Should history be compulsory to 16?

 

Medieval but not European for a change: the world famous examination system of imperial China under the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279)

So in a previous post, I explored what the History Curriculum for Key Stage 3 (11 - 14 year olds) is like in mainstream UK schools. There I argued that despite the way that politicians and the media often caricature it, its a lot broader, diverse and more enriching than just a narrow fixation on Henry VIII and Hitler. That's not to say that history teaching in lower secondary school (what folks across the Pond would call Middle School) does not have its problems, but its not in the state of general decay that a lot of people think it is.

But when we get to the teaching of history at Key Stage 4 (14 - 16 years old), when pupils are being prepared for the standardised exams known as GCSEs that they take at the end of Key Stage 4 when they are 15 - 16, we encounter problems of a different kind. Indeed, I think its here that those who complain about the curriculum being all about sixteenth century England and the Second World War are slightly more justified in their criticisms.

Now I may need to remind my North American and Continental European readers that, highly unusually among first world countries, in the UK any kind of formal study of history stops being compulsory at the age of 14. In England, about 47% of 15 - 16 year olds sit GCSE history exams in June every year. That's still a very large number, indeed significantly larger than was the case 20 years ago, but that still means that GCSE history is a course that less than half of British children take. Thus for a lot of people, including politicians, journalists, academic historians, educationalists and, last but not least, a minority of secondary school history teachers, the biggest problem with GCSE history is that its optional.

Here I must say where I stand on this. I do not support making GCSE history compulsory. This may seem odd for some of you. I am after all an lifelong obsessive enthusiast for the subject, who studied history at GCSE, A Level, undergraduate degree level and master's degree level. I am also a trainee history teacher and a paid-up member of the Historical Association. And to state the obvious, I am writing these words on my very own history blog. So why should I be arguing for something that's surely going against my professional interests? Arguably, in the eyes of some, this would make me a traitor to my subject, worthy of being tarred and feathered.

The reasons why are as follows. The first is that we all need to show a little self-awareness. I am all too aware from teaching children in two mainstream, non-selective schools that most children are not at all like I was when I was their age. The people who are clamouring from the rooftops for history to be compulsory till 16, if not 18, are people like myself and need to realise this. And the fact that most teenagers don't have wide-ranging knowledge and intellectual curiosity for the past can't simply be blamed on the quality of history teaching or that they can drop it at the age of 14. 

We've got to remember that factors outside of schools contribute so much too. To go from my own experience, I was reading about historical subjects as wide ranging as Alexander the Great, the Romans, Feudal Japan, the Aztecs and Incas, the British Empire and the World Wars from the age of 8. I obsessively looked at the globe in my room and at books of maps, finding out where everything was and who controlled which countries at any given time. I was also taken to ancient sites, castles, palaces and museums by my parents. Whether my passion for the past is innate, a product of my middle class upbringing or the result of something else entirely I don't know. Though I am pretty sure its not a result of the the history teaching I've received. While I remember it was always very good, from primary school through to degree level, I'd never say it was ever the main reason why I loved the subject. And most of my substantive knowledge of history does not come from formal study of any kind, but from reading for pleasure. Disciplinary knowledge (use of evidence, source analysis, reasoning with historical concepts) has been where good teaching has really made the difference for me. I'm sure many professional historians could say similar. Indeed, there are a few who admit to having found school history boring. This isn't to cast doubt on the ability of good teachers at secondary level to inspire a passion for the past in pupils - after all, that's part of the reason why I'm in the job.

Now this part of the discussion is perhaps completely missing the point. I don't think anyone is arguing for a compulsory history GCSE because we need more historians. Let's not forget that there are proponents of every other non-core subject (geography, music, art, PE, drama etc) who would love to see their numbers bolstered. And if the real aim of the game were to inspire a passion for history among the youth, then surely history GCSE would not need to eb made compulsory anyway?

The reasons why people support compulsory history at GCSE really are twofold:

1. It provides invaluable transferrable skills to help the younger generation in the world of further study, work and adult life.
2. A more historically-informed public makes for better citizens.

