The Town House, by Norah Lofts. Book review

First published 1959. Edition reviewed: Hodder and Stoughton 1983, ISBN 0-340-15182-X. 350 pages

Set in and around the fictional town of Baildon in Suffolk, England, in approximately 1401-1451, The Town House tells the story of Martin Reed, who first built the house of the title, and three generations of his family.  All the main characters are fictional.

In 1401, Walter is a serf training to be a smith on the manor of Rede in Norfolk.  When he falls in love and the lord of the manor refuses permission to marry, Walter and his intended bride, Kate, flee to the walled town of Baildon in Suffolk.  If they can live there without breaking a law or being reclaimed for a year and a day, they will gain their freedom.  Walter changes his name to Martin, the better to avoid detection.  Making a living and raising a family in a strange town is no easy matter, and their new life is precarious, subject daily to the vagaries of fate and the arbitrary whims – both kindly and malign – of powerful townsmen and the Abbey that dominates the town.  Until rebellion flares, when tragedy strikes and Martin must make a choice.

This is a tale of medieval life as lived day to day by the ordinary people of a fairly ordinary town and its rural hinterland.  The cast ranges from the destitute to the minor gentry, by way of farmers, craftsmen, labourers, traders and merchants.  Kings and magnates and their doings hardly impinge on the lives of Martin and his neighbours (e.g. Agincourt happens during the period of the novel but is never mentioned).  The novel conveys a vivid sense of what it might really have been like to live in the Middle Ages as a near-destitute labourer, an impoverished knight, a clerk or a prosperous merchant. 

Martin’s tale of hard work for low wages, the daily struggle to avoid starvation, the joy from occasional acts of generosity, and the slow crushing of his and his wife’s modest hopes under poverty and injustice, makes compelling reading.  All Martin’s industry, ingenuity and skill count for very little against the casual abuses of power that thwart him at every turn, until an unlikely twist of fate suddenly gives him an unimagined opportunity.  Higher up the social scale, the daughter of an impoverished knight is almost as much a prisoner of circumstances, as are a poor knight and a girl of high birth with no dowry, and a little girl trying to understand how the grown-up world works and eventually recoiling from it in disgust.  Anyone with a rose-tinted view of the Middle Ages as all about chivalry, courtly love, tournaments and pretty dresses, will find The Town House gives a refreshingly different picture of how the rest of the population lived. 

All the people in the novel are individuals, with their own faults and motivations, hopes and fears, shaped by their upbringing and constrained by the society they live in.  Each faces their own dilemmas and must live with the consequences of their choices.  Each faces joy and tragedy and must cope in their own way.  The characters are so vividly drawn that their personal quandaries and vicissitudes are every bit as gripping as any thriller about great affairs of state.

The novel is told  in five overlapping first-person narratives, each recounted by a different character, interspersed with shorter sections in third person labelled ‘interludes’.  It is an unusual structure but an effective one, as it shows the characters and the interactions between them from several perspectives.  Actions taken by one character that seem inexplicable in one narrative become comprehensible in another when seen from a different point of view.  The writing style is deceptively simple, written in clear modern English.  I say ‘deceptively’ because many key events are conveyed by allusions and hints rather than spelled out explicitly.  Sometimes this reflects the character who is narrating at the time; for example, Maude Reed is a little girl of eight or so and the undercurrents of adult scandal bewilder her, though the alert reader can recognise the gathering clouds.  This is a novel that rewards concentration.

There is no author’s note, perhaps reflecting the date of first publication (1959), perhaps because there are no historical events or historical figures featured.  The historical detail feels very authentic.  A map would have been useful to set the fictional town of Baildon and the fictional port of Bywater in the context of the real places mentioned, but this is a minor detail.

Compelling family saga of three generations of a family rising from serfdom to prosperity in fifteenth-century England, with a powerful sense of authenticity and wonderfully human characters.

Lady of the English, by Elizabeth Chadwick. Book review

Sphere, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84744-237-6. 521 pages. Edition reviewed: advance review copy supplied by publisher.

