Superstitions...

“There was a certain wealthy man who, as it later transpired, had been given over to sinful behaviour, died and was buried. However, with Satan’s help he kept emerging at night from his tomb and wandering here and there to the sound of loudly barking dogs. Every night he was the cause of great terror to the townspeople before his return at daybreak to the tomb.” William of Newburgh (1136-1198), Historia Rerum Anglicarum.

It was not until she had drawn the last bolt across the door that her heart rate returned to normal. Emma de Lacy leant her slender body against the thick wood with some finality and breathed a soft sigh of relief. Brushing thoughtlessly at the strands of chestnut hair that stuck to her clammy forehead, Emma turned to gaze at the maid servant who stood paralysed with fear in the corner of the room.

                “Agnes is everyone inside?” The girl’s face was ashen and her eyes wide as she cried,

                “Oh Mistress we’re all going to die! That horrible creature out there will kill us all!” Crossing the room Emma grabbed her maid impatiently by the shoulders and spoke with gentle authority,

                “Hush. There is no creature. It is but a phantasm created by idle minds. The dead cannot walk. Remember we went to Walter’s funeral and we saw him buried with our own eyes.” A loud crash sounded from outside and a woman’s piercing scream filled their ears. Agnes trembled violently beneath Emma’s stern grasp. “It is no dead man that is causing this commotion but living people panicking and rioting. If we stay inside tonight we shall all be safe. I promise you.” Agnes’ eyes flew to the staircase, guilt flashing across her face.

                “Master Thomas... he’s...he’s not in his room. I couldn’t find him.” Fear for her younger brother threatened to choke Emma, but she bit her lip, determined not to vent her frustration on the terrified girl.

Unclasping the maid she moved back towards the door that she had locked only moments before. With firmness she did not feel Emma pulled back the thick bolts and instructed calmly,

                “I shall go back out and find him. Now lock this door after me and do not open it to anyone but myself or Tom. Do you understand?” Agnes gave a tremulous nod. Grasping a small wicked blade with cold fingers Emma breathed a swift prayer for the safety of her brother and home before darting back out into the night.

                The late summer twilight was unbearably humid as she moved cautiously through the village. Privately Emma thought that this latest spell of madness was caused more by the oppressive heat and sun-burnt crops than it was a corpse reanimated by Satan. Many of the younger local men were unemployed due to the unseasonable weather and so were causing trouble, but it was the old who had exacerbated the violence by spreading their superstitions of the walking dead.

Yet it was not the dead who had set the village ablaze, and Emma gasped in dread as she saw the wind licking the flames steadily closer to more homes. Suddenly she doubted the promise she had made to Agnes, staying indoors might not be enough protection from this summer madness.

Desperation made her search bolder and Emma began peering up amongst the lofty branches of trees knowing that her brother was a keen observer. Catching a glimpse of blue cloth amongst rustling leaves she headed instinctively towards the wide oak.

                “Tom, I need you to come down. I know it’s you up there.” There was more rustling before she heard his voice brash and loud with excitement,

                “Come up here Em, you can see everything. They’re digging up old Walter’s grave and they’re lighting fires and...”

                “Tom! Come down right now.” With her focus fixed above her on the small body she could now make out amongst the dark leaves Emma did not notice the men who approached her from behind.

                “Em!” Tom’s young voice called out in alarm, and Emma turned to see four men armed with knives. Her own hand reached for the blade at her side, but her fingers were clumsy with fear and it dropped into the long grass. Unarmed she stumbled backwards, hitting the tree and provoking mocking laughter from the men. Her hands scrabbled across the bark as she sought something to fight with. Launching forward she threw wooden shards into her attackers’ faces and ran, drawing them away from her brother.

                Concentrating on the sounds of their lumbering pursuit from behind Emma ran blindly into a solid wall of muscle. Warmth pervaded her body where large hands caught and steadied her and she felt herself relaxing into the stranger’s encircling strength. But as she heard the approach of her pursuers she began cursing and scratching at his iron hold in desperation.

