From the sources 13: Happy Valentines in Old French and Old High German

 

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Now I’m not going to write a post about the history of Valentine’s Day itself, though I’d like to say that yes it does have a medieval history but later than the kind of medieval I write about here. A lot of very significant historical events happened on this day: the Abbasid Revolution in Iraq in 748, the Papal Schism of 1130, the coronation of Akbar as the ruler of the Mughal Empire in 1556, Captain Cook being killed by Natives in Hawaii in 1779, Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and the launching of YouTube in 2005, to name just six. But of course, this blog bearing the name that it does, we’re going to be focusing on an event in Carolingian history that happened on 14^th February, in the year 842 no less.

Ninth Century Frankish cavalry in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, nicely sets the tone for this

842 of course was in the middle of the Carolingian civil war of 840 – 843, between the three sons of Emperor Louis the Pious. I’ve talked about this a fair few times before, but at the root of it were the same forces that meant that ninth century Carolingians could not have nice things – the failure to equitably share power among the dynasty’s members, aristocratic factionalism at court and opportunistic foreign powers (above all, the Vikings) deciding to get involved. Lothar was trying to hold the empire together with his nephew Pippin of Aquitaine, while his younger brothers Louis and Charles thought they deserved their own piece of the pie.

By this point, it seemed like the civil war wasn’t going great for Lothar, as in June 841 he and Pippin had suffered a catastrophic defeat at Fontenoy. The next 8 months of the civil war saw very little actual fighting. Instead, the rival Carolingian kings sent envoys between each other, trying to negotiate a peace. They try and win over supporters from amongst the Frankish nobles who were either trying to stay neutral, or were on the opposing side. Meanwhile, opposing armies marched around the countryside of Northern France and the Benelux countries, garrisoning citadels here, forcing enemy strongholds to surrender there, blocking off routes where the enemy might approach elsewhere, and so on. Contrary to what some people might think, battles weren’t all important in ninth century warfare and were often indecisive. Indeed, its revealing how our sources tell us so much about the campaigning side of Carolingian warfare, yet provide us with barely any description of how the battles were fought, instead focusing on their aftermath and consequences.

And there are a lot of sources for this section of Carolingian history. Indeed, the 35-year period 828 to 863 is quite possibly the best documented generation in Western political history between the fall of the Roman Republic (66 – 31 BC let’s say) and the age of Richard the Lionheart, John Lackland, Philip Augustus and Pope Innocent III (1188 – 1223). We know so much about the intricacies of Carolingian politics at this time, and the full range of partisan perspectives.

One of these sources is the historian Nithard (795 – 844). Nithard is a very interesting chap, indeed quite a remarkable one. He was the illegitimate son of Bertha, the third daughter of Charlemagne, and the court poet Angilbert. I don’t want to go too much into this now, but Charlemagne seems to have allowed his daughters an unusual degree of sexual freedom, which their brother Louis the Pious thoroughly disapproved of. The emperor’s sisters were among the first to be targeted in his attempt to “drain the swamp” at Aachen. Nithard seems to have been educated at Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen and thus was thoroughly literate, proficient in the Latin language and very knowledgeable of the ancient Roman Classics, especially the works of the historian Sallust and the poet Lucan (both of whom wrote about civil war). He had of course also learned how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court. Indeed, one might say his education was fairly typical of a high-ranking Carolingian aristocrat. Before the civil war, Nithard had been a courtier, soldier and lay abbot of Saint Riquier.

Thus Nithard’s Histories provide us, along with the works of Einhard, Angilbert, Eberhard of Friuli and Dhuoda, with valuable insights into the attitudes of lay aristocrats in the Carolingian Empire and how they saw the workings of politics. Nithard wrote his history as the events themselves unfolded, and like Xenophon, Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus before him, he wrote as a soldier and politician with first hand experience of it all. Of course, as your average 16-year-old in a GCSE exam might say, crudely, that means he’s “biased” – Nithard fought for Charles the Bald and portrays his king in a positive light, and the enemy Lothar in a very negative one. Above all, he saw the civil war as a tragedy tearing the Carolingian state (res publica in the original Latin) apart and highly damaging to the welfare of the Frankish people, yet kept faith that everything that unfolded was God’s judgement. Let us see what he has to say about what went down on 14^th February 842.

On the fourteenth of February Louis and Charles met in the city which was once called Argentaria but is now commonly called Strasbourg. There they swore the oaths recorded below; Louis in the Romance language and Charles in the German. Before the oath one addressed the assembled people in German and the other in Romance. Louis being the elder, spoke first …

The basic sum of what Charles and Louis says next is thus: Lothar is an absolute rotter, and the civil war is all his fault. We’ve tried to offer peace on the most reasonable terms, yet he refuses. But at least us two look out for each other as siblings, so we’re going to swear these oaths to show you what good loyal bros we are, and that we’ll work together to heal the body politic.

Nithard then records the oath Louis swore in front of Charles the Bald’s soldiers in Romance thus:

Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salva dift, in o quid il mi atresi fazet et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

The English translation goes thus:

For the love of God and our Christian people’s salvation and our own, from this day on, as far as God grants knowledge and power to me, I shall treat my brother with regard to aid and everything else a man should rightfully treat his brother, on condition that he do the same to me. And I shall not enter into any dealings with Lothar which might with my consent injure this my brother Charles.

Charles then swore the same oath to Louis’ troops in Old High German:

In Godes minna ind in thes christianes folches ind unser bedhero gehaltnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, fram so mir Got geuuizci indi mahd furgibit, so haldih thesan minan bruodher, soso man mit rehtu sinan bruher scal, in thiu thaz er mig so sama duo, indi mit Ludheren in nohheiniu thing ne gegango, the minan, uuillon, imo ce scadhen uuerdhen.

Then Charles’ soldiers swore this oath in their own Romance language:

Si Lodhuuigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat conservat et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part non l’ostantit, si returnar non l’int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, nulla aiudha contra Lodhuuuig nun li iu er.

Which in English is:

If Louis swore the oath which he swore to his brother Charles, and my Lord Charles does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Louis nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

Louis’ troops then did so in their own language:

Oba Karl then eid then er sinemo bruodher Ludhuuuige gesuor geleistit, indi Ludhuuuig, min herro, then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es iruuenden ne mag, noh ih noh thero nonhhein, then ih es irruenden mag, uuidhar Karle imo ce follusti ne uuirdhit.

In English:

If Charles swore the oath which he swore to his brother Louis, and my Lord Louis does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Charles nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

The oaths as they appear in Nithard's histories 

Besides political significance, what makes the oaths so interesting is from the standpoint of written language. Here we are dealing with some of the very earliest examples of written Continental European vernaculars. In the case of what Nithard calls the “Roman” or “Romance” language, which is very clearly Old French, the Oaths of Strasbourg as recorded by Nithard are the very first text ever to have been written in that or any other Romance language. In the case of Old High German, a few texts had been written earlier in the Carolingian period, such as the Latin-Old High German glossary called the Abrogans (c.770), or the Merseburg Charms (the only surviving pre-Christian Germanic religious text). The oaths thus offer us lots of insight into what these languages were like at this point in time, and how they would later evolve.