Lady of the English is set mainly in England, Normandy and Anjou between 1125 and 1149, spanning the years in which Empress Matilda (daughter of King Henry I of England) was first heir and then contender for the throne of England. All the main characters are historical figures, including Empress Matilda, her father Henry I, her second husband Geoffrey of Anjou, her eldest son Henry FitzEmpress (later King Henry II of England), her stepmother Adeliza of Louvain and her supporter Brian FitzCount.

Empress Matilda is the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I after the death of her brother in a shipwreck. When her husband the Emperor of Germany dies, leaving her a childless widow, Henry I summons Matilda to England and makes his barons swear an oath to her as his heir, as his second marriage to Adeliza of Louvain is childless and looks likely to remain so. But then Henry forces Matilda to marry Geoffrey of Anjou, a boy barely into adolescence, a marriage that is as unpopular with some of Henry’s barons as it is with Matilda herself. When Henry I dies unexpectedly, Matilda’s cousin Stephen and his unscrupulous brother the Bishop of Winchester conspire to seize the throne. Matilda is determined to fight for her rights and those of her young son Henry – but the conflict will exact a terrible price.

As with the other Elizabeth Chadwick novels I’ve read, Lady of the English concentrates on the personal and emotional lives of the historical characters and the relationships and conflicts between them. Not just romantic relationships – indeed, the novel is refreshingly free of invented adulterous love affairs, a big plus point for me – although readers who like a strong romantic storyline will find one in the love story between Adeliza of Louvain and her second husband Will d’Albini. Adeliza is as much a central character in the novel as Matilda, and her longing for a child and then her second marriage and family life with Will d’Albini give the novel a strong domestic focus. Apart from a few vivid vignettes, such as the Battle of Lincoln and Matilda’s dramatic escape from Oxford, most of the action takes place off-stage. So does much of the political manoeuvring; there’s an intriguing hint of foul play around the death of Henry I that I would have liked to know more about, and I would also have liked to see more of Matilda’s dealings with the influential men who joined her cause and left it again. For the most part, war and politics are seen through their effects on the personal lives of the characters and the conflicts they cause.

As well as the conflicts due to the war, and personal conflicts between the characters, there is also an interesting look at conflicts arising from social conventions. Matilda is the most striking example; a ruler is expected to be stern, a woman is supposed to be soft and pliant, a contradiction in terms that causes difficulties for Matilda at every turn. Adeliza’s agonised yearning for a child during her barren marriage to Henry I is in part due to the pressure on a woman to fulfil her social duty of providing her husband with heirs, and part of her joy in the family she raises with her second husband Will d’Albini comes from being able to fulfil the expected role of mother as well as wife. Social expectations can weigh just as heavily on a man, as shown by Brian FitzCount who (as portrayed here) is a warrior by expectation and a scholar by temperament, and pays a heavy emotional price for that conflict (among others).

Brian FitzCount was one of the most memorable characters for me, a honourable man trying to do his best in a marriage and a social role neither of which was of his choosing. Young Geoffrey of Anjou was another memorable character, a childish bully who thinks the way to make himself look big is make someone else look small and whose attitude to his marriage to Matilda is to think that he will “have an Empress at his beck and call”. Henry FitzEmpress was also convincingly drawn, no mean feat as he develops from a baby through a precocious child to the threshold of adulthood during the novel. I also liked Brian FitzCount’s wife Maude of Wallingford, doggedly getting on with the unglamorous but vital business of managing the logistics of a household under siege and reflecting that she feels “like a donkey staggering along under a heavy burden of firewood, while Brian ignored her to look at the fancy glossy horses prancing past with bells tinkling on their harness”.

As well as the main characters, readers of Elizabeth Chadwick’s other novels may enjoy spotting appearances by secondary characters from other novels, such as John FitzGilbert the Marshal (from A Place Beyond Courage) and Hugh Bigod (who appears briefly at the start of The Time of Singing*, review here).

