Medieval Life

One of the great myths that keeps resurfacing about medieval (and even up to 19th C) life is that they had less attachment to their children.There is no evidence from the record, even back to Iron Age times, that this was so. Children are buried in embrace of other relatives, or siblings holding hands. Even after horrible violence and devastation there is care and delicacy in how children are arranged in burial. When there is written record, letters and histories tell us that mothers (and sometimes fathers) are completely undone by the death of a child, go into depression, are never the same for the rest of their lives, etc.

Cemeteries, letters, diaries - the actual data - can tell us a lot.

The belief likely comes from a bit of reasoning that says "Well, they just had to be less attached than we are now, because death of children was so much more common. They just had to be.  I mean, how could they keep going on if they cared about their children as much as we do?" People get through horrible things now, including the deaths of children, and go on to have lives that have some joy despite the scar tissue. Do you think they didn't really love those children? So also did the medievals love theirs. 

Yes, they tolerated a level of violence toward beast and man that we find unnerving.  Yet much of that was the upper classes, engaged in warfare, or controlling servants, or those for whom the violence of animals and strangers was no joke. Among the common folk there was more violent death than we have now, but not so hugely as we imagine.

From the cemeteries we can also tell a great deal about nutrition in childhood, which was intermittent. Infants born in the fall had less sunlight, less vegetables, less calories in general - or if they were nursing, their mothers had fewer of those things. The higher the latitude, the more this was true. The survival rate was worse, and the prevalence of rickets and other developmental diseases of deprivation was greater. There is a myth that teeth were healthy until sugar became fashionable, but cereal diets can produce rot and abscesses as well, especially among those who take no care of their teeth. The genetics of our teeth were mostly selected in the many tens and hundreds of thousands of years of foraging, hunting, and gathering, not the last few millennia of crops and pastoralism.

I think the myths come up because we want to make stories about them, as if we understood them.  Reading and listening to the professionals, even they keep drifting off into speculations, talking about how rewarding it is to imagine what their lives must have been like. Well, I like it too, but I don't know that it's the only thing. There also seems to be a sort of one-upmanship of showing how many different scenarios they can imagine might be true before reminding us (you silly people who only read the popular articles), that there is so much we don't know.

We know that this was a high-status individual who was burned on a funeral pyre.  But we don't know what that ritual meant to the community around him. Was everyone in the village expected to bring a bit of wood to cast on the flames, or was this the work of specialists within the community?  We don't know, as they left no written record. Was the family supposed to be in charge of performing the ceremony or was this under the direction of a priestly class? We can't tell for certain, but there are tantalising clues...How soon after death was the ceremony? Ah, we don't know. Very few of us now have much contact with the dead but these were a peo0le for whom death was an ever-present reality...there are things we don't know about death now that were commonplace then...You have to consider why that particular pottery vessel was placed the way it was* and how it compares to other burials across the continent to understand the whole context...at a burial, the dead are on a journey to somewhere in any society**... They all had objects around death that were important to them, just as we have today with churches and stone markers*** and archaeology asks us the questions we need to ask ourselves****

I enjoy a limited amount of this sort of speculation very much myself. Any excuse to stare off onto the horizon, be it field, forest, or ocean, and think Grand Thoughts is right up my alley. Or to look at the interior of a recreated dwelling and think what it must have been like to have six in this room in the winter, in times of a successful hunt/harvest/fishing expedition or an unsuccessful one - yes, that is a fine thing, and encouragement of fellow-feeling with anyone else in humanity likely has some follow-on effects in any society.  But I just came through 45 minutes of a podcast where that was the whole show.  It's like Robert Klein, fifty years ago now.

(Start at the 29:02 mark.  The automaticity of Blogger allowing various time entrances no longer operates.  I imagine there is a simple way to get around that, but I don't know it.)

*What pottery vessel? When? You haven't mentioned a single specific or even regional type yet. 

**Mention a couple of real possibilities.

***What objects? Flowers?  Knives? Dead servants? When does this discussion come down from 30,000 feet?

****That's like ten questions, built around no data. Not only archaeology, but weed can do this for you.  F-you.