The transferrable skills is the one I have the least time for. Don't get me wrong. I think that actual historical reasoning is an invaluable thing to have learned, and not just if you want to become a professional historian, a history teacher or anyone professionally involved with history in any way. Being able to weigh up different testamentary accounts of what happened is of course invaluable to the lawyer, and thinking about how multiple causes and factors can lead to an event makes for good journalism. And just generally, historical thinking allows you to look at contemporary society in a more critical, long term perspective. It also enables you to understand how interpretations of the past, which we encounter all the time in politics and the media, come about and how to look at them with a critical eye too. At the same time, historical thinking is a huge challenge to teach and learn, and as any history teacher knows, even more challenging to assess using standardised testing rubrics. Furthermore, all the elements of historical reasoning are encountered through the Key Stage 3 curriculum, when history is still compulsory.

Then we come to the generic skills that are easiest to learn, easiest to assess and most desirable to employers of all shapes and sizes. Stuff like coming up with a structured argument, analysing evidence, evaluation etc. These have very little to do specifically with history. Evaluating views is something you have to do if you take any humanities subject at GCSE, like Geography or Religious Studies. Likewise, questions that require you to analyse evidence are sure to come up on any Biology, Physics or Chemistry paper. And essay-writing is fundamental to English Language and Literature, which are the core, compulsory subjects par excellence. If the case for studying history were to be reduced to these, then we would be doing a massive disservice to the subject. Reducing secondary education, especially but by no means exclusively in the humanities, to the acquisition of generic, transferrable skills for work and future study is of course a huge problem that I don't have the space to tackle here. Fortunately others have already done so. Indeed, Michael Fordham, a veteran history teacher and tutor at Cambridge's Institute for Continuing Education, has made it his mission to fight against genericism in the world of secondary education. 

The latter reason is where the case for complusory history to the age of 16 might appear stronger, but its also where it gets most politically-charged. There's the argument, going back to Cicero in the first century BC, that the study of history is essential to being a good citizen. Indeed, that's one of the reasons why the history is a  compulsory subject from the ages of 5 - 14 (Key Stages 1, 2, 3) in the UK. It is also for that reason that many people end up asking the question "why stop there, then?" They argue that surely the children of today will be better adult citizens tomorrow if they continue to study history till at least the age of 16, or indeed to the very end of their secondary schooling. 

Yet when it comes to the exact purpose of this, there are essentially two different views on this. 

One is an essentially nationalistic view. Children need to study history because they need to learn how great the UK is and why they should cherish their British citizenship. This is essentially the argument Michael Gove put forward back in the early 2010s, when he set out his master plan for root and branch reform of the history curriculum. Gove believed, and presumably still does today, that children need to know about the UK's ancient and unique traditions of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, religious tolerance and individual liberty. History in schools, according to him, "ought to celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world" and portray Britain as "a beacon of liberty for others to emulate." Gove's main attention was focused on history at Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 (7 - 14 years old), where he resolutely failed to implement his vision and ended up with a curriculum fundamentally similar to the one before. He was also supportive of the idea of compulsory history at GCSE, lamenting in one of his keynote speeches that pupils get to drop the subject at 14. Gove neither succeeded in radically reforming the GCSE nor making it compulsory either, though he did succeed in boosting the numbers taking it through the English Baccalaureate scheme. Under this, schools were given ratings according to how many pupils were taking GCSEs in academic subjects, namely English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Combined or Triple Science, a Foreign Language (Ancient or Modern), and a Humanity (History or Geography). In practice, this has meant that in all English state schools hoping to be rated "Good" or "Outstanding" by OFSTED (the government inspectorate for schools), the top 90% of pupils have been told they have to choose either History or Geography at GCSE. On this account, Michael Gove maybe deserves some credit for the currently very high number of pupil studying history at GCSE. In 2019, 47% of 15 - 16 year olds in England sat History GCSE exams, compared to less than a third in 2011. As a history teacher, I generally think this is one of the better things to come out of Gove's bungled reforms, though it does highlight a lot of the problems that would arise should history become compulsory. 