He caught her furled hand in one of his own and she stilled as he swept a calloused thumb tenderly across her palm. Her eyebrows furrowed at the spark of recognition, but the stranger’s face remained shrouded in deep shadow. Her panic ebbed as she became entranced by the lazy journey of his touch across her skin.

The sound of snapping twigs heralded the appearance of her pursuers and the stranger turned swiftly his hands easily spanning her waist as he placed her safely behind him. Though she knew she ought to continue her escape Emma was rooted to the spot unable to tear her eyes away from the tall stranger who confronted the four men. Despite being outnumbered he easily fought off the other men, their daggers no match for the deadly arc of his broadsword.

The glow of a nearby fire glinted off the shining blade suddenly highlighting the stranger’s profile. Emma started, heat suffusing her face. Despite the recently healed scars that mutilated one side of his face she finally realised exactly who she had been pressed so intimately against.

A Medieval Tile Picture Gallery

Tiles are the the unsung heroes of medieval art. Trampled underfoot by tourists gawping at vaulted ceilings these tiles are ignored and neglected. To rectify this situation I present here a selection of beautiful tiles that should not be overlooked...

Thirteenth-century tiles, Winchester Cathedral

Inlaid tiles, St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury

Reconstructed thirteenth-century tiles,
Fountains Abbey

Mosaic tiles, Rievaulx Abbey

Inlaid tiles with inscription reading 'Ave Maria',
Rievaulx Abbey

Original glazed tiles, Byland Abbey

Thirteenth-century tile with griffin design,
Winchester Cathedral

Mosaic floor and marble zodiac roundels,
Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral

Thirteenth-century Gothic motif tiles,
Winchester Cathedral

Inlaid tiles featuring lions rampant,
Winchester Cathedral

Return Of The Beard!

Beards were the surprising topic that featured frequently in my university reading lists, much to mine and a friends amusement (for what about a ‘friendly mutton chop’ is not giggle provoking?). Whether it was the ‘Renaissance Beard’ a study of masculinity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or the attribute of a saint, beards seem to have been everywhere in history. Even excessive hair could be seen as a feature of monstrosity or ‘otherness’, and it was in this form that I encountered beards in an exam.

                Gerald of Wales was a late twelfth-century author, royal clerk and ecclesiastic. He was born of an English father and a Welsh mother, so knew firsthand what it was like to be on the edge of society.

He travelled to Ireland several times and recorded his observations in The History and Topography of Ireland. He wrote that “for just as the marvels of the East have through the work of certain authors come to the light of public notice, so the marvels of the West which, so far, have remained hidden away and almost unknown, may eventually find in me one to make them known even in these later days.”

                In Mappa Mundi, such as the famous Hereford Map, Britain was placed on the edges of the world along with the monstrous races in the south and east. In revealing the ‘wonders of the West’ Gerald was effectively redrawing the edges of the world and increasing England’s centrality whilst marginalising Ireland.

                Gerald described many ‘wonders’ and ‘miracles’ that he saw in Ireland or was told about, such as bestial relations between men and animals, werewolves, and women with beards. In BL, Royal MS 13 B VIII, written whilst he was probably living in Lincoln, Gerald described a woman with a beard and a mane on her back.

The Bearded Woman of Limerick,
BL, Royal MS 13 B VIII, f. 19.

 “Duvenaldus, the king of Limerick, had a woman that had a beard down to her waist. She had also a crest from her neck down along her spine, like a one-year-old foal. It was covered with hair. This woman in spite of these two deformities was, nevertheless, not hermaphrodite, and was in other respects sufficiently feminine. She followed the court wherever it went, provoking laughs as well as wonder. She followed neither fatherland nor nature in having a hairy spine; but in wearing her beard long, she was following the custom of her fatherland, not of her nature.”

                Gerald’s attitude to these ‘wonders of the West’ was quite different to contemporary writers such as Matthew Paris. There was no loud condemnation of the bearded woman or any additional Christian moralisation of her ‘monstrosity’. It has been said that in writing The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald reinvented the ethnographical genre, as he sought to describe the customs and characteristics of different cultures.

Beards and hair however continued to be a defining attribute of the medieval character.

The White Ship...