A helpful Author’s Note summarises some of the underlying history and sketches out some of the reasoning behind elements in the narrative, and a family tree at the front of the book may be useful to keep the family relationships straight for readers who are not familiar with the period. The plethora of Matildas in the period is neatly dealt with by using variant forms of the name – Matilda, Maheut, Maude – to differentiate between different individuals. The advance review copy only has placeholders for the maps, which will no doubt be included in the final edition and which should help interested readers follow the action and the characters’ journeys from place to place.

Colourful portrayal of Empress Matilda and Adeliza of Louvain, against the background of the Anarchy in twelfth-century England.

*For The King's Favor in the US

The Time of Singing, by Elizabeth Chadwick. Book review

Sphere, 2008, ISBN 978-1-84744-097-6, 506 pages

Set in 1173–1199, The Time of Singing covers the later years of the reign of Henry II, all of the reign of Richard I (Lionheart) and the beginning of King John’s. It centres on Roger Bigod, heir to the earldom of Norfolk, and his wife Ida de Tosney. William Marshal (hero of the author’s earlier books The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion), is an important secondary character. All the main characters are historical figures.*

Roger Bigod, eldest son of the earl of Norfolk, has been at odds with his boorish father, his stepmother and his two younger half-brothers for years, and when his father rebels against Henry II Roger defies his father and joins the king. Victory in battle sees Roger’s father forfeit the earldom, and although Roger has won Henry’s cautious regard, Henry is afraid of the Bigod earls’ power and uses the inheritance dispute between Roger and his half-brothers as a convenient excuse to withhold the earldom from either. Now Roger has a protracted struggle ahead of him to regain his inheritance. When he encounters Ida de Tosney, Henry’s young ward and reluctant mistress, Roger is immediately attracted to her and is happy to accept her as his wife. But Ida has to pay the price of giving up her young son for Henry to rear at court, and Roger has his own insecurities to deal with. As Roger’s work in the King’s service takes him ever more from Ida’s side, the emotional scars they both bear threaten to destroy their marriage.

As with the other Elizabeth Chadwick novels I’ve read, The Time of Singing is especially strong on human relationships. I felt it had a more domestic focus than the Marshal novels. Roger is embroiled in a protracted legal battle for his forfeited earldom and inheritance, there are some murky political shenanigans to negotiate while Richard I is away on crusade, and there are a couple of short battlefield action scenes, but the heart of the novel is in Roger and Ida’s relationship with each other and the people around them. Their marriage forms the centrepiece, but it is only the central one among the many other relationships that form the warp and weft of their lives. Ida’s relationship with her illegitimate son by Henry, who is taken from her to be raised at court when she marries Roger, is perhaps the most poignant. Roger’s family ties, including the difficult relationships with his thoroughly unpleasant father, his stepmother and his two contrasting half-brothers, and his growing friendship with William Marshal, shape his life choices and influence his relationship with Ida and their children. The novel illustrates how medieval society was held together by a complex web of kinship, lordship and friendship ties.

The main characters are well rounded and believable. Roger makes an attractive contrast to the charming and self-assured William Marshal. He is practical, patient, level-headed and reliable, but painfully shy around women and his self-containment can be all too easily mistaken for emotional coldness. Ida is sweet, caring, almost as innocent at the end of the novel as she is at the beginning, and traumatised by having to leave her eldest child behind at court. Left alone at Framlingham with her other children for increasingly long periods while Roger is engaged on legal and administrative duties, Ida’s loneliness and growing resentment are easy to understand. Roger is jealous of her previous affair with the king, and resentful of her pining for her missing son. The growing distance between them, and their struggles to find a compromise that will sustain their marriage (aided by some informal marriage guidance from William Marshal!) is convincingly drawn.

The novel shows an unglamorous side to Henry II, as something of a dirty old man not above exploiting a young girl placed in his care. The secondary character I found most intriguing was Ida’s illegitimate son by Henry, William (later known as Longespee, “Long Sword”). Brought up in the lap of luxury as the king’s son but insecure about his illegitimate status and anxious about his unknown mother’s identity, William develops an obsession with status and show that makes him behave like an arrogant snob as he reaches adolescence. It would be easy to dismiss him as a jerk, but Roger’s cool compassion is able to recognise the genuine worth underneath and build a wary acceptance between them.