The second variant is a more progressive, left-wing one. Under this perspective, pupils need to study history until the end of their compulsory schooling in order to understand the roots of modern day injustices and try and fight for change. A key moment here was Black Lives Matter, especially the toppling of the seventeenth century slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol on 7th June 2020. This generated a public debate over the UK's imperial history and how it should be remembered in the twenty-first century. Many people saw the school history curriculum as being at the heart of the solution to the current ignorance and amnesia. For example, Sam Freedman, an expert on educational policy, tweeted in response to Colston's fall "days like today are why I think history should be a compulsory subject to 16. You can't participate in the present if you don't understand the past." Indeed, before Colston's bronze likeness was taken for a swim in the Bristol Channel and just a week after the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd catalysed it all, an online petition was presented to Parliament. It demanded that history be made compulsory at GCSE, and that the history of Britain's involvement in slavery, colonialism and racism be taught. Needless to say, it was rejected.  

Ultimately, as I've said before with the closely related issue of what should be on the Key Stage 3 curriculum, I'm in agreement with neither. To allow either side of the political spectrum to tightly prescribe the content of the history curriculum to any age group, based on their own ideological version of British history seems highly dangerous. R.A Butler, the Minister for Education under the National Government during WW2, who essentially created secondary education in England and Wales as we know it today with the Education Act of 1944, had the foresight to see the dangers in this. Winston Churchill wanted the central government to prescribe the curriculum for history and other subjects - "tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec" is what he said to Butler. Michael Gove and his fellow travellers would applaud Churchill for this today. But Butler successfully resisted this, and it was only after the 1988 Educational Reform Act that a National Curriculum for history began to be developed. And as I've said before, in practice this has given English state schools a lot of autonomy over what history content their pupils learn at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 and long may that continue. 

And reforming the content that pupils learn at GCSE/ Key Stage 4 is much less straight forward that people might think anyway. In practice, what actual historical content pupils study for their history GCSEs is dictated by what periods and topics the four exam boards (Edexcel, AQA, OCR and Eduqas) offer. Edexcel is a for-profit organisation (owned by the publishing company Pearson), while AQA, OCR and Edquas are private charities under the law. All four are in competition with each other and are essentially driven by market forces. Thus they offer whatever content secondary school history departments across England are most comfortable teaching, not what Westminster and Whitehall dictate. While some people want to the government to stop the outsourcing of GCSE exams to private companies and would like to see a single public-funded examboard, until this happens it effectively puts the dampers on any kind of radical reform of GCSE curricula. And that, by extension, removes part of the impetus for a compulsory history GCSE, as what's currently on offer from the main examboards is not the historical content that any of supporters of a compulsory history GCSE on the right or the left would want to see. More about that another time.

Now I'm going to stop waffling and really cut to the chase. I simply don't think compulsory history to 16 is right on the principle of freedom of choice. Obviously pupils need GCSEs in English, Maths and Science if they're going to be at all employable, but beyond that they should have freedom to choose which subjects they like. But more importantly, even if complusory history to 16 was the right idea in the abstract, I don't think its at all feasible in practice. 

I have not been a teacher for very long at all (two school terms as a trainee). But already from teaching in two very good but very normal London state schools, I know that compulsory history would be detrimental for many pupils. In my Key Stage 3 classes (11 - 14 years old), when history is still compulsory, I've taught pupils with the reading age of an 8 year old, refugees who can barely speak English and pupils with all kinds of other complex learning needs. For these pupils, being in mainstream education is itself an immense challenge. What matters for them is that they can get 5 grades 9 - 4 (A* - C in the old parlance) at GCSE, including English and Maths, so that they can succeed in adult life. Everything else for them really is an added bonus at best. Forcing them to do history at GCSE could very well be a nightmare for them. Alternatively, you could say that since even the core subjects they have to take already (especially English) place such huge demands on their literacy as is, perhaps having a humanity in the mix is a good thing as it helps build and reinforce those cross-curricular literacy skills. Indeed they might find it more interesting and fun writing essays about the Harrying of the North or the Cuban Missiles Crisis than "Macbeth" or "Pride and Prejudice." But alternatively, that subject that lights the spark of their interest and helps them build their literacy skills might be volcanoes and earthquakes, comparing Christianity and Islam or Greek mythology. Once again, while I can totally agree that studying a humanity (besides English Literature if we're counting it as one) is invaluable and something at all GCSE students should do, it shouldn't have to be history. Geography, Religious Studies and (where it is offered) Classical Civilisation are just as worthwhile. Indeed, and really I ought to have made this argument before, if we make history compulsory at GCSE why not just make all mainstream humanities subjects compulsory, as indeed they are in those countries where history is compulsory till school leaving age.  

