her hair with a wimple, which covered both the head and neck. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, wimples gave way to fashionable hats such as the tall, conical hennin, which originated in the early fifteenth century (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 80). We may think of the hennin as the quintessential medieval headgear, but it shared space with headgear of many different shapes, including two-pronged shapes and shapes that featured a wing on each side. These headdresses might have thin floating veils made from silk.
With the headgear of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries came a fashion for hairlessness and high, white foreheads like the women of romances. Fashionable ladies plucked the hair back from their foreheads to display a high forehead and covered their faces with a mixture of lead powder to increase the skin’s whiteness. One twelfth-century recipe to whiten the face called for herbs, lead, camphor, borax, and gum arabic combined with rose water. The lady was instructed to take a small piece of this substance and mix it with water before applying it to her face. Her face could also be reddened with a mixture of herbs and rose water (Green 2001, 138–139). Eyebrows could be plucked back to almost nothing to accent the white hairlessness of the face.
Fashion in upper-class clothing changed slowly in the Middle Ages by our standards. In the early Middle Ages, men and women alike wore long gowns that covered linen shirts. Over time, skirts for men went up in length, until, in the fifteenth century, they barely covered the buttocks, and the legs were covered by hose made from wool yarn. Women’s dress, meanwhile, changed mainly in the style of neckline and sleeve. Starting in the eleventh century, a long, full overtunic covered the undergown, and, in the twelfth century, women’s sleeves became so long that they had to be knotted to keep them from dragging on the floor. The popular garment of this period was the bliaut, a tight-fitting dress with belled sleeves. Bodices, generally, were tight and skirts full to emphasize the hips (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 78–79). The sleeves, which were often laced onto the overdress, could be replaced or modified to support the current fashion, while necklines could be altered. In the fourteenth century, other overgarments were replaced by the houppelande, a sort of open coat, beautifully decorated and with wide sleeves and a high collar. Women’s reached the ground and sometimes had trains, while men’s were open in the front and considerably shorter, from mid-calf to mid-thigh (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 68).
This miniature shows the fashion for elaborate headdresses, pale skin, and high foreheads popular with women in the fourteenth century. (Gift from J. H. Wade. The Cleveland Museum of Art.)
Good outer gowns were expensive and were passed down in wills. An Anglo-Saxon will from the tenth century divided the dead woman’s kirtles (overdresses) among her kinswomen with great specificity: “And her blue kirtle, which is untrimmed at the bottom, and her best headdresses are to be given to Beornwynn. And her three purple kirtles are to be given to Lufetat and Aelfgifu and Godwif” (Skinner and van Houts 2011, 282). Purple, made from the murex snail native to Lebanon, was a very expensive dye, so it is not surprising that the deceased wanted to pass her fanciest dresses on to other women.
In the later Middle Ages, when a wider range of luxury goods became available as a result of expanding trade, wealthy people had access to silk and might have their clothes sewn with pearls or gold or studded with gemstones. In the thirteenth century, gold leaf was sewn onto ceremonial garments; by the fourteenth century, gold embroidery, made with thread twisted with gold wire, became popular. Other popular materials available to rich buyers included damask, a patterned silk that came from Damascus, and thin silks good for headdresses and veils. It became more common for upper-class people to have large wardrobes and to change those wardrobes more often. Advances in dye technology made more bright and dark colors available: dark red and purple were the most popular, but a green called perse and a dark azure blue were available as well. Noble houses and royal families kept full-time seamstresses, tailors, and furriers, along with armorers and embroiderers, to provide luxury clothes quickly and exclusively (Piponnier and Mane 1997, 28–29, 70–71).
Elaborate brooches like this one were often part of the inheritance that young women received from their mothers. (Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1987. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Such luxuries in late medieval fashion had many critics. Moralists preached against the height of headdresses and the length of trains. Some cities and courts passed laws called sumptuary laws to rein in both what they considered to be excessive luxury and to ensure that lower-class people were easy to distinguish from upper-class people. The Venice statutes of 1299 forbade anyone to wear borders of pearls on their clothes, except brides on their wedding dresses, while the English statutes of 1363 set limits for how much given classes of people might spend on their clothes and what furs—ranging from ermine and miniver to cat or rabbit—each group was legally permitted to wear (Amt 2010, 63–65).
The changing fashions of royal courts could be punishingly expensive for wealthy people who wanted to display their social standing through their clothing. Some governments, like the English government in 1337, tried to protect their trade in fabric by prohibiting the wearing of foreign-made materials. Philip the Fair (1268–1314), the king of France, tried to limit the amount of money his nobles spent on clothing per year, probably to prevent them from squandering money that he could otherwise tax. Such restrictions were frequently loaded with criticism toward upper-class women, who were regarded as vain and loving luxury.
CONCLUSION
The contrast between lower-class and upper-class women in medieval society is still striking despite the time separating us from them. Aristocratic women of the period enjoyed many luxuries, but their lives were far from idle—the demands on their time and their fertility were constant. In the next chapter, we will explore the realm of women in the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages.