The Intertwined Lives of Kings, Bishops, and Commoners in Medieval Society

It was an uncomfortable world, hungry, cold, dangerous, where the black death reigned and underfed masses dreamed of plenty.

A young and nervous world dominated by sudden and irrational emotions, fear of the supernatural and hope in it.

Common life in the Middle Ages, this time on the Western Tradition.

Now UCLA Professor Eugen Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization.

If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.

Now human history is written by people who can read and write, and so it is mostly about people who can read and write.

And about those who are important to them. In the Middle Ages, roughly between the 6th and the 14th centuries, that meant bishops and princes.

And anybody else who paid or kept or disciplined the men who wrote, who were mainly clerks and monks.

And so we know more about that sort of person than we know about simple people. Partly because they are individually made. Partly because they are more important.

But also because once we leave the thin upper crust of society, we enter the darkness.

Above the feudal order, or rather disorder, there stood in most lands a king, whose influence was gradually increasing and whose administration was expanding.

After the 11th century in England, Catalonia and Castile. After the 12th century in France.

The royal machinery began to forge the judicial and administrative structure of enduring states.

The king was anointed at his coronation, and he carried a divine power. He was identified with powerful patron saints.

He was like a saint himself. A symbol of fertility, protector of the humble, a healer.

Feudalism was a very important thing. The royal society also invented a theology in its own image, with a royal god ruling like a lord, enthroned in triumph or in judgment.

Down below was Satan, image of the disloyal vassal, rebel, traitor.

The political lesson was clear, even if the king was sometimes in trouble, the other side was bound to lose. The future lay in his hands.

He was crowned as master of a realm that could take weeks or even months to cross.

He was the only lord who owed homage to no other besides the Lord God.

All the great barons, the very greatest men in his kingdom, owed him allegiance.

And this meant that he was in a good position to increase his own domains when a line of succession failed. Or when a vassal failed in his duties.

He was the protector of churchmen. He was the protector of non-nobles. He could support them against bothersome nobles when it suited him.

Or he could support one noble against another. There was also, however, the emperor. Who had inherited the prestigious Roman title.

And the powerful memory of Charlemagne, depicted here at his coronation.

But in fact, the emperor was merely the uncertain ruler of parts of Germany and Italy.

He was often ignored by his own princes and by the increasingly powerful rulers of France and England and Spain.

The idea of empire maintained the old ideal of unity. Of universal unity under one supreme head.

This is a banquet for the emperor Charles IV. Given by the king of France, Charles V. But the reality was disunity.

And disunity was most acute in the emperor's own realm. His hold on Germany was contested by civil war.

His title was controlled by the princes who elected him. And who might depose him. His power was really based on his own family domains.

The emperor was in effect the head of a confederation of German princes. By the 14th century, this was reflected in the new title of the domain he ruled.

The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. But medieval Christendom was like one of the stone monsters that adorned its buildings. It had two heads, not one.

The secular ruler was one. The pope was the other. And since two heads are seldom better than one, each tried to establish his own supremacy.

The ensuing conflict kept them busy for several hundred years. Emperors and kings claimed that the consecration of their coronation rights gave their office a sacred, religious character which entitled them to rule priests as well as laymen, to invest bishops, and to draw revenues from the church.

The popes, on the other hand, asserted that the spiritual realm transcended and ruled any worldly political power.

Clerical propaganda compared the pope to the sun, emperors and kings to subordinate moons shining only with reflected light.

In the end, though, the issue was very practical. Who was going to be boss? The pope quarreled with the emperor about who was entitled to name bishops, who were both high dignitaries of the church and great feudal nobles with large estates. The pope also quarreled with the kings of France about their right to tax.

This long struggle between church and crown finally came to an end when the king of France, Philip the Fair, checked papal pretensions and humbled Pope Boniface VIII. When the pope tried to prevent Philip from taxing the French clergy, Philip sent armed men to capture him in 1303. The ordeal was too much for Boniface and he was forced to leave the church. He died a few months later.