Now for the vast majority of pupils in mainstream secondary education, there's no doubt that they could get a decent pass under the current GCSE history exam specifications if they had the motivation to. And here motivation is the key word. If pupils get to choose their subjects, they're a great deal more enthusiastic than if they're forced to them, by the same logic that volunteers make better fighters than conscripts. And for the subjects they are forced to do, namely English, Maths and Science, they at least have a powerful form of negative motivation there - if they fail them, they'll be virtually unemployable. I know this from experience, as I hated GCSE Maths but I knew I had to do well at it, and in the end I did. That kind of negative motivation can't exist for non-core subjects like history, which aren't seen as essential by most employers. What that then makes for when a non-core subject like history is made compulsory is one hell of a lot of disaffected learners. Anyone who has taught any academic subject at Key Stage 3, when they're all still compulsory, knows how pupil disaffection manifests itself - poor effort and poor behaviour in the classroom. On a bad day with a particularly difficult Key Stage 3 class in a non-academically selective school, a significant portion of lesson time can be taken up with the teacher managing pupil behaviour. But at least at Key Stage 3, disrupted lessons can be written off as the pupils don't have to pass external exams, only internal assessments set by the school/ subject departmental leadership. Whereas at GCSE, every bit of curriculum time is precious, especially in a subject like history. It is thus really important that your pupils are with you, almost from the moment they enter the classroom, so you can maximise on you actually teaching and them actually learning content. 

Linking to all this talk of motivation and subject content is the final reason why history should not be compulsory at GCSE, and that is a simple logistical one. There simply aren't enough trained history teachers for every 14 - 16 year old in the country to be studying it, especially in the current teacher recruitment crisis in England. This hasn't hit history nearly as badly as some other subjects high in demand, like physics, computing or design and technology. But it demonstrably has all the same. What this means is that, already at Key Stage 3, many schools are getting non-specialists, whose actual subject specialism may be Geography, Religious Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Business Studies etc, to teach history. This situation really isn't ideal, but its just about workable at Key Stage 3 with the right kind of subject leadership, staff training and resources. However, if GCSE History were to be taught by non-specialists, it would be letting the pupils down, plain and simple. In order for pupils to be motivated and do well at GCSE, they need teachers who possess good knowledge both of the content of the periods they're studying and of history as a discipline. 

Indeed as Kristian Shanks, a history teacher and deputy head of a secondary school has pointed out in an article arguing for exactly the same position I am now, we've seen the horrors this can bring with another subject - Religious Studies. Lots of state schools used to make Religious Studies compulsory at GCSE, in order to meet their statutory requirement of providing for the Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development of 14 - 16 year olds. What this led to was a dumbed down course in which pupils could receive as little as one lesson a fortnight, taught by non-specialist teachers and with lots of disaffection and poor behaviour. Indeed, as someone who took Religious Studies for GCSE at a private school where it wasn't a compulsory subject and was given much more curriculum time, we were able to cover all the content we needed to get As and A*s in just two terms. For the whole of year 10 and some of year 11, we spent our Religious Studies lessons discussing Kierkegaard and Batman, or watching movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "Kingdom of Heaven." Indeed, when the EBacc was created, the government couldn't countenance making Religious Studies eligible for the humanities component - it just wasn't intellectually stimulating or challenging enough. The same cannot be allowed to happen to history!