Readers who enjoy the minutiae of life (at least among the aristocracy) in years gone by will love the details of domestic life, including Roger’s (fictional) love of extravagant hats and the detail of food, clothing and life in a great house (complete with aggressive geese in the bailey). As the novel covers over twenty years, the narrative often skips forward several years at one jump, and I had to remember to pay attention to the dates given in the chapter headings. A helpful Author’s Note summarises the history underlying the novel and the gaps filled in by fiction.

Warm-hearted exploration of romantic, family and social relationships in twelfth-century England.


*I should note that I’m familiar with Roger Bigod’s castle at Framlingham and the castle Henry II built at Orford to clip the Bigod earls’ wings, so it was particularly appealing for me to read about the men who built them.

Hugh and Bess, by Susan Higginbotham. Book review

Sourcebooks, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4022-1527-8. 276 pages.

Set in 1341–1350, with flashbacks to 1326, Hugh and Bess tells the story of Hugh le Despenser (son of the notorious Hugh le Despenser who was the favourite of Edward II and was horribly executed for treason in 1326) and his wife Elizabeth (Bess) de Montacute. Hugh’s mistress Emma and the faithful laundress Alice are fictional; all the other major characters are historical figures.

Bess de Montacute is nearly fourteen, pretty, sharp, wilful and very aware of her status as the eldest daughter of William de Montacute, trusted advisor to King Edward III. So when she is told to she is to marry Sir Hugh le Despenser, who is not only aged 32 but also the son and grandson of disgraced traitors, she is not at all pleased about it, despite his riches. For his part, Hugh has mixed feelings too; he knows he has to make a grand marriage, but he is already in love with his mistress of ten years’ standing, a knight’s daughter named Emma. Bess soon comes to enjoy her role as a rich man’s wife, but on a personal level all Hugh’s kindness and consideration can win from her is a grudging tolerance. Only when Hugh is sent abroad to fight in a war that puts him in mortal danger does Bess realise how much he has come to mean to her – but is it too late?

Susan Higginbotham’s previous novel The Traitor’s Wife told the story of Eleanor de Clare, niece of Edward II, and her husband Hugh le Despenser (the notorious one, who used his position as Edward II’s favourite and homosexual lover to extort money from practically everyone in England, thereby achieving the remarkable feat of uniting the English nobility, at least until they had got rid of him). Hugh and Bess continues the story of the Despenser family into the next generation. This Hugh le Despenser was an attractive character towards the end of The Traitor’s Wife, as he patiently tried to live down his father’s appalling reputation by exemplary behaviour and loyal military service, so it was a pleasure to see him get a novel to himself.

Hugh and Bess is subtitled “A Love Story” in some editions, and that’s an accurate description. Although politics and warfare play a part in the story, and there is a harrowing portrayal of the Black Death, the focus of the novel is the relationship between Hugh and Bess. Bess is an immature and rather self-centred teenager at the start of the novel, which is fair enough considering her age, and becomes more engaging as she grows up. I found Hugh the most attractive and interesting character. He has to come to terms with the fact that the father he loved was also (deservedly) one of the most hated men in England, and imprisonment for four years in harsh conditions bordering on solitary confinement has taken a heavy toll. Somehow Hugh has to learn to cope with society again – not easy when everyone looks at him askance as the son of an extortionist and sodomite – as well as to face the gargantuan task of redeeming his family’s reputation. Hugh meets the challenge with pragmatism, courage, and a wry sense of humour. For example: musing on his relationship with the king, “…they would never be intimates; in any case, his father had been so close to his king that this would probably have to suffice for whole generations of Despensers”; when the Black Death arrives at his manor causing unwelcome guests to depart in a precipitous hurry, “That was one way of chasing off Lady Thornton, you have to admit”.

