Read Life in a Medieval City Online
Authors: Frances Gies,Joseph Gies
Tags: #General, #Juvenile literature, #Castles, #Troyes (France), #Europe, #History, #France, #Troyes, #Courts and Courtiers, #Civilization, #Medieval, #Cities and Towns, #Travel
1.
city wall:
The walls of Troyes have long since been replaced by boulevards. The description of the wall given here is based on that of neighboring Provins, built in the same period and still standing, including the handsome Porte-St.-Jean.
2.
Viscount’s Tower:
A mere anachronism in the thirteenth century. But in the next century it regained importance, becoming the “belfry,” stronghold of the burghers and hall of municipal government.
3.
paved with stone:
Probably. A document of 1231 attests that the section of the thoroughfare immediately west of Troyes was paved. City pavements were rare outside Italy, although in Paris Philip Augustus is said to have paved some streets in the early thirteenth century.
1.
oiled parchment:
Glass was seldom used even in the houses of the wealthy. In England, where great nobles possessed scattered estates, they sometimes carried glazed casements from one residence to another. Wooden shutters were also common.
2.
table manners:
These injunctions are taken from three sources:
Roman de la Rose
and Robert of Blois’s
Chatoiement des Dames
, both thirteenth century, and
Disciplina Clericalis
, written in the eleventh century by Petrus Alfonsus, a converted Spanish Jew, translated into French at the end of the twelfth century and popular in the thirteenth.
1.
at three-hour intervals:
The eight services of canonical office celebrated by the Church were (approximately):
Matins at midnight: Lauds at 3
A.M.
Sext at midday: None at 3
P.M.
Matins at midnight: Prime at 6
A.M.
Sext at midday: Vespers at 6
P.M.
Matins at midnight: Tierce at 9
A.M.
Sext at midday: Compline at 9
P.M.
In its simplest form, the clepsydra was similar to the sand-glass, with hour-levels marked as water dripped through an aperture. Elaborate mechanical clepsydras were also made, which with their trains of cogged wheels were ancestors of modern clocks. A drawing of Villard de Honnecourt shows an escapement, one of the basic mechanisms of clockwork.
The remarkable scientist and scholar Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II, is said to have invented the mechanical clock in 996, but the clock he had constructed at Magdeburg was doubtless a water clock, as were other clocks described during the following three centuries. In 1360 the first unquestionably mechanical clock in the modern sense was built by De Vick for Charles V of France.
2.
A fat capon costs-six deniers:
Most of the commodity prices cited here and elsewhere in the text are drawn from the massive compendium of the Vicomte d’Avenel, who gathered price and wage figures in western Europe from 1200 to 1800. Original sources are cited in his work.
3.
gardens:
These plants are taken from John of Garlande’s thirteenth-century dictionary.
4.
members of normally male professions:
Cf. Villon, “Les Regretz de la belle Héaulmière.”
5.
abbess of Notre-Dame:
When Pope Urban IV wanted to build a church on the site of his father’s shoe shop, he found himself embroiled with the abbess on whose seigneury the construction impinged. She led an armed party that attacked and demolished the work in 1266.
6.
wipe…one’s nose:
Langlois, who edited Robert of Blois’s
Chatoiement des Dames
for modern readers, suggests that the injunction is intended as humor, and is not a true indication of manners.
1.
Birth records:
When Jeanne of Champagne was betrothed in 1284 an extensive investigation was necessary to determine her birth date.
1.
demolish…portico:
Evidently the portico was repaired later, because the projecting statues are still a feature of Notre-Dame-de-Dijon.
2.
Jongleurs:
From instructions written for jongleurs of Provence.
1.
the hundred and twenty guilds of Paris:
In 1268, 120 crafts registered and wrote out their statutes at the invitation of Etienne Boileau, provost of Paris.
Preserved in the
taille
(tax list) of Paris for the year 1292 are the numbers of practitioners of the regulated crafts, by then totaling 130. The principal ones:
2.
confiscation:
In 1268 Thibaut V, preparing to go on the last Crusade, again confiscated the goods of Troyen Jews and burned thirteen.
1.
silver-copper-zinc pennies:
Though the basic coin of the Middle Ages was called denier in France, penny in England, pfennig in Germany, etc., it was universally written in Latin,
denarius
, as was the pound (
libra
) and shilling (
solidus
), which accounts for the odd abbreviations of modern English coinage, the last relic of the medieval money system.
2.
grosso (groat):
St.-Louis issued a
gros tournois
even larger than the
grosso
in 1266, and Edward I of England a still larger groat in 1270. Simultaneously gold coinage returned for the first time since the Dark Ages, first in Italy, then in France and England. The French gold coin,
écu
, was valued at 10
gros tournois
, or 120
deniers de Provins
, or one-half
livre
.