Controversies 2: the problem of early medieval literacy (the basics)

In this early tenth century manuscript illustration, thought to be based on a lost ninth century original, Charlemagne has a conversation with his son, Pippin of Italy. Meanwhile a scribe, not obviously a cleric (since he isn't tonsured), writes down the minutes of their meeting

You've almost certainly heard it said by someone, somewhere that only priests and monks were literate in the Middle Ages. Now I'm going to say this from the outset. Like so many other things that people think they know about the Middle Ages, from widespread belief in a flat earth and armoured knights being lifted onto their horses by cranes, to iron maidens, chastity belts and the droit de seigneur, this is a MYTH! But of course, the biggest myth about the Middle Ages is that for a whole millennium of history nothing much changed at all. In fact, I'd argue that the period 500 - 1500, give or take half a century on either side, makes absolutely no sense as a single historical epoch. So which segments of the Middle Ages are we talking about when we say that people other than clerics could read and write. 

As longtime readers of this blog will know, and as you might have figured from the title, I'm of course interested here in the early Middle Ages, by which I mean the period before the year 1000. Now while medievalists of all shapes and sizes can unite against ancient historians/ classicists, early modernists and modernists being ignorant or dismissive about the Middle Ages, that's where it ends. 

In the context of medieval literacy, a specialist on the high and late Middle Ages (1000 - 1500) could laugh at the assertion that only the clergy could read and write in the Middle Ages, and say "you what mate? Haven't you heard of Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan or Margaret Paston? Have you not considered the thousands of financial accounts, property deeds, tax records and other government documents, law books, books of hours, chivalric romances and other works vernacular literature that could hardly have been the preserve of a small clerical elite? Think before you speak again, you ignoramus!"  

But those same people might then say, "but for the period before the year 1000, you're probably right. I don't want to offend my early medievalist colleagues too much, but you might be right in calling those the real Dark Ages."

Indeed this is sort of the thrust of three classic studies of Medieval literacy (both of them now 40+ years old), namely Malcolm Parkes' "The Literacy of the Laity" (1973), Michael Clanchy's "From Memory to Written Record" (1979) and Brian Stock's "The Implications of Literacy" (1983). All three of them are rightly celebrated, as they essentially kickstarted the study of medieval literacy as a serious academic sub-field - they themselves took their cues from the pioneering anthropologically-inspired work of ancient historians and early modernists. While both of them argued that reading and writing had a huge level of importance to medieval government, society and culture, they were  focusing on the high and late middle ages. They saw all of this the product of a great transformation taking place in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had different views on what was at the root of this transformation. Malcolm Parkes thought it was Anglo-Norman barons, ladies and knights' growing appetite for fiction and historical romances written in the vernacular (King Arthur, chivalric adventures, you know what I mean) in the twelfth century that kickstarted the rise of lay literacy among the aristocracy. With the rise of commerce and towns and growing need for written financial accounts that came with it, the middle classes followed suit in the thirteenth century. Clanchy, on the other hand, argued it all started in 1066 with the distrust the Norman conquerors of England had for native oral testimony and their preference for written records and law, that began the shift from "memory to written record." Initially this mainly concerned churches and clerical functionaries in William the Conqueror's government. But by the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307) written law, written instructions from the government, written property deeds and estate surveys, written financial accounts, written literature etc had become so important that the aristocracy and urban middle classes all had to receive at least elementary education in literacy in a bureaucratic world.

Meanwhile, all these authors argued that England and Western Europe in the pre-1000 period were essentially oral societies - laws, literature, history, property rights, customs, religion etc were all passed on by word of mouth with literacy only being used by a small, essentially clerical minority. For reasons that we'll soon see, that has provoked ire from early medievalists. Indeed, in the later editions of "From Memory to Written Record" published in 1997 and 2013, Clanchy was a lot more generous when it came to discussing literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in the opening chapters. And in terms of his central thesis, he's absolutely correct - literacy at a societal level did fundamentally change, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the Medieval West between 1066 and 1300. I wouldn't for one minute quibble with the argument that more people could read and write, and there was much greater use of documents for a much greater range of purposes, in Edward III's England than in Aethelred the Unready's England. But that great upsurge in literacy didn't come out of the blue either. So what was literacy really like before the eleventh century. 