The narrative style has a similar light touch and occasional shaft of dry wit, which I found appealing. I like a novel that can make me smile. For example, the description of the dowager queen Isabella “…carefully dressed so as not to outshine the younger Queen, but somehow managing to give the impression that she could certainly still do so if she pleased”; Bess, as a flighty teenager on the day before her wedding, feeling that it would be disrespectful to pray for something to prevent her marriage and frivolous (not to mention impractical) to pray for her bosom to develop overnight; Elizabeth de Burgh, commenting on Bess’s desire for a sign from heaven about her marriage, “What, a lightning bolt?”.

Hugh and Bess is quite a short book, somewhere between a novel and a novella, and makes for a quick, easy read. Details of domestic life among the fourteenth-century aristocracy are well covered, including the ever-changing fashions (Queen Isabella on Bess’s attempt to dress demurely, “That gown and wimple are fit only for a soggy day in Wales”). The effects of the Black Death, known at the time and in the novel simply as “the pestilence” are also well described, covering not only the disease itself but also the remarkable stoicism with which the survivors picked themselves up and rebuilt their lives in the aftermath. A helpful Author’s Note sets out what happened to some of the characters after the end of the novel, and the history underlying the story.

Charming, uncomplicated short tale of domestic life and love in fourteenth-century England.

Bowmen in medieval Wales

In the comments thread on the post on seventh-century Chester, the discussion turned to the medieval longbow. I said I thought archery was especially associated with south Wales and that I hadn’t got the reference to hand but would post it when I found it. Well, I have now found the reference I was thinking of. It comes from the Description of Wales, written in the 1190s by Gerald of Wales (also known by his Latin name, Giraldus Cambrensis), and the quote is:

Merionyth, and the land of Conan, is the rudest and least cultivated region, and the least accessible. The natives of that part of Wales excel in the use of long lances, as those of Monmouthshire are distinguished for their management of the bow.

--Gerald of Wales, Description of Wales, Chapter VI. Online at Project Gutenberg

Monmouthshire is in south-east Wales, immediately west of the River Wye. See the Wikipedia page on the historic county (not to be confused with the smaller modern county of the same name) for maps showing its location, and see Streetmap UK for an interactive map that will let you zoom in and out to put the location in context.

Gerald was a distinguished churchman, the son of a powerful Norman baron and a princess of Deheubarth (south-west Wales), so he was in a position to have access to accurate information about the Wales of his own time. While it is unlikely that the men of Monmouthshire had a monopoly on archery (or that the men of Meirionydd had a monopoly on the use of long spears, come to that), I see no reason to doubt Gerald’s word for a particular skill being concentrated in a particular region, at least in his own time. Whether that reflects any deep-seated historical tradition or was a relatively recent development is open to interpretation.

The Traitor’s Wife, by Susan Higginbotham. Book review

Sourcebooks, 2009, ISBN 9781402217876, 500 pages.*
First published: iUniverse, 2005, ISBN 0-595-35959-0

Set in England in 1306-1337, The Traitor’s Wife tells the story of Eleanor de Clare, niece of King Edward II and wife to Hugh le Despenser (the Younger), one of the most hated men of Edward’s reign. All the main characters are historical figures.

Eleanor’s formidable grandfather, Edward I, arranges her marriage to young Hugh le Despenser, the son of one of his faithful followers. Eleanor soon falls in love with her clever and witty young husband and the marriage is both happy and fruitful, until the untimely death of Eleanor’s only brother at the Battle of Bannockburn suddenly makes her a great heiress. At first trying to secure Eleanor’s lands and then to add to them, by fair means or – increasingly – foul, Hugh extorts, threatens, blackmails and bribes his way to ever greater riches. When Eleanor’s uncle Edward II becomes besotted with him, there is no check to Hugh’s greed and ambition and soon he rules the country in all but name. Not surprisingly, this earns him powerful enemies. When Queen Isabella, her lover Roger Mortimer and most of the rest of the aristocracy join forces to get rid of Hugh, Eleanor and her beloved uncle King Edward II are caught up in his downfall.