After that, the successors of Boniface took refuge in exile here in Avignon, an imperial city they owned on the French border. This is the papal palace at Avignon where the popes remained until 1378, some even later than that, reluctant protégés of the kings of France. Papal glory and influence were given to the papal power. The pretensions to supremacy would never recover from this Babylonish captivity as it was described. The priests kept their sacramental powers but secular supremacy from now on stayed firmly in the hands of kings and princes.

It's important to remember though that behind this great struggle beyond the tug for power, church and crown continued to collaborate throughout the middle ages and beyond.

Men of prayer and men of war continued to support each other against the third estate, the common men of labor. A thousand years before, Christ had advised his followers that Caesar should get his due. And now the representatives of Christ were needed to repeat the point again and again to keep people obeying laws, paying taxes, knowing their place. The priests seldom failed to remind.

Beyond the churches, however, beyond the palaces, there was another far more basic world. For one thing, the vast majority of medieval people lived much closer to nature. And nature was wilderness. It was fallow land, moors, brush, where you could lose yourself and die.

It was forest, terrifying in its vastness and its dangers. In those days, bears, boars, stags, especially wolves, wandered everywhere into the fields and into the town, even into Paris in the 15th century. Hunting wasn't just a sport, but a necessary defense and of course absolutely necessary for survival. People went out to gather wild fruit, herbs, honey, just as they had done in the Stone Age. But most of their diet, even in the upper classes, was cereals, grains, which depended on uncertain harvest. So life was marked by famines, which killed off as much as 10% of a community.

Give us this day our daily bread was a very real and anxious prayer. A world of frequent shortages and uneven diet provided vivid fantasies of plenty, like the mythical land of cocaine, where everyone was plump, where there were houses built of cake or barley sugar, and streets paved with pastry, and sausages and roast larks fell from the sky. For centuries, food remained the foremost image of luxury, and where the poor dreamt, the rich and powerful ate, mostly over it. They often had stomach or liver troubles, or gout, or else they had tremendous vitality and needed a lot of violent exercise to work off their meals.

Some of the underfed masses, on the other hand, were given to hallucinations, perhaps from hunger or food poisoning, or to desperate appeals to magic to help them handle a world they couldn't cope with. Their masters were not immune to these fears either, despite of being more comfortable. Comfort, after all, is a highly relative term. And the nights were darker, and the cold was colder than we can imagine, because there was practically no artificial light, and the heating facilities were rare and inefficient. And even light remained a luxury in huts where the only opening was often the door, and even in houses and palaces where openings were kept small for security reasons. And only the richest people could afford small panes of glass.

So homes were cold and damp and dark and smelly, and often more uncomfortable than the fresh air outside.

People kept warm by putting on more garments, on top of another, and often they wore more indoors than they did outside. Altogether, they managed only a very unstable balance in the struggle against cold and damp and hunger. A medieval poem about Pierce Plowman gives us a taste of what it must have been like. The needy are our neighbors, says the poem, if we note rightly. As prisoners in cells or poor folk in hovels, charged with children and overcharged by landlords. What they may spare in spinning, they spend on rental, on milk or on meal to make porridge to still the sobbing of the children at mealtime. Pierce Plowman was written in the later 14th century after the great plague had devastated the West.

And it's worth remembering in the 12th and the 13th centuries when economic conditions had been better and in many parts of Europe population density had been almost as great as it would be in the 18th century. But basic material conditions remained pretty lousy throughout. It's not surprising then that the people of the Middle Ages tended to die young. As many as half the babies born might die before one year. And women died in childbirth all the time. In the 15th century the life expectancy of aristocrats in many places was around 21. Indeed the youth of many medieval figures is one of the most striking things about them.

Young people of the time had characteristically adolescent reactions. They may have been hardened warriors but they easily burst into tears.

They were easily excited easily depressed often naive, vain, enthusiastic, credulous and in fact that's the way most people seem to be.