So how do we determine early medieval literacy? Now that is a difficult question. I think there's two ways of looking at literacy, on a personal and a societal level. Personal level meaning who exactly could read and write. Societal level meaning the place of literacy in society. 

Personal literacy is probably the hardest to figure out. To state the most obvious, no one in the early middle ages was producing statistics about how many people could read or write. Indeed, prior to about 1850, all data on literacy in Western Europe has to be inferred from various kinds of evidence. For example, ancient historians have tried to infer a high degree of literacy in the Roman Empire, possibly as high as 30% of the adult male population, from things like the Pompeii graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets or the Egyptian papyri found in the Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps. For historians of early modern Europe (1500 - 1800), the generally agreed baseline is how many people could sign their own names. Unfortunately, and this something I lament all the time, there's no early medieval Pompeii. Though the latter method could work for the early middle ages, its much less reliable than for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries  given that much less survives by way of original documents, and not of the right type. 

There are individual lay people from the early Middle Ages who we know were literate. From the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), we have some long-time friends of this blog like Einhard, Angilbert, Nithard and Dhuoda, all of whom wrote works in learned Latin whilst being lay nobles and courtiers. All Carolingian kings from Pippin the Short to Carloman II, we know were literate and had received a full education in Latin. Meanwhile, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli had a huge library of books he read and consulted, and showed an interest in theological debate, and Count Gerald of Aurillac read his psalter regularly. Most famously, Einhard says of Charlemagne that he could read and understand St Augustine's "City of God", a highly difficult theological text, though he never mastered learning to write, but not for want of trying.

From the Merovingian period before it we know that all the Merovingian kings from the generation of King Chilperic (r.561 - 584), whose Latin poems were dreadful according to Gregory of Tours, to that of  Childebert III (r.694 - 711), whose autograph survives on royal diplomas, were literate. We also know that various Merovingian saints like Desiderius of Cahors. Audoin of Rouen, Bonitus of Clermont and Leudegar of Autun had spent their earlier careers as lay civil servants at the Merovingian court and had received secular legal and literary educations. At a humbler level, we have the slave Andarchius who could read Virgil and the Theodosian Code. 

Signature of the Merovingian King Chlothar II (r.584 - 629) to the Edict of Paris in 614. People love to slag off Merovingian handwriting as clumsy and illegible, but this is a good deal more elegant than the signatures of modern politicians. See Donald Trump's signature below.

In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut (r.612 - 629) and King Chinthila (r.636 - 639) are known to have written poems, and the former corresponded with the great Isidore of Seville on Classical Roman poetry and science. We also know from the letters of Isidore's pupil, Braulio of Zaragoza, that King Chindasuinth (r.642 - 653) and Count Laurentinus (otherwise undocumented) owned libraries in which all kinds of obscure texts that Braulio had difficulty obtaining were located. Another seventh century Visigothic nobleman, Count Bulgar, wrote letters to Frankish bishops in which he expressed anxiety about the Avar horde and their involvement in wars north of the Pyrenees.

For Anglo-Saxon England, we have King Sigeberht of East Anglia and King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who Bede informs us were able to read and write Latin. King Alfred the Great (most famously) translated the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius into Old English. And Ealdorman Aethelweard, a West Saxon aristocrat, wrote a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for his cousin, a German abbess. 

Early medieval lay literacy in action: Alfred the Great's translation of Gregory the Great's pastoral care

From post-900 Germany and France, we know that emperors Otto II and Otto III were literate in Latin and German (Otto III knew Greek as well from his mother, Empress Theophanu). Likewise, Otto III's contemporary King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031) of West Francia/ France was literate in Latin too and enjoyed debating theology. Duke William V of Aquitaine (d.1030), had a huge library and corresponded in letters with Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who called him a second Maecenas (after Augustus' chief adviser and patron of Virgil and Horace) for his literary interests. 