On 25th November 1120 the White Ship sank whilst travelling between Normandy and England. It is thought that the ship hit a rock in the Seine estuary, though two contemporary chroniclers recorded that the crew was drunk. There was only one survivor, all the other passengers aboard the ship died including William, King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir.

-          Did you hear the news?

-          About what?

-          The White Ship.

They said that she was mad. Sitting on her rocky perch day after day, watching for his ship, waiting for his return. They said that he must have run off with another girl. A prettier girl they said, one that laughed and smiled. They did not stop to wonder whether this girl had once laughed and smiled.

They saw her gazing with hollow eyes unblinking at the ebb and the flow of the tide, as if she feared that it would disappear if she looked away. Her face might have been considered beautiful, but it was curiously devoid of any expression or animation. She looked as if she had been carved out of alabaster, smooth pale and unblemished, more like a funerary effigy than a living girl.

The wind grabbed at her hair, pulling it into dark tangles across her face. She had no veil, the long length left unbound to whip freely about her shoulders. Not once did they see her lift a hand to move the flyaway strands that brushed her cheek.

 They spied her unmoving and silent when they awoke at dawn and there she remained long into the night. She seemed more like a fey creature than a girl. Morning fog coiled around her body like some queer woollen mantle. The hem of her dress was sodden and dark with water stains, as if she clambered across the shore each night in an attempt to return to the sea.

They said that the girl wept perfect silent tears that ran down her pallid cheeks and collected in her lap. They spoke sagely of weeping statues, images that shed tears of blood or holy oil. It was said that in her grief for the lover she lost and the sea which rejected her, she wept tears of cold, bitter seawater.

-          The White Ship?

-          It is such a terrible tragedy.

-          They were only travelling from Normandy to England.

-          I heard they hit a rock.

-          Apparently the whole crew was drunk.

-          Sinners the lot of them. Drunken sailors and debauched courtiers.

-          It is known that God punishes sinners.

They think I do not know that they believe me mad. I can see it in their wary expressions. I can read it in their guarded eyes. Yet I am not mad. I yearn to express all the anguish and misfortune that encloses my heart. But I am like the storm that rages far out at sea. Dark clouds may swirl upon the horizon but only those within the storm itself can feel the pounding of angry thunder and spark of furious lightning. For me there are no loud cries of pain, no gulping breaths of grief, but a silent isolated sorrow.

I was born deaf, unable to hear the sounds that others take for granted. Often I was thought stupid and cuffed around the ear for my slow wits. Inside I screamed in frustration against the injustice of it all. I had all these questions and feelings that roared around my head and yet I had no means to express them. No means that is until he found me.

One day he just took my hand and smiled and the clamouring in my head calmed to a whisper. He was my connection to the outside world. He showed to me the richness of sounds I could never experience and made music come to life before my eyes. He taught me to read lips and to communicate with others through my hands. Owing to his kindness I was able to express all that before I had simply felt. It was a gift beyond price.

Here though his lessons do not help me. I cannot decipher the movements their lips make. It is unfamiliar like a new language or dialect.

He went to sea with the prince. He was handsome, young and ambitious. I did not want him to go to sea and leave me, but he promised to return. Without him I am alone again isolated in my silent world. And so I am waiting here for him to come back. I want to ask those who pass by me if they have heard any news of the White Ship but they would not understand the frantic motions of my trembling hands.

I can remember our hands linked in the dappled sunlight as he shaped my fingers to his. I can remember the contrasting textures of our skin as he slowly caressed the lines criss-crossing over my palm. I can remember the feel of his smiling lips as he brushed a kiss over my wrist.

They are talking and gossiping again. Not just about me this time though. It is as if some new piece of news has caught their interest. It is perhaps something sad or tragic if I have read their expressions correctly. But I cannot tell any more from the quirk of lips or lift of an eyebrow.

    So I shall just continue to sit here and watch for his return. He will return to me, I know it. He would not leave me alone here. He loves me. He will return. After all he promised he would return to me.

-          They say that all onboard the White Ship died.

-          What a waste. All those young lives.

-          The King’s heir is supposedly among the dead.

-          Many other people’s sons and daughters and lovers died that night as well.