1.
fewer than a half dozen doctors:
This is a fairly safe conjecture. In Paris in 1274 there were eight qualified physicians, a number which rose rapidly to 29 in 1292. On the other hand, 38 men and women of Paris in 1274 were identified as practicing medicine without benefit of a diploma. In the fourteenth century, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris launched a vigorous war against the unlicensed practitioner.
2.
medical textbooks:
Pietro d’Abano, Taddeo Alderotti, Lanfranc, Henri de Mondeville, and others added much new work in the later thirteenth century.
1.
no benches or pews:
Lecoy de la Marche, in
La chaire française
, insists that there were benches in the churches, on the grounds that otherwise people could not have fallen asleep (they were the butts of many clerical jokes and diatribes). Others feel that the congregation could have slept as soundly on cushions and portable seats.
2.
sermon on the Christian virtues:
This sermon was preached to pilgrims at Notre-Dame of Amiens.
3.
oratorical tricks:
These were employed by the famous Paris preacher Jacques de Vitry, cardinal-archbishop of Acre.
4.
process of canonization:
Details of procedure were fixed in the thirteenth century, and beyond a fourteenth-century refinement have scarcely changed since.
1.
names of the masters:
Our earliest source of information about the builders of St.-Pierre is the cathedral accounts from 1293 to 1300. One Master Jacopo Lathomo (the Stone Cutter) is mentioned in a legacy of 1295–6 to the cathedral, and French scholars speculate that he may have been an architect who worked on the cathedral about 1270. The first certain reference to an architect in the records is to Master Henri, whose expenses for a trip with a servant are recorded in 1293–4; the next year he goes to the quarry on Ascension Day with Masters Richer and Gautier; in 1295–6 Renaudin, valet of the masons, presents himself to Henri at Auxerre, so that they may visit the quarry at Dangis; the following year they are at Dangis again. In 1297–8 Geoffroi of Mussy-sur-Seine takes over the job.
In 1920 a French scholar, de Mély, published in the
Revue archéologique
the then astonishing number of over five hundred architect-engineers in France alone. Many more medieval builders have been identified since. In 1954 John Harvey published a dictionary of English medieval architects.
2.
The builders’ plans:
Very few survive. Parchment was precious and was commonly scraped and reused. An extant plan of Strasbourg Cathedral dates from the thirteenth century.
3.
iron clamps:
Metallic reinforcement of masonry was common—windows, steeples, and pinnacles made use of wrought iron for clamps, stays, tie-rods, and dowels.
4.
the bell is long-waisted:
When change-ringing became popular at the end of the Middle Ages, shorter-waisted bells were cast because it was easier to raise and ring them.
5.
choir vault:
The steeply pitched timber roofs of Gothic churches do not touch the vaulting beneath. The sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt shows timbering built up from the tops of the piers, at the point of the springing of the arches, and secured by wooden ties. The timber roof was apparently then erected and the vaulting finished under cover. Rafters were about fourteen inches apart, often covered with leading.
6.
Gothic architecture:
Hans Straub, in his
History of Civil Engineering
, names four structural developments of the Gothic builders: (1) the distinction between bearing pillars and nonbearing walls; (2) the pointed arch, which is “statically efficient,” that is, can carry heavy loadings; (3) vault-supporting ribs in place of the Roman solid vaults; (4) buttresses and flying buttresses.
7.
Deathbed bequests:
Among the legacies to the Troyes cathedral in 1298-9 is that of Pierre, the town hangman.
8.
the master glazier has no secrets:
Art has its own historical laws, and there is undeniably a charm in twelfth-and thirteenth-century glass which the work of later centuries does not have, probably because in later days the use of the medium to its best advantage, as a mosaic of colored light, was sacrificed to realistic representation.
9.
St.-Bernard:
The great ascetic’s viewpoint was not entirely abandoned by the later Middle Ages, and certainly found an echo in the Protestant movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sale of indulgences to pay for church-building, especially St. Peter’s in Rome, was a powerful stimulus to discontent, and the very magnificence of church architecture remained an irritant to some.
1.
Nicolas of Clairvaux:
Translated by John Benton in
Annales de Bourgogne
.
2.
seven liberal arts:
A fifth-century writer named Martianus Capella, in a romance called
The Wedding of Philology and Mercury
, which remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, personifies the seven arts as women, distinguished by their varying clothing, implements, and coiffures.
3.
Alexandre of Villedieu’s
Doctrinale: Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
Doctrinale
remained the universal grammar of Europe.
4.
a map of the world:
Several twelfth-and thirteenth-century maps are extant, including the world disk in Hereford Cathedral (late thirteenth century), which depicts imaginary continents and seas with fabulous beasts; the Psalter Map (c. 1230); and the Ebstorf Map (from the same period as the Hereford Map.)