Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist

He is one of only three figures in the New Testament - the others being Our Lord and Our Lady - to have a feast to celebrate their birthday. His death is commemorated separately at the end of August.

Most depictions of the Great Forerunner show him as a solitary figure in the wilderness or concentrate on his martyrdom. This illumination showing his birth is unusual amongst his iconography.

The birth of St John the Baptist

Silvestro dei Gherarducci

1370-71

Image: Walker Art Gallery Liverpool

A tempera painting on vellum showing the letter D, taken from an illuminated choirbook at a Camaldolese monastery in Florence. The letter is decorated on three corners with floral motifs. The image set within the letter is of the birth of St. John the Baptist. The Virgin Mary is holding the infant on the front left, wearing a blue cloak over red dress. In the background, his mother Elizabeth, Mary's cousin, is still in bed being attended by a nun, while his father Zechariah seated on the front right who has been speechless since he was told of the birth by the Archangel Gabriel, writes "His name is John."

Surviving in a heatwave

As we swelter and shelter from the current temperatures  here in the UK and across western Europe I came upon a video from Medieval Way which looks at how people managed to keep themselves and their food supplies cool in past centuries. 

It is normally thought the earlier middle ages were warmer and followed from about 1300 by the beginnings of the ‘Little Ice Age’ which deepened into the seventeenth century before working itself out in the early nineteenth century. That does not mean that exceptionally hot summers, such as that of 1540, or hot spells, did not occur.

I am no scientist but even I can understand and recall these pre air-conditioning features of daily life. I can still recall, after seventy years, the coolness of the cellar, and indeed the hall,  in my grandmother’s mid-Victorian house, the sun-blinds over traditional large shop windows, photographs of Edwardian country houses bedecked in similar blinds - their casings still survive at the Oxford Union’s building, the curious earth ware device to keep the extra pint of milk in cold water before refrigerators became normal, the slightly sinister looking meat safe with its fine mesh….

Most of those are much more recent than the medieval centuries but the sense of a cool interior even in really hot weather when entering a centuries old building with thick walls, be it a cottage or a church, is both palpable and so refreshing.  

 

The video can be watched at Medieval Peasant Knew Something About Cooling We Forgot

Queen Elizabeth I in amber

Artnet has a report about the forthcoming auction of an amber heart-shaped pendant enclosing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. 

The pendant with its portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Image: Artnet News

The item is little known and its creation has only now been studies. Dated to after 1592 because of the datable portrait, it appears to have been made in Königsberg, the centre of the amber-working craft. There seems no indication of who commissioned it or how and when it travelled to this country.

It does, however, suggest the importance of trading and cultural links between England and the relatively new Duchy of Prussia in these years. Trade with the Baltic was important until the events of the twentieth century from the east coast and ports as far west as Devon.

The illustrated article can accessed at Rediscovered Amber Portrait of Elizabeth I Heads to Auction

I also learned from it that magnifying glasses were invented in Königsberg - if anyone had asked me I would have thought renaissance Italy. One lives and learns.

The Major Oak

 

The recent announcement that the great survivor the Major Oak has died is sad news. Located near the village of Edwinstowe in north-western Nottinghamshire this venerable tree was very much a symbol of what remains of the ancient woodland that made up much of Sherwood Forest in the medieval centuries. 

 

The Major Oak

Image: Wikimedia

The Major Oak also had a place in the relatively modern legendary history of Robin Hood. That there probably was an outlaw of skill and cunning - or maybe a series - called or known as Robin Hood seems very likely. It was Sir Walter Scott in “Ivanhoe” who located him in the 1190s. The most recent research places him in the early thirteenth century, and more significantly, not in Sherwood in Nottinghamshire but north of Doncaster in Barnsdale along the Great North Road towards Ferrybridge. Barnsdale was not a royal forest in the legal sense but simply a wooded area along the magnesian limestone ridge which runs northward from the river Don. 