As I’m not a philologist, I’ll keep the discussion of linguistics brief. For the Old French you can very clearly see the languages’ Latin roots. Some words are still in their Latin forms i.e. Deus (God), jurat (he swore – historic present), conservat (he keeps), numquam (never) and nulla (not any). But there’s clearly a lot of evolution i.e., amor (love) in Latin has moved closer to the French amour with amur; avant is recognisably the French word for before, as opposed to the Latin ante; and sendra, soon to evolve into the Modern French seigneur (lord). auxilia has evolved into aiudha, which is actually closer in spelling and pronounciation to the Spanish than the French word for help; likewise, podir, which has evolved from the Latin potere is cloiser to the Spanish poder than the French pouvoir. The verb tenses also appear to be closer to French i.e., for the conditional/ future words like salvarai and prindrai have endings recognisably like how they would be in Modern French.

For the Old High German, I really can’t claim much expertise – one term in year 7 is the only time I’ve ever formally studied any German, which I know is problematic given how much important Carolingianist scholarship is written in German. Still, you can see recognisable forms of German words in this text i.e., folches (clearly related to volk – people), bruodher (clearly related to bruder – brother), herro (clearly related to herr – lord or master), dage (clearly related to tag – day) and Got (God). And uuillon is clearly related to willa in Old English and will in modern German and English.

Thus, the Oaths of Strasbourg are a moment of huge historical significance in the history of Western European languages. Indeed, from the Romance side of things, it basically marks the terminus ante quem for when the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in Gaul evolved into Old French – when exactly one became the other is highly debated, but it was certainly before 842. Other Romance languages appear fully in written documents slightly later – Italian is the next to come, in the 960s, followed by Spanish and Portuguese; Romanian is the last, first appearing in 1521 (in Cyrillic letters, no less).

What was the attitude of the Carolingians to vernacular languages. Well, its safe to say that in order to successfully navigate high society in the ninth century Carolingian Empire, you had to be trilingual. Louis the Pious had his sons Lothar, Pippin, Louis and Charles educated in Latin, Old French and Old High German, of which the Oaths of Strasbourg are themselves evidence, and pretty much all of the high nobility (the reiksaristokratie) would have been educated the same, especially since many of them like Eberhard of Friuli owned lots of estates in both Romance and Germanic speaking areas. How much bilingualism, let alone trilingualism, spread down the social hierarchy is much less certain. Charles and Louis’ soldiers, who we can reasonably assume to have been drawn from amongst the middling landowners and well-to-do free peasants, could only speak their native vernaculars, and so said their oaths in them, unlike Charles and Louis who said their oaths in German and Old French respectively so the other side’s troops would understand. At the Council of Tours in 813, Charlemagne decreed that priests, depending on where they were, should preach either in the Lingua Romana (Old French) or Theodisc (Old High German) so the common folk could understand.

A ninetenth century artist imagines the scene of the Oaths of Strasbourg

As written vernaculars go, we have only one other example of written Old French from the Carolingian era, a short late-ninth century poem on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia. After that, the next examples of written Old French appear in the twelfth century with the birth of the chansons de geste and other early chivalric fiction. For Old High German, there’s quite a bit more from the Carolingian period. For example, the monk Otfrid of Wissembourg (a monastery now in Alsace, France) produced the Evangelienbuch, an Old High German verse translation of the Gospels, for King Louis of East Francia. There are also some poems like Muspilli (a poem about Hell), the Hildebrandslied (a fragmentary epic), the Georgslied (about St George) and the Ludwigslied (about a Frankish victory over the Vikings). Still, the amount of Old High German literature that survives pales in comparison to the amount of Old English literature surviving from 685 to c.1100. Yet when you factor in the surviving Latin literature, far more poems, treatises and histories survive from Carolingian Francia in the ninth century than from the whole Anglo-Saxon period. Its because they’ve got an unusually high proportion of vernacular texts, that Anglo-Saxonists (or as some would now prefer to be called, Early MedievalEnglishists) are able to justify obsessively fixating on so few texts, to thepoint that Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon have been sucked dry and done todeath. Meanwhile, a great deal of medieval Germanist scholarship focuses on reconstructinghypothetical texts that may have never existed, rather than the Old High German texts that are actually there. The Carolingians, however, had different priorities to us and preferred Latin literature by far.

The biggest question of them all: how do we get from A to M?

 

How do we get from one to the other: the Roman world (represented by the Piazza Amerina mosaics, c.300 AD) and the Medieval one (represented by the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, c.1414)? Well, we're trying our best to find out.

So, imagine this. You’re a student and you’ve been invited to a toga party by the university’s Classics society at the plush suburban house of the society’s (super-rich, ultra-posh) president. The party has gone on into the small hours of the morning. The food and wine have been of the highest standard, going by student party fare obviously, and you’re getting quite sloshed. There’s both civilised conversation, joke cracking and poetry recital (in Latin and Ancient Greek obviously) going on, as well as all the debauchery you’d expect of an Ancient Rome-themed student party. People are disappearing up to the bathrooms to do a bit of tactical vomiting, and others are disappearing into the bedrooms to get up to, well … use your imagination! Topless drunk people in loincloths are also whacking stuffed toy lions, tigers and bears and each other with foam swords in the garden while others cheer. Life feels pretty good. Someone gives you a cake baked in the shape of a stuffed dormouse and says “you’re in for the adventure of a lifetime… you’ll have travelled to a new era.” You say “why the hell not.” You feel drowsy and lie on a couch for a bit.

After what feels like an hour you become a bit more conscious and see that there’s an argument going on. Apparently, some popular people had a fight for who was going to be emperor of the party, and so now there are four. Then the door bursts open. Some gate crashers have come from the Christian union. Then a bunch of Goths appear outside. Some drunk partygoers in Roman legionary outfits start chucking dogfood at them for no good reason, and then they get into a fight and the Goths force their way inside. You start thinking “this party is getting a bit too much. Its almost four in the morning, I think I might as well head home.”

You have very little recollection of what happens next except some flashes. You passed a nightclub where some local hooligans were trying to get in, while Toto’s “Africa” was blaring on the DJ set inside. You saw a bunch of people running down the street as some tough-looking East Asian men on motorcycles were blazing down the road. You can see a guy in a Wales rugby shirt pulling a sword from a stone and shouting “take that Saxon invaders!” at some England rugby fans. And then after that you passed an Italian restaurant that had been hired out by the university’s German society and philosophy society, where everyone seemed to be having a good civilised time, until some guys in legionary outfits showed up and everything apparently went downhill from there pretty quickly. You pass a club called plague, only to then have another short blackout. Then the next thing you remember is seeing some students dressed as monks chanting a super-charismatic guy dressed as a pope making a speech in a deserted marketplace.