The Traitor’s Wife is very much Eleanor’s story, covering the whole of her eventful life from her marriage to Hugh until her death. Eleanor is an appealing character, sweet, affectionate and straightforward, perhaps a little naïve in taking Hugh at his own estimation and managing to remain blind to his faults for so long. Edward II is also well drawn, a kind and attractive man who nevertheless made a hopelessly inept king. Some of the secondary characters are also memorable, such as the charming and irrepressible Piers Gaveston and the honest, decent, pleasant William la Zouche. Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella have a wonderfully snappish relationship towards the end of their period in power, as might be expected of a couple who came together out of a mix of expediency and lust.

I felt I would have liked to understand Hugh le Despenser better. Clearly a very complex man, the reader sees him mainly through Eleanor’s eyes and thus sees mostly his good qualities. I found it hard to grasp quite why he was so detested until very late in the book, when Eleanor has to face the evidence of his misdeeds. I’d have liked to see more of Hugh the villain at the time to understand why the tidal wave of hatred built up against him as it did. Not having seen much of Hugh’s bad side, I wasn’t very clear whether Isabella and Roger Mortimer were acting out of pure spite in their treatment of Hugh’s family, or whether they had some genuine grievance that would explain their behaviour. I also didn’t quite grasp why Isabella’s attitude to Eleanor seemed to change; when Isabella first comes to England she treats Eleanor as something of a confidante, but their relationship cools and Isabella is later Eleanor’s enemy. It seems to happen rather early to be attributable to Hugh’s nefarious activities, so I must have missed something.

The novel shows up the remarkable emotional resilience of medieval women, who have to pick up the pieces when their men end up on the wrong side of a power struggle. How do you explain to children that their father has been executed, and shield them from the worst details of it, when your own heart is breaking for the loss of a beloved husband? Eleanor survives the deaths of her brother, husband, father-in-law and uncle, estrangement from her sisters, her eldest son’s imprisonment, her own imprisonment (twice), and still manages to lead a fulfilling life.

One aspect of the novel that I liked very much is the wry sense of humour. Hugh has a sarcastic wit (On Piers Gaveston being given months to prepare for banishment, “With his wardrobe he’ll need every day of it”), Piers takes nothing seriously, and there are sidelong comments on medieval life, such as the difficulties of being a servant in a castle full of women. There’s a delightful note of comedy when John de Grey and William la Zouche are both wooing the widowed Eleanor, and again when they have to go to court to argue over which one of them married her.

The novel is told in third person from various points of view, so the reader is able to see more than one side to the events and can get to know several people. Although there’s a large cast of characters with a only small range of names between them, the story is clearly told so I had little difficulty in keeping them straight. There’s a helpful list of characters at the front of the book if you do get confused. A useful Afterword also sets out the underlying history, including the aspects that aren’t known and that have to be filled in with speculation, and briefly tells you what happened to the rest of the characters after the story ends.

Detailed and well-researched story that brings the people and events of a complicated period of history to life.

*I reviewed The Traitor's Wife when it was first published, and am re-posting my original review now in honour of the new Sourcebooks edition.

Blog tour

Sourcebooks has organised a blog tour for the publication of The Traitor’s Wife. Here are the other stops (Note that the dates are in US format, month/day):

Readers Respite (4/6)

Passages to the Past (4/6)

Reading Extravaganza (4/7)

S. Krishna’s Books (4/7)

HistoricalNovels.info (4/8)

The Tome Traveller’s Weblog (4/10)

Jennifer’s Random Musings (4/12)

Medieval Bookworm (4/13)

StevenTill.com (4/13)

Peeking Between the Pages (4/14)

A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore… (4/14)

Savvy Verse and Wit (4/15 & 4/16)

Sam’s Book Blog (4/16)

Diary of an Eccentric (4/17 & 4/20)

My Friend Amy (4/17)

The Secret Middle Ages: Discovering the Real Medieval World, by Malcolm Jones. Book review

Sutton Publishing, 2002, ISBN 0-7509-2685-6.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Chadwick for recommending this book!