This immediately confronts us with a problem. Can these people be considered at all representative, or just exceptions to the general rule? Some certainly look more like exceptions than others. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, for example, looks like a fairly obvious candidate for being exceptional. He was trained at a monastery in Ireland and would have almost certainly become a cleric had it not been for his brother, King Egcfrith, dying in battle against the Picts in 685, creating a dynastic crisis which it was up to Aldfrith to resolve by returning home to take up his brother's throne. King Sigeberht of East Anglia likewise spent his childhood in exile in a Frankish monastery. Alfred the Great definitely belongs in a category of his own as well. And for some of the other royal examples, there's an argument that kings belong in a category of their own. But the Visigothic kings we know were literate, Sisebut, Chinthila and Chindasuinth, acquired their thrones either by usurpation or military coup and had had careers as generals and military governors before becoming kings. So we can probably actually take their personal literacy as a sign that literate education was common among the Visigothic nobility in seventh century Spain.

Indeed I'm reminded of a comment I once heard in one of master's seminars from a fellow student. I can't recall exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of "if you have to give the names of powerful women in history, then that indicates they're not very common or significant." Precisely this kind of argument is what the minimalists and sceptics would say about lay literacy in the early medieval West. Of course, there are obvious fallacies with this kind of argument when applied to both, but especially so for early medieval literacy. For the vast majority (90% and upwards) of known individuals from the early Middle Ages, we have no surviving writings and we can say nothing about their education. And for those that we do know about, like all the names I've mentioned, its not because they were the only ones who left writings or received a literate education. Rather its because their writings survive to us today, either by accident or survival, or because we have anecdotal and other circumstantial evidence of them being able to read and write from histories, hagiographies, letters etc. 

But where this kind of argument gets us somewhere is that we need to be focusing on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence. To put it another way, if we want to know whether these individuals were exceptions or not, it makes more sense to try and find what were the general expectations surrounding lay literacy and education, as well as the range of purposes for which writing was used in government and society. What really matters is not finding out how many people outside the clergy could read and write, but to what extent did you need to be able to read and write or at the very least be able to use documents through intermediaries to do well for yourself as an elite (or indeed non-elite) lay person in early medieval society. This is after all, how ancient historians and later medievalists have approached the subject, and its no surprise that this exactly how early medievalists have been approaching the problem since the 1980s. Literacy and education, literacy and government, literacy and society, all of these I'm going to explore here some time to show how lay literacy was much more common than people think in the early Middle Ages. But I'm too constrained by time and space to look at them now. 

Before I finish with this post, we need to consider two things. Firstly, whether or not learning Latin was a barrier to literacy in the early middle ages. Secondly, whether it ever makes sense to speak of early medieval societies as oral cultures. 

As is well-known, the language of the vast majority of early medieval texts (outside of Anglo-Saxon England) was Latin. Traditionally, scholars presumed that only priests and monks would have known how to read Latin in the sixth to tenth century West, and even then not all of them. Let it of course be known that the existence of poorly educated illiterate clerics was a consistent source of complaint from St Boniface and Alcuin in the eighth century to Erasmus and John Colet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The presumption was that Latin was a foreign language, albeit a highly important, indeed sacred one, and that only those given a rigorous education could read it in the post-Roman West. This would obviously hold true in areas like Anglo-Saxon England, where the local language was a Germanic one, but even in Gaul, Spain and Italy where scholars used to think that sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries the spoken vernacular had completely evolved into early forms of French, Spanish and Italian and that Latin was no longer intelligible. But Rosamond McKitterick in "The Carolingians and the Written Word" (1989) challenged this and has argued that the spoken vernacular in the Romance regions wasn't actually all that different to Latin, except that it was spelled and pronounced differently.