After another temporary blackout your remember being on a street with a gyro shop and a kebab shop with lots of people queuing up outside. All a sudden a vast crowd of people in loose-fitting clothes shouting “Allahu Akbar” or was it more likely “Aloha snack bar” (you were so drunk you couldn’t tell) appeared and burst through to help themselves to everything those outlets had to offer. Everyone else in dismay shouted “what! No spicy meat!” These people then ran over to the French delicatessen, apparently closed, but were then chased back by a fearsome man wielding a stale baguette shouting “mon dieu.”

Then the next thing you remember, and probably you’re longest and most vivid memory is what happened at dawn, at approximately 8:00 am. Having half regained sobriety, you stood in what appeared like another toga party all except without as much debauchery. You saw a guy dressed as a pope plonk a crown on another guy’s head and say “behold your new Roman Emperor.” You could hear Latin, French and German being spoken. There also appeared to be a lot of people dressed as monks, and a lot of people in fake chainmail with swords and round shields. Lots of really learned and insightful discussions seemed to be happening. You thought “this is a civilised affair, I really want this to last.” But then in forty minutes time you heard some people screaming “that’s for me” and some other people saying “eh, I think that’s mine, back off”, and some other people still saying “please say sorry” and then a massive punch up began. Then the door bursts open and some people from the Scandinavian society come in blaring Norwegian death metal and Abba at full volume and swilling back schnapps and Absolut Vodka. You decide you’re out of that house party.

After 9:00 you have very little recollection of what happened, except seeing some angry people running amok in the streets shouting in Hungarian, then some time later seeing some people shouting “the end of the world is nigh”, then sixty minutes or so later a man who appeared to have an arrow in his eye (had you just gatecrashed the archery society and caused an accident) and then more than half an hour later some people in cheap St George outfits heading down to the local weatherspoons called “The Jerusalem Tavern.”

When you fully regain sobriety and stop having blackouts, its midday. You’re standing in what appears to be a Theme Park. You wearing a jester’s outfit and there’s a horrible taste in your mouth. You can see a massive Gothic cathedral-shaped attraction that’s still under construction. There’s a massive moated castle with a rollercoaster looping round it. You can see people sitting in some stands watching a joust between two knights in shining armour, munching on chicken legs and suckling pigs while quaffing ale and cider. You can see minstrels in tights with feared hats playing the lute and serenading some girls dressed in colourful gowns and funny hats. You walk down an avenue of quaint timber-framed wattle and daub houses and see some monks burning a dummy heretic and chanting in Latin while people cheer. You then head down to a market place and see people selling Egyptian cotton clothes, Indian spices and fake walrus ivory chess sets while drinking what appears to be champagne. As you wander around further still you can see elegantly dressed, perfumed barons and filthy, smelly peasants alike grumbling about the king’s new taxes and clamouring for a PARLIAMENT. You head down to the alchemists’ shop to get rid of what lingers of your hangover, and by this point you say to yourself “I’ve gone from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages.

Its at that point you look at your phone and see its absolutely flooded with texts. You can see ones that present you with all kinds of weird data about things like pollen levels, global temperatures, population decline and growth, manuscript production, charter production, quality of pottery, aggregate surviving coins and shipwrecks at different times, all of which bewilder you. You then check your facebook, twitter and Instagram and see you’ve been making all kinds of statuses in which you say these weird esoteric phrases like “de-urbanisation,” “declining state capacity”, “end of casual literacy”, “militarisation of the aristocracy”, “drying up of trade networks,” “failure of the patronage system”, “decline of public justice”, “agricultural and demographic growth”, “settlement nucleation”, “change in family structure”, “monastic reform”, “the emergence of popular Christianity”, “millenarianism”, “growing armed retinues and private violence”, “crisis and collapse of royal power” etc. All except these same statuses have been made more than once at different times and its hard to make sense of how they all fit together. And in size 36 font capital letters and posted at all kinds of different points throughout the morning, posts, tweets and statuses about this thing called “the emergence of feudalism.” And each one of them has angry commenters saying “none of this happened, you’re just being misled by the sources.” For the posts about “feudalism”, the numbers of angry commenters exceed all others. And at around 10:00 in the morning, you appear to have started a massive flame war between dozens of people with mortarboards in their profile pics who either say “this is a feudal revolution. This is the moment when everything changes and the ancient becomes the medieval. The X that marks the spot. Can’t you see that you dingus?” And others who say “shut up with your stupid fantasies.

This, my friends, is a rough analogy for everything that goes on in European history between 200 and 1200. What you can see before, during and after your hazy drunken flashbacks represents what is immediately visible in the sources and what lingers in the popular imagination. The texts, facebook posts and tweets, meanwhile, represent the discussions among academics about what was really going on beneath the surface level changes, what was really driving it all and when were the real big changes actually taking place. This, in sum, is an analogy for the whole of late antiquity and the early middle ages (plus the first half of the high middle ages) and for the great big defining problem that confronts everyone who works on those periods. How did we get from the ancient Roman world to the classic medieval one made familiar to us by modern novelists, painters, composers, film-makers and video games designers. And just like when you fully regain consciousness after a drunken night out as a student, you know that something big has happened, but you can’t quite piece it all together. The historian of the early middle ages is in a very similar position. Which is really what makes this period so fascinating and exciting to study anyway!

From the sources 12: Hilary the Englishman, a gay poet of the twelfth century

 

Happy LGBT History month everyone. Since its that time of the year, I thought I’d explore something I’ve barely ever touched on here – the history of medieval sexuality.

Why might the abduction of Ganymede by the lusty Zeus be the subject of a Romanesque column capital in the twelfth century monastery of Vezelay in Burgundy? More about that later ...

Scene from the Moralised Bible of Vienna, (Codex Vindobonensis 2554); Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, thirteenth century. The not so tolerant side of medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, which did get more severe in the Later Middle Ages.

The problem with studying LGBT history before about 1800 is basically twofold. The first is that the modern concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism are all very recent concepts for classifying people – the first three are all essentially Victorian, while the latter was first used in 1965. And for most of human history, people wouldn’t have identified themselves according to the type of person they felt a physical and psychological attraction to. In Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (I’m less confident talking about non-western societies here), sexuality was about what you did to others or to your own body, not what you felt deep down inside. That’s not to say that there weren’t people back then who, in our modern terms, would be called straight, gay, bi or trans. In the same way, people of different skin colours have existed for millennia, yet it was only in relatively recent times that people started thinking in terms of “white people” and “black people.”

The second problem follows from this. How can we identify anyone who lived before the nineteenth century as gay? Its not as easy as you might think in the premodern sources named historical people who we can definitely show were exclusively attracted to their own biological sex.