Contributing to the general insecurity were the epidemics that struck over and over smallpox, dysentery all kinds of respiratory diseases

and there was also malaria which was endemic in a lot of areas. There were skin diseases the worst of which was leprosy which may have affected as much as 5% of the population in the 12th and 13th centuries. Above all there were the great plagues the greatest in the 1340s and the 1370s and the death which killed one third of the population of the west and half the population of many cities.

If you add to these horrors the commonplace violence of everyday life you get people who were generally rough and rude and anxious living a perpetually precarious existence. Now obviously if people are uncomfortable, unwell feverish overfed if they are rich underfed if they are poor they're bound to fly off the handle or to collapse all of a sudden which is what medieval people seem prone to do. They were also extraordinarily sensitive to the supernatural which may have had something to do with their frazzled nerves.

Everybody seemed ready to believe in signs dreams, portents, vision and the like. In monastic circles particularly fasts and repressions were added to a regimen of discipline and reflection that was deliberately focused on one's inner world and on the world of angels and demons.

No psychoanalyst ever scrutinized his dreams with more loving care than the monks of the middle ages.

But laymen also had their share of dreams and visions in this very emotional society where there was as yet no code of manners to prohibit fits or feints or swoons and devils or saints were constantly intervening in everyday affairs.

So this is an inexact and arbitrary society a society dominated by sudden and irrational emotions in which a man says he'll do something and then he has a dream he has a vision or he says he has one and he changes his mind or he puts it off which is more easily done and more easily accepted not only because people think that they're at the mercy of mysterious forces so that any excuse is good but also because time itself is a vague and indifferent concept. In fact if you want to measure the gulf between the middle ages and today just try to imagine a world with almost no clocks.

For most people the measurement of time so essential in our world was impossible there were sand clocks this one measured half hours but really they were quite inaccurate there were sundials but there wasn't always sun most people were like the peasants who begged their bishop for a miracle because the village cock had stopped crowing and they had no other way of telling the time as for matters beyond this dates even for important things like the birthday of great nobles or charters or treaties there was complete confusion in papal documents the year began at Christmas but in Venice it was the first of March in Florence it was the 25th of March and in France it was at Easter no wonder it took a major inquiry in 1284 to establish the age of the Countess of Champagne the greatest heiresses of the time.

By then however one of the great intellectual developments of history was taking place the calendar was being rationalized the day was divided into equal hours and mechanical devices were envisaged to keep track of it all in the 14th century weight driven mechanical clocks appeared with automatic figures to enhance them by 1354 a cock crowed and flapped his wings over the great clock at Strasbourg so from now on there was secular rational urban time born in the towns like Rouen under the influence of businessmen who knew the value of time because they had to keep calculating interest.

Yet this sort of thing remained rare because numbers were little known and awkwardly handled calculating things was a mystery reserved for specialists and a lot of people continued to use a variety of measures that differed from place to place even those people you would expect to know their numbers didn't the architects or engineers were terribly exact about their calculations which meant that a lot of buildings didn't come out quite right or collapsed like this 13th century abbey and it also meant that budgets tax rolls financial plans were based on misinformation and self delusion.

You might say that this is so today but it wasn't 14th century England where the royal council set out to maybe attacks on English parishes the council calculated that there were 45,000 parishes in the kingdom when all it had to do was to look at its own registers to find there were only

8,600 parishes an error of 5 to 1 now in the middle ages numbers were more likely to be used symbolically as when people talked about armies of 100 or 200,000 or when they talked about tens of thousands slain in battle when armies seldommustered more than 15 or 20,000 at most numbers were often used to impress as when city officials quite accustomed to complex book keeping claimed populations to be hundreds of thousands for cities of 30 or 40,000 in fact the whole idea of exactness with its respect for figures was foreign to the medieval mind which may have been just as well since this was a very approximate world in which the best way to survive was to live from day to day and yet at the same time the idea of exactness this rough and limited world and its often limited and awkward minds were also responsible for a wonderful series of artistic creation creations that remain the most enduring glory of the 300 years between the 12th and the 14th centuries as we shall see next time.