By the fourteenth century Robin Hood was leading protagonist in popular ballads, where avenged individual wrongs, not those of society. It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he became more generally the robber of the rich to give to the poor, and so could become the demotic hero of cinema.

How the Sheriff of Nottingham was drawn into the narrative ms is not clear, but one can reasonably imagine that a lawless group based in Barnsdale would not lose much sleep over heading south and crossing the county boundary into Nottinghamshire for variety or to through the forces of law and order off their trail.

  

Robin Hood has attracted a considerable amount of scholarship from academics in the past half-century or so. The book I always recommend is “Robin Hood” by J.C.Holt, which is careful and scholarly, very readable and well illustrated.

I regret on my various visits to Nottinghamshire over many years that I never bot to see the Major Oak. However its d ace dents will live on. Like the famous Cowthorpe Oak in Yorkshire time has, sadly, finally caught up with this landmark.

Wikipedia has a history of the tree at Major_Oak

and of its wider setting at Sherwood_Forest

 

The BBC News website has an article about its history and its place in the cultural life of Nottinghamshire which can be read at The 'Robin Hood' tree: The history and enduring appeal of the Major Oak

The Daily Telegraph has two articles about the way well-intentioned, if misguided, attempts to sustain it may well have hastened or contributed to its ultimate demise, They can be seen at Robin Hood’s 1,200-year-old oak tree in Sherwood Forest ‘killed by sightseers’ and at A century of noble (and misguided) measures that killed the Robin Hood oak

Entering into the world of Bruegel

The Fake History Hunter has an insightful post on Substack about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Farmers - or the Peasants - Dance dated to 1567 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. 

The Farmers Dance - De boerensdans

Image: Wikipedia 

The author explores the picture and the figures shown within it not just for its own sake but, as the title of his site indicates, to show how the ‘fake history’ of so many depictions in cinema, television and AI imagery imagines life in the past. Whilst sixteenth century people did not have the domestic equipment and conveniences that we take for granted it does not mean they lived their lives in unremitting dirt and squalor, drudgery and misery, clad in ragged grey or black. 

By entering into the scene of rustic enjoyment on a saint’s day the author opens up the mid-sixteenth century world for his readers, and shows us a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar.

The article can be read at Art review: ‘De boerendans’ (the farmer’s or peasant’s dance), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1567.

Eilmer the “Flying Monk” back in the news

Wilmer, the eleventh century monk of Malmesbury Abbey, usually known as the ‘Flying Monk’, is back in the news. However this time it is not for his aeronautical experiment but rather his astronomical observations.

I have posted about him before. My 2010 article, which includes a number of online links, can be accessed at The Flying Monk

Earlier this year research based on what is recorded of his actions and observations by the great twelfth century chronicler based at the abbey, William of Malmesbury argued that Eilmer had anticipated Edmund Halley* six centuries later in forecasting the 76 year return  of what we know as Halley’s Comet. 

This argument is summarised and set out in an article published last January in Phys.org which can be read at Halley's Comet wrongly named: 11th-century English monk predates British astronomer

However Medievalists.net now has an article based on one on that old stalwart Notes and Queries which suggests that Eilmer had not seen Halley’s Comet twice, but another comet early in the eleventh century. If he was younger than has hitherto thought then his famous flight would have taken place a few years later than has been thought.

This new interpretation, with a link to the new argument, can be read at When Did a Medieval Monk First Try to Fly? New Study Reopens the Debate

Whichever is right is probably unknowable with absolute certainty, but what surely emerges from the story of Eilmer is that eleventh century English Benedictines had serious scientific and astronomical interests, and anticipated experimental science.

* Pronounced ”Hawley”, not “Hallé”

 

King Ludwig II of Bavaria

140 years ago today, on the evening of June 13th 1886, the body of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and that of one of his doctors were found floating close to the shore in the waters of Lake Starnberg. Four days earlier the Bavarian government had ruled that the King was unfit to rule and appointed his uncle, Prince Luitpold as Prince Regent. Thus ended the reign since 1864 and the life of the Wittelsbach ruler who was only in his forty-first year.