Take for example one of the most famous gay men of Medieval England – Edward II. Did he have long-term sexual relationships with his right-hand men, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger? The evidence generally suggests that he did. Was his marriage to Isabella of France a marriage of dynastic political necessity? Yes. But contrary to all the ingenious efforts of historical fiction writers to cast doubt on Edward III’s paternity (Mel Gibson making William Wallace a time-travelling paedophile has to be the most atrocious example), Edward II could get sufficiently aroused by his wife to father a son and heir. And while his wife Isabella was still a prepubescent girl, he fathered an illegitimate son, Adam Fitzroy, from an unnamed mistress in 1307. So, Edward II would be bisexual in our terms, right? That would probably make most sense.

 Similar things could be said about hundreds of other people from premodern history, from Alexander the Great to James VI of Scotland and I of England. That’s of course not to disregard the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, and that very few people are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their inclinations.

 And for some other noteworthy premodern gays, its all a matter of speculation. Take for example Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519). We know that he was arrested for sodomy with the goldsmith’s apprentice and gigolo Jacopo Saltarelli by the Florentine authorities in 1476. The charges were soon dropped, Leonardo never faced trial and no one made such accusations ever again. Was Leonardo homosexual? It’s a reasonable inference that he was. He certainly loved drawing and painting the (nude) male figure, he never married or had any known sexual relationships with women and he had a number of apprentices who weren’t very talented artists but were quite good-looking young men. At the same time, while it’s a reasonable inference to draw from the facts, even when put together they don’t exactly constitute proof either.

Thus for many figures in premodern history, especially from less well-documented periods (the late middle ages/ early modern period are much better in terms of sources than the early middle ages), we’re left with this dilemma. To say the historical figure in question was likely not gay can come across as mildly homophobic, or at the very least unable to read between the lines. This is brilliantly parodied in the popular meme format “historians … they were roommates.”

On the other hand, to say that these historical figures were gay without firm proof, bearing in mind of course that proof to the historian is somewhat different to proof for the lawyer or the scientist, can invite accusations of modern progressive wishful thinking.

Therefore, some historians would argue that it’s best not to focus on finding gay people in the medieval past. Instead, they would argue for focusing on how medieval people themselves thought about sexuality and what they saw as normal or deviant sexual behaviour, and how these things can be very different from our assumptions about human sexuality now. This is essentially the divide between LGBT and queer history explained, just how gender history differs from women’s history or the history of race differs from black history.

Still, I think we can find plenty of people who we can justifiably call gay in the Middle Ages. While there’s definitely too few sources to make medieval LGBT history anything more than a fairly small sub-field, what survives is actually quite rich and amounts to a lot more than political accusations of sexual transgression or records of homophobic persecution. For the pre-1200 period, the bit of the Middle Ages I’m mostly interested in, we have a surprising amount of Latin poetry written by clerics, monks and nuns that is undoubtedly homoerotic in tone. Whether monasteries were secret refuges for LGBT people or even gay subcultures hiding in plain sight, like the mollyhouses of eighteenth-century England, is debatable at best. And the very idea that LGBT people would have been more attracted to the religious vocation than straight people in the Middle Ages relies on all kinds of modern assumptions about masculinity and sexuality. To understand medieval monks, you’ve got to take seriously the idea that forsaking marriage and sex was once a lot more manly than it is now. Early medieval historian Rachel Stone has done some very good posts about why speculating about gay monks (but interestingly, not lesbian nuns) is fraught with problems but also a worthwhile historical exercise.

But anyway, here’s an example, one from the twelfth century by a certain Hilary the Englishman. We know almost nothing about him, except that he was apparently from England and he was one of the pupils of the great Peter Abelard, after his castration and separation from Heloise, at the Paraclete in Champagne in 1125. The poem is called “To an English boy” and goes thus:

Hail fair youth, who seeks no bribe,
Who regards being won with a gift as the height of vice,
In whom beauty and honesty have made their home,
Whose comeliness draws to itself the eyes of all who see him.

Golden haired, fair of face, with a small white neck,
Soft-spoken and gentle – but why do I praise thee singly?
Everything about you is beautiful and lovely; you have no imperfection,
Except that such fairness has no business devoting itself to chastity.

When nature formed you, she doubted for a moment
Whether to offer you as a girl or a boy,
But while she sets her mind’s eye to settling this,
Behold! You come forth, born as a vision for us all.

Afterward, she does finally extend her hand to you
And is astonished that she could have created anyone like you.
But it is clear that nature erred in only this one thing:
That when she had bestowed on you so much, she made your mortal.

No other mortal can be compared with you,
Whom nature made for herself, as if an only child;
Beauty establishes its home in you,
Whose sweet flesh shines brightly as the lily.

Believe me, if those former days of Jove should return,
His handservant would no longer be Ganymede,
But you carried off to heaven; by day the sweet cup
And by night your sweeter kisses you would administer to Jove.

You are the common desire of lasses and lads,
They sigh for you and hope for you, because they know you are unique.
They err or, rather, sin who call you “English”:
They should add letters and call you “angelic.”

(Translation is from John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the fourteenth century”, Chicago (1980), pp 373 – 374)

The poet is definitely trying to demonstrate how learned he is here. He of course imagines the youth he is infatuated with replacing Ganymede on Mount Olympus, which of course shows knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid Book V and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X both ancient Roman texts a well-educated twelfth century cleric with a good grasp of Latin would know. And at the end he humorously includes the incredibly famous pun (to medievalists anyway) supposedly said by Pope Gregory the Great in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History when he saw fair-haired slave boys in Rome in 590. Gregory’s pun of course works best in the original Latin where its non angli sed angeli. In another of his poems, to a certain boy of Anjou, Hilary refers to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus from Seneca, and to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife from the Hebrew Bible.

Thus some historians and literary scholars might argue that these poems were little more than just writing exercises used as a pedagogical tool for practicing writing poetry like Classical Roman authors, or were just playful intellectual games. But if so, that begs a lot of questions. Why do so by writing love lyrics? Surely the other genres of Classical Latin poetry, like epics, odes and even satires would be more appropriate. Or indeed, why did these twelfth century clerics focus so much on the literature of the Augustan age? Why not instead make your main schoolroom texts the Christian Roman poets of the fourth and fifth centuries? Why Horace, Ovid and Virgil rather than Claudian, Prudentius and Rutilius Namantianus?

What all of this demonstrates is two things. One, twelfth century Western Europe’s reverence for Classical antiquity was very deep indeed. If they were simply in need of poetic eloquence, they could find it elsewhere. The second is that Hilary’s poems and others like it were most likely written as genuine gay love poems. Indeed, there is evidence that some monasteries and cathedral schools were worried that routine poetry composition exercises in the scriptorium were being used to deviant ends. Our old friend, Guibert de Nogent, a few generations before Hilary, got into trouble when he wrote sexually explicit and obscene poems inspired by his adolescent reading of Ovid. Some might call it in his case the medieval equivalent of a geeky teenager writing a Kirk and Spock, Legolas and Gimli or Nico DiAngelo with half a dozen different characters from the Percy Jackson universe (before his relationship with Will Solace became canon anyway). Websites like Wattpad are basically devoted to this stuff. Of course, Guibert was writing his juvenile compositions in a conservative Benedictine monastery, Saint Germer de Fly. The world of the twelfth century schools that Hilary the Englishman inhabited may have been a bit more liberal in this regard, making it all the more possible to sneak in some gay love poems to fellow students while you’re busying yourselves with the trivium.