This is an argument that makes a huge amount of sense when you make the analogy between Standard Chinese and regional dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Yue and Guangxi), Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects (Iraqi, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi etc) and indeed English. English is an absolute nightmare for pronunciation, and I feel really sorry for my EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils who have to go through their whole secondary schooling in it. This is also the reason why we had to do a short course on phonics as part of the PGCE. For example the grapheme (combination of written letters) -ough represents eight different phonemes (sounds) in spoken English i.e., borough, rough, cough, hiccough, lough, through, fought, dough and plough. Or the constant arguments between Northerners and Southerners in England over whether to pronounce a as a long vowel or a short vowel.

McKitterick also points out that the standard textbooks used for teaching Latin grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation in Carolingian monasteries in Gaul and Italy were ones written in the fourth century Roman Empire, and would not have made sense unless the students reading them already spoke Latin. Its revealing how Latin-vernacular interlinear glosses and dictionaries from the eighth and ninth centuries only appear in Germany, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, where Latin really was being learned as a foreign language. A lot of this is going against what I wrote in my post on the Oaths of Strasbourg, but McKitterick's (and by that token, Roger Wright's) arguments are actually quite convincing. And besides the oaths of Strasbourg and the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which could be considered to be just the Latin dialects native to Gaul written phonetically. Its worth noting, as I did in that post, that besides those possible exceptions, we don't have any vernacular texts written in Romance languages until after 950. Its in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that we start getting inscriptions, charters, short poems and documents of a practical nature (like a list of cheeses from a monastery in Northern Spain from 959) written in Old Italian and Old Castilian. Thus McKitterick, and before her Banniard and Wright, would argue that the real shift from Latin dialects to Romance languages happened around 900 rather than around 700 as per the traditional view. This is by no means settled scholarly consensus though. 

The geographic divide between regions where Latin/ Romance and Germanic languages were predominantly spoken speakers in 750 (green line) and 1914 (red line). Interestingly, the line hasn't changed much since the early Middle Ages, except in regions like the Pas de Calais in France or Tyrol in Italy. You can also see the origins of the Flemish-Walloon divide in Belgium. By Resnjari - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93789268

Thus, there's good reason to think that Latin was not a barrier to literacy in Gaul, Spain and Italy before the late ninth and early tenth centuries at the earliest. In the Germanic and Celtic-speaking lands it would have been more of one, though in those regions you also had vernacular texts. Can we really consider Anglo-Saxon noblemen who couldn't read Latin poems illiterate if they could read Old English poems like the Wanderer, Beowulf or the Battle of Maldon. Furthermore, we should take into account that there were many different levels to Latin literacy, especially how much the Latin language had evolved since Classical times and the range of different registers in which it was written. Virgil and Horace would have been difficult texts to the Carolingians, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare are difficult texts for people in the US and UK today.

As for the whole question of oral culture, I don't think it makes sense to call early medieval cultures oral even if we took the clerical monopoly view of early medieval literacy. The definition of oral culture used by experts like Walter Ong is a culture whose knowledge and worldviews have not been shaped by writing and texts at all. If we go by that definition, then early medieval Western societies cannot be considered to be true oral cultures because they were, after all, Christian.  Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion based around the written word, specifically its sacred text the Bible - indeed from as early as the seventh century, Muslim writers identified all three Abrahamic faiths as "peoples of the book." Likewise the very existence of written law codes, charters, histories, poems and treatises from Western Europe in the period 500 - 1000 show that writing was important to creating and preserving society's knowledge. And if only a minority could directly access it, even more would be affected by it i.e., as I've shown in previous texts, regardless of whether or not Carolingian peasants were literate, they were affected by the information recorded in the polyptychs and other documents drawn up by landlords. Sufficeth to say that while not everyone in the early middle ages was literate, virtually no one was insulated from the effects of the written word in society. 

On a final note, this blog has, as of a few weeks ago, been around for a year and half. Thank you everyone for reading my posts, whether you're a veteran reader or a first-timer, and to those who have given praise and constructive criticism - it means a great deal to me!

Let;s finish with one of my favourite early medieval artworks, St Matthew from the Ebbo Gospels (first quarter of the ninth century).

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.