The Secret Middle Ages is a survey of the neglected arts and crafts of the medieval period (roughly 1100 to 1600) in Britain and continental Europe including France, the Low Countries and Germany. The author comments that most studies of medieval art present only a partial picture, confined to religious art and the precious objects owned by the elite. His survey, by contrast, sets out to explore what he calls the “other half” of medieval art, the everyday objects accessible to the bulk of the population – biscuit moulds, furniture, cheap lead jewellery, personal seals, floor tiles, woodcuts in books that illustrate contemporary stories and sayings, and decorative carvings in churches such as misericords and carved capitals.

The book begins by discussing an inventory of 40 biscuit moulds owned by a wealthy businessman in Frankfurt in 1521. Pictorial biscuits were given as seasonal presents, a sort of edible greetings card (Now there's a tradition worth reviving!). Three-quarters of the moulds depict scenes that are non-religious, and about half are concerned with love in its courtly or erotic manifestations. So much for the popular view of the Middle Ages as a repressed society obsessed with religion!

Chapters on various themes follow. Popular religion covers lucky charms, talismans and souvenirs from saints’ shrines, official, unofficial and frankly absurd (who could resist St Uncumber, a bearded lady whose job it was to relieve women of their undesired husbands?). A survey of animals and their symbolism includes dogs, cats (including the association between cats and witches), exotic creatures such as baboons, and the small furry animals such as bunny rabbits, mice and squirrels that were often used as lovers’ pet names. Representations of monstrosity and folly deal with creatures such as Wild Men, mermaids, donkey-headed fools and races of people with tails, and a chapter on insult and humiliation reveals a startling range of insults and ingenious punishments. Being pushed off to hell in a wheelbarrow seems to have been a particular favourite on lively church wood carvings; the author doesn’t mention it, but I wonder if that image is related to the phrase, “going to hell in a handcart”?

A survey of proverbs and proverbial follies, such as shoeing a goose, driving a snail with a whip, sawing through the branch you’re sitting on, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or carrying daylight (or soup) in baskets, reveals the surprising antiquity of some of the phrases and figures of speech that are still in common use today. The archetypal "Irish joke" (What’s black and hangs from the ceiling? An Irish electrician) turns out to have a long provenance, except that in the Middle Ages it was applied to the inhabitants of Norfolk (UK) or fictional villages such as Gotham (UK) or Schilda (Germany).

The World Turned Upside Down was a popular motif in medieval art and literature, including flying pigs, hares that hunt and cook the huntsmen, animals playing musical instruments, and the reversal of gender roles (the woman wearing the trousers, the man spinning with a distaff). Many of the conventions of romantic love in use in the medieval period are still in use today, such as the heart symbol and the giving and receiving of love tokens such as flowers or trinkets. Two chapters on sexual and scatological imagery round off the book.

The Secret Middle Ages is a cornucopia of vivid, fascinating, humorous and frequently surprising insights into the rich and varied world of ordinary life in the Middle Ages. In some ways this world is very different from ours, for example, its evident misogyny is unattractive to modern ideas. In others, such as the conventions of romantic love and the many proverbs and phrases that are still in use today, it is very recognisable. The everyday objects surveyed in this eclectic book do more than much High Art to bring the Middle Ages to life – for example, the cheap little lead brooch in the shape of a violet with a romantic caption that was perhaps bought at a fair or from a pedlar by some village boy as a love-present for his girl.

The writing style is witty and engaging. In his preface, the author observes that he has, “…managed to forget my scholarly pretensions sufficiently often to seem like a person interested in what he is writing about”. As a result the book is a pleasure to read from beginning to end, as well as to dip into. Almost every page will raise a smile, or (unless you are already an expert) tell you something you didn’t know. An invaluable resource for anyone trying to, in the author’s words, “…get to grips with the puzzles and contradictions of an era that is both so like and so unlike our own.”

Entertaining, erudite and eclectic survey of the everyday arts and crafts of the Middle Ages.

Has anyone else read it?