I aim to, in future posts, explore more of these gay love poems from the twelfth century, including some by women. I also want to look at what general medieval attitudes to what we would now call homosexuality were like.

All Hitler and Henry VIII? Some insider reflections on what history actually is taught in UK schools

Please note: while I'm not exactly the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Superman, Spiderman or Batman, I do have a kind of dual identity thing. There's trainee secondary school teacher me and there's freelance early medieval historian (more accurately, unpaid blogger and unapologetic Carolingian fanboy) me. Normally I try to keep the two apart, but this time I thought I'd do something a little different.

If you’ve lived in the UK in the last twenty years, you’ve probably heard somewhere that all secondary schoolchildren learn about in history these days are Tudors and Nazis. You hear it from politicians, journalists, public intellectuals, people concerned with the state of education in the twenty-first century UK and people slightly miffed that their favourite historical period doesn’t generate the interest it deserves. Whether they’re scandalised that schoolchildren these days can’t tell apart their Nelson from their Wellington, or that the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Amritsar Massacre don’t appear enough in the textbooks, the agreement is clear. It really is the one thing that can unite Tory Brexiteers with ex-Corbynites and the Black Lives Matter movement. Is it really so?

The short answer is, of course, no. The first reason is a lot of media commentators either don’t seem to grasp, or maliciously obscure, the distinction between the different levels of the UK secondary school system – Key Stage 3 (11 – 14 years old), Key Stage 4/ GCSE (14 – 16 years old) and Key Stage 5/ A Level (16 – 18 years old). Now if any school history department taught only sixteenth century England and twentieth century Germany at Key Stage 3, it would fail inspection by OFSTED (the government regulatory body for English schools). Likewise, none of the GCSE or Level exam boards allow any history candidates to only be examined on the Tudors and the Nazis. So, in sum, the proposition is absurd and symptomatic of either ignorance or malice.

Enough smug dismissal! Like all myths and misconceptions, the idea that the only history teenagers learn in school these days is the Tudors and the Third Reich doesn’t appear in a vacuum either. But first, we must demystify for those of you don’t have insider perspectives, how the history curriculum for 11 – 18 year olds actually works in the UK.

From the ages of 11 – 14 (what is officially known as Key Stage 3), history teaching is governed by the National Curriculum set by the Department of Education. However, currently 88% of secondary schools in the UK are either central government-funded academies, free schools or private schools, which are under no legal obligation to follow the National Curriculum. Only local authority-funded schools, faith schools and (academically selective but state-funded) grammar schools have to follow the National Curriculum, which are now less than 12% of schools in England. There is a certain level of irony in all of this. The former education secretary Michael Gove fought a four year battle with the teaching unions (“the blob” as he unflatteringly called them), the vast majority of academic historians in the UK and the civil service to radically overhaul the history curriculum. As you would expect, the rhetoric of “it’s all Tudors and Nazis” these days was invoked by Gove and his supporters. Take for example Gove’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2010:

“Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know — the history of our United Kingdom. Our history has moments of pride, and shame, but unless we fully understand the struggles of the past we will not properly value the liberties of the present. The current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well, this trashing of our past has to stop.”

Gove’s masterplan was to combine Primary Key Stage 2 (7 – 11 years old) and Early Secondary Key Stage 3 (11 – 14 years old) into a single linear seven year course covering the full-sweep of English history. Primary schoolchildren would have to learn about everything from the beginning of the Stone Age in 10,000 BC to the Act of Union in 1707, and Secondary schoolchildren everything from the creation of Great Britain in 1707 to the Fall of Thatcher in 1990. The whole idea was completely bonkers, not least because primary school history is taught overwhelmingly by non-subject specialists (many primary school teachers may not even have a GCSE in history) on a highly squeezed timetable where literacy and numeracy are always the biggest priorities. Thankfully, Gove lost the battle and the new National Curriculum published in 2013 was really little different to what which Ed Balls had introduced in 2008 under New Labour. What makes this all ironic is that another education policy of the 2010 – 2015 Coalition was to encourage local authority-funded schools to become academies – schools that failed OFSTED inspection would be forced to become them. Between May 2010 and September 2012, the number of academies went up tenfold so that on 7 September 2012 54% of state-funded secondary schools were either academies or in the pipeline to become them. Ten years later, that figure (including free schools, another Coalition government initiative) would stand at 80%. So, one could be cynical and say that really the political battle over the National Curriculum for history was all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”, given that as a result of the same government’s policies most secondary schools were now no longer under any obligation to teach it.

Yet actually, the National Curriculum for Key Stage 3 does still have a fair amount of consequence on the majority of UK secondary schools. That’s because it serves as a highly useful guideline, especially for making sure all your students have reached where they need to be in terms of knowledge and skills in all their subjects before they start their GCSEs. Thus only a small minority of radical and experimental schools will teach anything that fundamentally deviates from the National Curriculum – this is true even of private schools.

And for history, the National Curriculum offers a huge level of freedom in itself. You do have to teach Key Stage 3 pupils the fundamental historical skills and second order concepts like causation, change and continuity, evidence and enquiry, interpretation and significance. You also have to teach them a range of cross-period first order concepts like architecture, church, dictatorship, empire, hierarchy, peasantry, suffrage etc. In terms of what actual historical content you have to teach, however, it works thus:

·         A broad overview of British history from 1066 to 1945, including how government, society and culture in England have changed over time. Schools can however choose which key people, periods and events within that rubric they study in depth and which ones they cover superficially, if at all. The topics most commonly taught in English schools are:

1.       The Norman Conquest

2.       The feudal system

3.       Henry II and Thomas Becket

4.       King John and the Magna Carta

5.       Medieval life – religion and the church, villages, towns, women, crime and justice

6.       The Black Death

7.       The Peasants’ Revolt

8.       Henry VIII and the Reformation

9.       Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada

10.   James I and the Gunpowder Plot

11.   Charles I, the Civil War and Cromwell

12.   Other developments in Tudor and Stuart England – could include the Renaissance, the age of exploration, growing wealth and poverty, the witch craze, black people in Tudor England, the seventeenth century scientific revolution.

13.   The Industrial Revolution

14.   The British Empire

15.   Victorian change – could include Chartism and the rise of democracy, Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, the Great Exhibition, public health and social reform, urbanisation, policing and Jack the Ripper etc

16.   The Suffragettes

17.   Britain in WW1

18.   Britain in WW2

·         The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Abolition

·         Hitler and the Holocaust

·         At least one period of international history other than the two mentioned above. The National Curriculum gives as examples Mughal India 1526 – 1857, Qing China 1644 – 1911, changing Russian empires c.1800 – 1992 or the twentieth century USA. The medieval Islamic world, African kingdoms and Native Americans are also becoming increasingly popular.

