Culture

Patient, heal thyself

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Early medieval medicine was decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand a decent practitioner could mend a broken bone, bind a nasty wound, and give you the best attention possible in the event of fever. There would be a decent chance your healer could rely on a book of herbal remedies from the ancient Greeks. Not too bad.

On the other hand, your healer was strictly bound by the medical theories of those same ancients, theories which began and ended with the infamous “humors” of the body. The herbal remedies had been copied many times over, usually by scribes who had never seen the plants being referenced. And indeed, those plants grew in the eastern Mediterranean, not northern Europe. Other medical ‘texts’ are filled with references to things like how to tell if a person is going to die via holding a tick from a black dog in the healer’s left hand.1.Peregrine Horden, What’s Wrong With Early Medieval Medicine?, Social History of Medicine, v.24, n.1, pp.5 – 25. Be sure not to miss the discussion of “vulture medicine.”

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Peregrine Horden, What’s Wrong With Early Medieval Medicine?, Social History of Medicine, v.24, n.1, pp.5 – 25. Be sure not to miss the discussion of “vulture medicine.”

A pox on all our houses

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Life in the 8th century was hard. Endless labor, the constant threat of famine after too much or too little rain, the occasional Viking or Saxon raid, and of course, disease, which became ever more prevalent after malnutrition. We of the last few generations tend to forget that for virtually the entirety of human existence death came much earlier than it does today, and disease played a very large part in that. Famines did occur, and of course war, but it was disease that struck us down in droves, whether in plagues so virulent even the isolated annalists recorded them, or mere families succumbing to a stray germ. For anyone who got sick there were no antibiotics, no real understanding of anatomy, nothing but a couple of herbal books from the Greeks, and a 7th century encyclopedia to consult. And that only if you were lucky enough to find someone who could read, and possessed those volumes.

That encyclopedia is the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville, who wrote it sometime before 636, when he died. Book IV is a surprisingly comprehensive and rational discussion of medicine and disease. He includes descriptions of acute and chronic illnesses, and a separate chapter for “Illnesses that appear on the surface of the body.” All told Isidore gives a reasonable description of more than eighty different maladies, before discussing various remedies, scents, and oils, and “The instruments of physicians.” It is a fascinating read, particularly to imagine oneself at the bedside of some failing soul, scouring your Isidore for some clue. Of course, you could also say that virtually all of human medical knowledge was contained within six pages of text, but let’s not quibble.1.Isidore, Etymologies, pp.109-15.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Isidore, Etymologies, pp.109-15.

Save us from the fury of the Northmen’s… comb

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While the Vikings don’t appear in the records of the 8th century until near its close, recently a rare piece of evidence about the Vikings in the early 8th century was unearthed in Ribe, one of the oldest towns in Denmark. What, might you muse, was this relic of those wild seafarers and vicious raiders known to us from countless movies and images? One of those horned helmets, perhaps, or a massive axe still embedded in the skull of some poor monk? None of the above. It was a comb, a beautiful little piece of engraved reindeer antler.

Comb made of reindeer antler

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All men are not created equal

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Are all men created equal? While “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they were certainly not evident to those born in the 8th century. There were several different legal statuses a person could hold, either at birth or as their circumstances changed later in life. These statuses were written into the various law codes in effect at the time. Unfortunately the codes only describe what the effects of being part of one status or another were, but don’t delineate what it actually meant to be in one status or another. So we have to infer the meaning of a status, rather than rely on a written description. Welcome to early medieval studies.

The most common way the laws illustrated status was the fines that were imposed for various infractions against a person. “[A]lthough the laws do not support the existence of difference social classes based on birth in the Frankish kingdom, they nonetheless make it clear that some people were worth more than others. This difference in value was indicated by a person’s wergeld, the amount at which that life was valued.”1.Fischer-Drew, Laws of the Salian Franks, p.45. Based on these carefully constructed fines, and the descriptions of those to whom the fine protected, it is possible to build a rough social model for the early medieval age.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Fischer-Drew, Laws of the Salian Franks, p.45.

Mind your manors

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Manor houses, lords of the manor, and the rugged but forelock-tugging yeomanry did not spring, fully formed, from the minds of Fellowes and Bronte. Manors have been a part of the European landscape for more than fifteen centuries. What we see today are the slightest shadows of a system that once formed the foundation of the economic, social, and political structures in early medieval Europe.

A manor was a self-sustaining economic unit under a single lord that produced a surplus, a surplus which could take the form of many types of economic production. The manor was the dominant social and legal structure for the vast majority of the continent’s inhabitants. And the manor was the basic unit of political authority, the tool by which the king and church expanded their income and power. The benefice was the idea, the manor the method.

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