King Ludwig II

A photograph from 1865 of the young monarch

Image: neuschwanstein.de

To most people he is “Mad King Ludwig”, the patron of Wagner and builder of fantasy palaces and castles in Bavaria. His dramatic death has, of course, fuelled conspiracy theories about both his diagnosis and his death.

Today, with greater knowledge of mental health and of personality disorders, there is doubt as to whether he was “mad”, even if clearly not average in his makeup. The point that in the nineteenth century and indeed the twentieth that being eccentric was the prerogative of the affluent and being mad the curse of the poor is not entirely irrelevant here.

King Ludwig’s enthusiasm for the music of Wagner - and indeed without his patronage much of the later works of the Bayreuth Opera House might not exist - and his enthusiasm for spending his own money, and what he was given or could borrow, but not that of the state on his amazing building projects was in one sense excessive. In another it was brilliant, and ensured his enduring fame. Supporting Wagner and creating and planning his palaces was wonderful, not mad if by that word is meant anything less that highly cultured and visionary.

King Ludwig II at the time of his accession in 1864.

He is wearing the riband of the senior Bavarian Order, that of St Hubert

Image: neuschwanstein.de

As a monarch whose actual realm was being drawn into the new German Empire with the concomitant constraints his cult of King Louis XIV and of medieval, and oriental, concepts of monarchical rule may well have been a reaction against his own times. Nonetheless he appears to have dutifully conducted his business as a constitutional monarch, even if he was largely absent from Munich. So too did Queen Victoria at Balmoral or Osborne rather than London.

The King in the middle years of his reign

Image:thefamousbirthdays.com

The good Wikipedia biography sets out the evidence well, with links to recent articles about the circumstances of his death through the footnotes as well as their links to other articles on their website.

The biography can be read at Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria

There is a short illustrated biography in English with some telling quotations from the website of Neuschwanstein which can be accessed at Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung | Neuschwanstein Castle | King Ludwig II

I think the King’s cousin, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who knew him better than most, was right in her assessment that he was not mad but an eccentric who sought to live in a world of dreams.

King Ludwig II as Grand Master of the Order of Knights of St George 

The painting was completed in 1887 the year after his death

Image:Wikimedia

The man who sought to be an enigma as be became more reclusive lost the elegant good looks that that had impressed many, including Wagner, at his accession and in his later years appears heavier, almost ponderous whilst still in his mid to later thirties. Maybe the never-ending pursuit of his vision of himself and his kingship, of high art and culture was at the same time literally weighing him down and making him prematurely middle aged and depressive. 

His life is one of initial outward promise, inner demons, circumstances he could not control, and the pursuit of artistic visions that never fulfilled his craving for more of the wonders he had helped create. A lonely life, and a sad story, a tragic story, and one that does not deserve the epithet “mad”. Nevertheless his legacy in the buildings he commissioned and the incredible music he supported is one that endures and enriches us all. Visionary would be not just much gentler, but also a far more accurate summary.

Please pray for the repose of the soul 

of King Ludwig II

Medieval cooking ingredients

I came upon an interest post on Substack from The Fake History Hunter which sets out to show the wide variety of foods available to medieval people before the introduction of modern staples from the New World. The list includes some items that definitely belong to the world of the social elite, but it is nonetheless very impressive and given that society was not as rigidly differentiated as popular presentations might suggest would allow, one way or another, for considerable or occasional variety.

The post can be read at Food & ingredients available in Medieval Europe before contact with the Americas

Reading through the list of foodstuffs I felt I wanted the much lamented and irreplaceable Two Fat Ladies to roar into view on their motorcycle and sidecar and set to creating an extravagantly inviting feast.