·         Some aspects of British history from before 1066

·         A local history enquiry

So essentially the National Curriculum for history at Key Stage 3 is like a buffet where you have to include a few specific foods on your plate and have to make sure the amount of food you pile onto it doesn’t spill over. It’s not tightly prescriptive at all. Indeed, there’s arguably a small element of longue duree (got to admit, I dislike that trademark phrase of Fernand Braudel) in all of this, as until 1988 there was no mandatory national curriculum in history at all, so schools could in theory teach any history they liked but in practice mostly taught British history in chronological order.

Many people are dissatisfied with this status quo. The conservative right, for one. While the current national curriculum was passed under the Tory-led government of David Cameron, it was only passed in that version because Michael Gove had to backdown from his original plan for nothing short of world domination in the face of overwhelming opposition. Right wing politicians, journalists and historians are always complaining that children can easily go through their entire school careers without learning anything about Simon de Montfort and the emergence of parliament, the battle of Agincourt, the Glorious Revolution, the Seven Years’ War, the battle of Trafalgar or Gladstone and Disraeli. In their view, too little serious historical content is taught in favour of soft historical skills, and the glories of the British (implicitly English) past are done down, trashed and ignored.

Meanwhile, left-wingers also find the curriculum wanting. They see the history curriculum as still being too focused on high politics and rich white men, and that the struggles of ordinary working people for basic rights and freedoms, women’s history, Black and Asian British history and increasingly LGBT history as well should be given more attention. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in June 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has led to an increased demand for more imperial history to be taught in schools. Many academic historians have, for a long time, felt that the history taught in English schools is too parochial and Anglocentric. The climate crisis is creating a demand for ecological and planetary history to be taught – should lessons on the industrial revolution now include the question of why we live in the Anthropocene? The history curriculum is as much of an ideological battleground as ever.

In spite of all this, I actually think the national curriculum as it stands, for all its shortcomings, is really the least worst option we have. I think inevitably its going to have to inevitably be mostly British history we teach at Key Stage 3. While I’d personally love to teach more international history, not least because British history is always better understood in a wider European and global context, national history is always going to make up more than half of what’s taught. There’s a strong belief that children should be taught about the environment they know best, that being their own country or local area, and some would argue that teaching too much non-British history could be alienating to white working-class students. It’s also a widely held view that education should have a civic purpose – these kids are future voters, they need to understand the country they’re living, its political system and how they came to be that way so they can make good decisions at the ballot box, or indeed bother to turn up there. Conservatives and nationalists would also consider it unpatriotic and scandalous if mostly non-British history was taught in schools. But even if British history inevitably wins pride of place on the curriculum, that doesn’t remove the imperative for schools to try their best to tell diverse stories within that rubric. A lot of schools are already making a good effort to teach more black British history, and figures like John Blanke and Walter Tull are soon to become household names. British women’s history, however, noticeably lags behind. For many schoolchildren, the only named historical women they’ll encounter in any depth during their Key Stage 3 curriculum are sixteenth century queens (with the exception of Elizabeth I, mostly viewed as wives and mothers), the victims of a Victorian serial killer and the suffragettes. Some schools, however, are trying to break this mould, and to a medievalist like myself it does look like progress to see Empress Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine appearing as topics for year 7s studying medieval England. It could be even richer if Licoricia of Winchester (I have yet to encounter schools that teach about the Jews in medieval England), Julian of Norwich and Margaret Paston were to follow, all of whom could make very stimulating Key Stage 3 enquiries for getting students to think about historical significance and evidence.

But there is still plenty of scope for schools to bring in world history and there are some absolutely fabulous curricula out there. For example, at my first placement school, they had on their Key Stage 3 curriculum map Ming China 1368 – 1644, Islamic Empires 600 – 1200, Mughal India 1526 – 1760, the French and Haitian Revolutions 1789 – 1804 and the Partition of India in 1947 as well as more conventional topics like the Normans, Tudors, Stuarts, Industrial Revolution and World Wars. And at the school I attended for sixth form (16 – 18 years old), their new year 7 curriculum (11 – 12 years old) includes the Byzantine Empire, the Rise of Islam, Kievan Rus, Genghis Khan, Mansa Musa, Tamerlane and more – they’ve even got Charlemagne on there (my absolute favourite topic, as you know!). And in the late spring and summer term at my current placement school, I will be teaching Islamic Civilisations 600 – 1600 to the year 7s.

I think it always works best if its driven somewhat by interests of the school’s history department. There are lots of absolutely brilliant secondary school history departments where the teachers are incredibly passionate about their subject (they may have master’s degrees in history, or even further academic qualifications) and are constantly trying to build their historical knowledge and understanding of all kinds of different periods by reading up to date historical scholarship whenever they can afford the time. Departments like these are able to design truly cutting-edge curricula for their schools that still go broadly in line with the National Curriculum but above and beyond it, introduce students to a range of different countries in different periods and build enquiry questions into these topics for their pupils to explore that reflect current scholarly debates. By contrast, many history departments are full of ordinary, run of the mill history teachers who, already overwhelmed by the obscene workload combined with home and family life, just can’t find the time and motivation to develop their subject knowledge and therefore just want to stick with the topics they already know and for which there’s already decades worth of teaching and learning resources on. It’s also important cultural backgrounds of their pupils are taken into consideration. If you’re teaching in a school in a highly diverse borough of London, Birmingham, Manchester etc where the majority of students are of Afro-Caribbean or South Asian heritage then its absolutely imperative that your students are able to learn more about their heritages in the school curriculum and see people who look like them represented in the curriculum. By contrast, if you’re teaching in a school in rural Devon, Lincolnshire or Cumbria, where 98% of your students are White British, then topics like Mali or the Mughals taking up as much space as the Tudors and Stuarts will go down less well. At the same time, lets not make too many assumptions and make too many arguments about identity. I’ve taught at a school where the majority of students were of South Asian heritage, and many of them were incredibly enthusiastic for learning about the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. And who’s to say white students can’t get excited learning about African and Asian history. Coming at it from a different angle, would it be at all right to suggest that the suffragettes shouldn’t be taught in all boys’ schools? At the end of the day, history is all about exploring people, places and periods different to what we are familiar with, and also identifying the broader commonalities in the human experience across time and space.

