A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime.

Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

Usually Death was personified as a skeleton with hourglass and scythe, in a white shroud or bare-boned, grinning at the irony of man’s fate reflected in his image: that all men, from beggar to emperor, from harlot to queen, from ragged clerk to Pope, must come to this. No matter what their poverty or power in life, all is vanity, equalized by death.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble.

In Christian theology, via St. Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ offered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.

In the evening minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes, trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals.

At such evenings grand seigneurs liked to preserve the old custom of lighting rooms by means of torches held by servants, instead of wall sconces, because it satisfied a sense of grandeur.

Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails. There was much washing of hands both before and after meals, even though knives and spoons were in use and forks, though rare, were not unknown.

An individual basin was brought to the lord and a washroom provided at the entrance to the banquet hall where several people at a time could wash their hands at a series of small water jets and dry them on a towel.

Then he held audience for “all manner of people, rich and poor, ladies and damsels, widows and others.” On fixed days he presided over matters of state at the Council. He lived consciously with “majestic regularity” to show that the dignity of the crown must be maintained by solemn order. After midday dinner he listened to the minstrels play sweetly “to rejoice the spirit,” and then for two hours received ambassadors, princes, and knights, often such a crowd that “in his great halls one could hardly turn around.” He listened to reports of battles and adventures and news of other countries, signed letters and documents, assigned duties, and distributed and received gifts. After an hour’s rest, he spent time with the Queen and his children—a son and heir was born in 1368 and afterward a second son and two daughters—visited his gardens in summer, read and studied in winter, talked with his intimates until supper, and after the evening’s entertainment, retired.

“As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”

People of the Middle Ages were less deterred by physical hazards than their more comfortable descendants.

Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body, after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind.

Because the Free Spirits believed God to be in themselves, not in the Church, and considered themselves in a state of perfection without sin, they felt free to do all things commonly prohibited to ordinary men.

If the Brethren’s habits came to be less pure than their precepts, the impulse was nevertheless religious. They were in search of personal salvation, not social justice. Medieval heresies were concerned with God, not man. Poverty was embraced not only in imitation of Christ and the Apostles but in deliberate contrast to the avarice that corrupted men of property. To be without property was to be without sin.

Drawn from clerks, students, dissenting clergy, and from the propertied class, especially women, they were articulate and usually literate. Women, out of their frustrations and search for ecstasy, were prominent among the mystics.

If the price was eternal hellfire, that was what many could expect anyway at the Day of Judgment.

Imposing and autocratic in manner, he was sonorous of voice, eloquent with tongue and pen, cultivated and well read in several languages, sophisticated and artful in his management of men.

Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Though he never lost his indignation at social injustice, Deschamps looked with a satiric eye on the human species, which though endowed with reason, prefers folly.

Given a religious motive, economic fear can rise to fury.

Gerson was a man proof against classification or generalization.

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He was a compendium and a reflector of the ideas and intellectual influences of his age.

Few who professed disbelief during life took chances when they neared the end.

The merchant class had more money at its command than before, and its expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance. The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras, Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative

A pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in order to prove the need of salvation.

caravansaries

The French had brought no catapults or other siege weapons, as they had brought none against Barbary. Funds had been invested in silks and velvet and gold embroidery, cargo space packed with wines and festive provisions. Why drag heavy machinery a thousand miles across Europe for use against a contemptible enemy? Something fundamental in the culture determined these choices.

If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.