The Witch’s Cat

The witch’s cat is as much a part of her traditional paraphernalia as her pointy hat and broomstick. Terry Pratchett’s Nanny Ogg wouldn’t be quite the same character without her formidable tom-cat Greebo:

Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

--Witches Abroad

The logic of the association is clear enough. Cats can move silently, they often hunt by night, and a well-camouflaged tabby or black cat can give the impression of having materialised out of nowhere, all characteristics that fit easily with the supernatural. Superstitions about cats abound to this day, which would fit with them having once been closely associated with magic and the supernatural. The association with deities is very old; in Ancient Egypt, several goddesses were associated with cats and depicted as cats or with cat heads (see the Pitt Rivers Museum website for examples). But how far back does the association between cats and witches go?

Medieval Europe

In The Secret Middle Ages, Malcolm Jones cites a record from 1324 of an Irish witch, Alice Kyteler, whose demonic familiar could take on the form of a cat. Shape-shifting, in which the witch herself turns into a cat, is mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury in 1211, “women have been seen and wounded in the shape of cats”, and by the late fifteenth century illustrations of witches frequently show them with cats (p. 40). So the association was firmly established by the Middle Ages.

Norse mythology

In Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja rode in a carriage drawn by cats, according to the Icelandic writer and historian Snorri Sturluson. Snorri was writing in the thirteenth century when the Norse pagan religious beliefs were dying out, and is usually credited with wishing to record the old traditions before they were lost for ever (for which modern scholars of the Norse world owe him a considerable debt of gratitude). I say “dying out”, rather than “had died out”, because Snorri wrote that Freyja alone of the gods still lived, which could mean that aspects of her cult were still practised in his own day. Among many other attributes, Freyja was the goddess of magic, witchcraft and divination (seidr) (Ellis Davidson 1964, p. 120). She could also change her shape, though she turned into a bird rather than a cat, and she could temporarily disguise her human lover Ottar as an animal (in his case, a boar) (Crossley-Holland, 1980, Hyndla’s Poem).

Eirik’s Saga, written in Iceland in the early 13th century, describes a volva (a seeress, prophetess, sorceress or witch), a human practitioner of seidr magic, who came to a farm in Greenland and foretold the future of everyone present (Eirik’s Saga, ch.4). The volva wore a hood lined with white cat’s fur, and gloves made of catskin with the white fur inside.

In the story of Thor’s journey to Utgard, the giant and magician Utgard-Loki challenges Thor to lift a great grey cat from the floor of the hall. Thor, mightiest of the gods, tries with all his might to pick up the cat, but can only raise one of its feet a few inches from the floor. It is later revealed that the cat is in fact the World Serpent disguised by a magic spell (Crossley-Holland 1980). It may not be stretching a point too far to treat this story as another association of a cat with a practitioner of magic (though I won’t insist on it).

So Norse tradition associates cats with Freyja, the goddess of seidr magic, with female human practitioners of magic, and possibly with a giant magician. The extant written sources date from the thirteenth century, contemporary with the other records from medieval Europe mentioned above, but there seems no reason not to accept that they may derive from earlier traditions.

References

Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Norse Myths. Penguin, 1980, ISBN 0-14-006056-1.
Eirik’s Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson. Penguin Classics, 1965, ISBN 0-14-044154-9.
Ellis Davidson, HR. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Penguin, 1964, ISBN 0-14-020670-1.
Jones, M. The Secret Middle Ages. Sutton, 2002, ISBN 0-7509-2685-6.



Having traced an association between cats and witches back to Norse mythology, I felt it wasn’t stretching a point too far to apply it to seventh-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England. Here’s a snippet:

Ashhere shivered. He was frightened of witchcraft, and frightened of the green-eyed, black-haired witch, who looked at him as if she thought someone had already turned him into a toad. She had said, as far as he could understand, that she had to open Eadwine’s wound to remove the evil that was killing him, and Ashhere had believed her. But he had not expected it to be so harrowing an experience. Had she gone? He crept tentatively to Eadwine’s side. No sign of the witch, but in the exact place where he had last seen her, kneeling beside Eadwine’s shoulder, a cat sat upright with its tail curled neatly around its toes. A very trim, very supercilious, very elegant pure black cat. With green eyes.

Ashhere clutched for the amulet that wasn’t there. The cat twitched its tail and glared at him with unblinking contempt. Ashhere glared back. The cat won.

--Paths of Exile