We must never lose sight of one very important fact – that history’s place on the school timetable is incredibly squeezed. The biggest priorities for curriculum time in all schools are English, Maths and Science, since they are the subjects all students will have to sit at GCSE and are widely seen as most fundamental to students being able to get good jobs when they’re adults. Many schools now make modern foreign languages compulsory at GCSE as well, so they get greater priority too. Many private and grammar schools will also have compulsory Latin at Key Stage 3 as well. History then has to vie for the remaining curriculum time with geography, religious studies, art, design and technology, IT, music, sports and PSHE (what is elsewhere called citizenship or social studies). Given that kids are at school 5 days a week for approximately 7 hours (many grammar and private schools have somewhat longer timetables), including breaktimes, lunchtimes and tutor time/ school assemblies, history can only be given at most two hours a week on the school timetable at Key Stage 3, and sometimes half as much. That means there is immense time pressure on the curriculum, especially since teachers need to build students historical skills and literacy as well as their knowledge of what happened in the past. Thus, any school history curriculum has to be incredibly selective in what it teaches. This is what both the right-wing and left-wing critics of the curriculum miss. It simply isn’t possible to teach kids about every great British victory or every colonial atrocity except in a very superficial manner. The right really ought to know that the kind of history curriculum they want has already been tried, and the result was “1066 and all that.” The left ought to have the foresight to know that if they had their way, the result would be much the same all except “1919 and all that.” Its much better, in my opinion, that a smaller range of people and events be studied in depth, along with creating a broader understanding of the key features of the period they belong to. For example, studying a pair or trio of sufficiently contrasting medieval kings (i.e., Edward I with Edward II, Henry V with Henry VI etc) works better than trying to fit in all the Plantagenets. Likewise, studying the impact of British rule on a particular colony i.e., Jamaica, Australia, India or Zimbabwe makes a lot more sense than trying to do justice to the whole empire in all its vastness and diversity. Its these depth studies that actually bring them anywhere close to what historians actually do. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, are we teaching our kids history, or just how to be really good at pub quizzes?

Then there’s raw politics. If the content of the curriculum were to be more tightly controlled and prescribed by Westminster and Whitehall, then there would be a definite ideological slant to school, history and left or right, depending on which one was not in government, would be up in arms. Then as soon as Labour or the Tories would be out of office, the party now in government would want the curriculum changed to fit their vision of the British past, which would create further indignation and more agonising workload for teachers. It should really be a source of national pride for us in Britain, that we have never had such a thing as government issued history textbooks, as do exist in countries like Japan and South Korea. Let us pray that remains the case for the foreseeable future.

I’m not going to get on to the issue of GCSE and A Level history here. As all of my UK readers will know, history is not compulsory for schoolchildren after they reach the age of 14, nor has it ever been. This makes the UK highly unusual among OECD countries, and many see this as a situation that needs to change. I must say that, as a trainee history teacher, I would never support a compulsory history GCSE – its logistically impossible at the moment and would only lead to dilution, dumbing down and disaffection. But fortunately for me in terms of job prospects, history is a very popular subject at GCSE – about 47% of 14-year-olds in England choose to do it now, more than ever before. Anyone who says that history is dying in schools is just being alarmist for the sake of it. But what that does mean is that the other 53% of schoolchildren will not formally study any history past the age of 14, making the kind of history they learn at Key Stage 3 all the more critical for them going forward as adult citizens. Thus the Key Stage 3 history curriculum will always have to remain a political battleground for the foreseeable future and there’s nothing we can do about it. But, for all its shortcomings at the moment, it’s a good deal more sophisticated than just Hitler and Henry VIII.

William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

 

William the Conqueror and Henry IV of Germany Part 1 – why compare them?

In this series of posts, I’m going to do something really quite exciting and unconventional. I’m going to compare William the Conqueror (1027 – 1087) and Henry IV of Germany (1050 – 1106). Why is this such a radical idea? After all, both of these eleventh century rulers were each other’s contemporaries, though William was of an older generation. Both rulers of course knew of each other, which wouldn’t be true if I was attempting a comparison between William the Conqueror and the Seljuk Turkish sultan Alp Arslan (d.1072) or between Henry IV of Germany and the Song Chinese emperor Yingzong (r.1067 – 1085).

Indeed, both had quite strong reputations in each other’s kingdoms, and chroniclers in each kingdom followed the other kingdom’s affairs with great interest. William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s chief propagandist, claimed in 1075 that when William the Conqueror was planning his invasion of England, he sent embassies to the court of King Henry IV to secure his support as well as to the court of Pope Alexander II, though importantly not that of William’s notional liege lord King Philip of France. Its of course unlikely that the embassy happened, given that William of Poitiers, a highly articulate yet unreliable narrative historian, is our only source for it. But the fact that William of Poitiers would make the claim at all in a work intended to praise the Conqueror to high heaven, indicates just how esteemed Emperor Henry IV was in England and Normandy, as he was everywhere else in Western Christendom – the German king-emperor was the most important monarch of them all. Likewise, from the German side, Bruno of Magdeburg, writing in 1082, claimed that in 1074 when King Henry IV was facing a full-scale rebellion against his rule in the duchy of Saxony, he requested that William the Conqueror send military support. William then curtly replied that he had claimed his kingdom by violent conquest, and that if he left it alone for too long there would be rebellions. Bruno might have simply been relying on gossip, but it does show (and we know this from other German chroniclers too) that the Norman Conquest of England was much talked about in Germany – perhaps Henry IV wanted to the Normans to harry his own rebellious North.

Map of the German Empire in the eleventh century. By Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg: Sémhurderivative work: OwenBlacker | Discussion - Holy Roman Empire 1000 map-fr.svg, originally based on HRR 10Jh.jpg (2005)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16239633

Indeed, even if diplomacy was quite tenuous between England/ Normandy and the German Empire at this time, they would later be joined at the hip when William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, Matilda (1102 – 1167), married Henry IV’s son, Henry V (1086 – 1125). Some people easily look over this, but Matilda did not have the title of empress for nothing, and she wasn’t happy that for her second marriage she had to settle for a mere French count, Geoffrey of Anjou. Had Henry V lived for 20 more years, then the “Anarchy” would have taken a much more interesting turn with Swabian and Bavarian knights causing mayhem in the Home Counties and the Midlands. Perhaps we would have had German kings of England five and half centuries before we actually did, the Hundred Years’ War would have been completely avoided and Shakespeare would have written plays about kings called Otto and Conrad as well as, of course, Henry.

Perhaps most importantly of all, both rulers are remembered as highly significant in their respective countries. Their reigns are seen as turning points, indeed the pivotal moment, in English and German medieval history respectively – everything before them is inevitably seen in their shadow, and everything afterwards flows from them. What the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is to the English, Henry IV’s penance at Canossa in 1077 is to the Germans – they’re the dates that every schoolchild knows (or at least is supposed to know) and which you should never set your credit card PIN number to. If you ask the average educated English person to name five memorable medieval kings, William the Conqueror will almost certainly be one of them, and if you said the same to the average educated German, they’d probably name Henry IV. And the period they lived in was one of genuine cataclysmic change in both of their countries, which was driven by many of the same forces – the rise of knights, the proliferation of castles, a whole umbrella of economic and social changes and of course the growing power and authority of the papacy. So why have they normally been studied in isolation from each other?

You see, medieval political history has traditionally been written on national lines. English historians of medieval politics focus on England, German historians of medieval politics on Germany, French historians on France and so on. From the nineteenth century through to after WW2 this was very much the established way of doing things, though since the 1970s that has changed. Notably though, there are a lot more British and American historians of medieval Germany than there are German historians of medieval England. Nonetheless, this still means there’s traditionally been the presumption that Medieval English and medieval German history have very little to do with each other.

 Still, national traditions of scholarship leave a long shadow. As a result, until a few generations ago historical scholarship on Medieval English politics was shaped by the question that preoccupied the Victorians: why did a powerful and centralised national monarchy that gave birth to the common law, Parliament and ultimately Great Britain and the British Empire emerge. Meanwhile, German historians, like their predecessors in the Imperial and Weimar eras, still return to the opposite question: why did the German emperors increasingly lose control so that Germany ended up a loose confederation of squabbling principalities, suffered the tragedies of the Thirty Years’ War and Napoleonic occupation and was only unified in 1871 by the iron will of Bismarck. The Norman Conquest and the Penance of Canossa respectively have traditionally been identified as key turning points for both. 

What makes all of these traditional scholarly preoccupations important is that English historians have since the nineteenth century traditionally focused on the state, the law, bureaucracies, court cases and constitutional matters, and many still do. Since the 1950s and even more so since 1990, however, there has been a widespread interest among political historians of early and high medieval England in the social side of politics. There’s been a lot of work on lordship (personal power over people of lesser status), patronage networks, family relationships, aristocratic identity and stuff like that.

 On the German side of things, historians increasingly from the 1920s onwards and overwhelmingly so since the end of WW2, have generally ignored the study of medieval government and administration (the Verfassungsgeschichte that was much more fashionable in the Imperial period) in favour of a way of looking at medieval politics that focuses on the personal relationships between the king/ emperor and the political community – ties of lordship, patronage, family and friendship. A successful medieval king wasn’t one who issued laws that dictated how things were to be run across the country, taxed his subjects rigorously, punished criminals with harsh justice and generally worked to increase the power of the central government and the bureaucracy against the nobility and other vested local interests. Rather, as German medievalists have tended to see it, a successful medieval king was one who worked hard to get all the nobles on the same page as him and be on as friendly terms with them as possible, play by the time-honoured “rules of the game” (to use Gerd Althoff’s phrase) of kingship and generally act like the just and gracious lord of his people. Kings who succeeded in all this could then achieve lots of stuff by bring the nobility of the kingdom/ empire together in royal assemblies and armies. German historiography also stresses the importance of ritual and symbolic actions in how this consensus was built up between kings and aristocrats, such as displays of anger, the shedding of tears, kneeling or prostrating oneself to ask for forgiveness, bringing in holy relics to court gatherings or army musters, seating plans at assemblies and feasts and the like. And yet people talk about "gesture politics" like its a new thing!

What this means is that, in more than just a literal sense, English and German historians speak a very different language when it comes to discussing medieval politics. As a result, it seems like the two political systems of England and Germany in the middle ages were profoundly different and cannot be understood in each other’s terms, making any kind of meaningful comparison impossible. And on the surface of it, its easy to see this as just a natural state of affairs because the actual content they work on is very different. Lets turn to the two rulers we’re comparing. William the Conqueror was able to defeat and kill a rival contender for the throne, Harold Godwinson, in one decisive battle on 14 October 1066, and just over two months later he had seized control of the effective capital of England (London) and with it the machinery of government and was crowned king. Then over the next five years, he was able to completely subdue the whole country by force and replace the majority of its ruling class with foreigners loyal to him. By contrast, Henry IV faced betrayals, rebellions and civil war for almost all his reign and temporarily lost all authority over his kingdom when in 1076 the Pope released his subjects from their oaths of loyalty to him. This he could only regain if he approached the pope as a humble penitent begging for forgiveness. The sources are also hugely different. For example the most famous document from Norman England is of course the Domesday Book – a government survey of (almost) his entire kingdom that records land ownership, economic activities, wealth, tax assessment and the (adult male) population. Likewise there are lots of writs and charters and other administrative records surviving from Norman England. There are plenty of detailed narrative histories for the Anglo-Norman period - Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon - but they're counterbalanced by these administrative records. Meanwhile, Henry IV’s Germany is very different. While poor in administrative records it is rich in chronicles, many of them written by historians hostile to Henry IV like Bruno of Merseburg and Lamprecht of Hersfeld. These provide lots of "thick description" of rituals, assemblies and battles, but have little to say about the workings of government. Thus, in contrast to the Anglo-Norman case, they do so much more to colour how historians view the workings of politics in the period.

Thankfully, over the last fifty years, some historians, almost all of them English and most of them specialising in Continental European medieval history (though also including some intrepid and outgoing Anglo-Saxonists) have tried hard to bridge the scholarly great divide and challenge the insularity and historiographical navel-gazing of English and German medievalists alike. To give a short list of them (in chronological order) they include Karl Leyser, Timothy Reuter, Janet Nelson, Sarah Foot, Catherine Cubitt, Simon MacLean, Charles Insley and Levi Roach. There’s been a lot of work recently on the importance of just the kind of ritual and symbolic communication stuff that German medievalists like Gerd Althoff focus on, in relation to late Anglo-Saxon England, though Anglo-Normanists have been slower to follow up on this trend. Indeed its frankly bizarre that its taken so long for English medievalists to see the importance of demonstrative behaviour and symbolism in medieval kingship. After all one of the most famous episodes in English medieval history opens with a king throwing a tantrum and ends with the same king making a humble pilgrimage to Canterbury and being whipped bloody by monks to apologise to the archbishop whose death resulted from his anger. The whole saga of Henry II and Thomas Becket makes a great deal more sense if you have in mind Henry IV at Canossa in 1077, or from an even earlier time Emperor Otto III in 1000 making a pilgrimage to Gniezno to visit the tomb of the martyred Adalbert of Prague and greeting Duke Boleslaw the Brave of Poland in the humble garb of a penitent. And Anglo-Normanists have tried to look at the Norman Conquest in a more pan-European perspective as well, as exemplified by work from people like David Bates, Robert Bartlett, Stephen Baxter and (again) Levi Roach.

Canterbury 1174, when even the most old school historians finally realise that the politics of Norman and Angevin England weren't a ritual free-zone after all

But enough of the historiographical detour. In my view, William the Conqueror and Henry IV, while they mostly don’t match up, nonetheless make a really stimulating comparison for thinking about how eleventh century kingship worked (both through similarities and differences), the momentous changes going on all over Europe and how events almost a thousand years ago can still be so resonant and controversial today. In subsequent posts we’ll be exploring both rulers’ childhoods, how they presented themselves as rulers and faced challenges to their authority and how their reigns were shaped by broader forces of change.

Sources cited

Primary

William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1998)

Secondary

Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, 500 – 1200, translated by Christopher Carroll, Cambridge University Press (2009)

Elisabeth Van Houts, ‘The Norman Conquest through European eyes’, English Historical Review 110 (1995)

Charles Insley, “‘Ottonians with pipe rolls?’ Political culture and performance in the kingdom of the English, c.900 – 1050’”, History 102 (2017)